Читать книгу The Seminoles of Florida онлайн

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The fort, although Spanish property, was reported as an “asylum for runaway negroes.” General Jackson, now in military command, ordered the “blowing up of the fort, and the return of the negroes to their rightful owners.” The exiles knowing little of scientific warfare believed themselves safe in this retreat; and when in 1816 an expedition under Colonel Duncan L. Clinch was planned, the hapless Indians and negroes unknowingly rushed into the very jaws of death. A shot from a gunboat exploded the magazines and destroyed the garrison. History records that of 334 souls in the fort, 270 were instantly killed! The groans of the wounded and dying, the savage war whoops of the Indians inspired the most fiendish revenge in the hearts of those who escaped, and marks the beginning of the First Seminole War.

Savage vengeance was now on fire, and “Blount’s Fort” became the magnetic war cry of the Seminole chiefs as they urged their warriors to retaliation. This barbarous sacrifice of innocent women and children conducted by a Christian nation against a helpless race, and for no other cause than that their ancestors, one hundred years before, had been born in slavery, marks a period of cruelty, one of the most wanton in the history of our nation.