Christmas Eve Freedom-Fighting in 1837
Americans often romanticize the early years of the Republic, averting their eyes from the crude racism in the U.S. Constitution and the cruel treatment of blacks and Native Americans in those decades. Overlooked are brave freedom fighters who resisted arrogant white supremacy, as William Loren Katz recalls.By William Loren Katz
This Christmas Eve 2012 marks the 175th anniversary of an heroic battle for self-rule and liberty by a daring band of American freedom-fighters traditionally ignored by school courses, texts and teachers.
On the northeast corner of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, 380 to 480 members of the multicultural Seminole nation under the command of Wild Cat and John Horse, his African Seminole second-in-command, prepared to face down invading armies twice their size led by U.S. Colonel Zachery Taylor, a Louisiana slaveholder and career soldier, who had a reputation as an “Indian killer” that would take him to the White House as 12th President of the United States.
An engraving of Chief Wild Cat of the Seminoles.
Slavery lay at the heart of U.S. policy that day, with the nation’s still young Constitution embracing and protecting the business of owning other human beings, even granting Southern planters additional electoral power because they possessed Africans. Not only did the Constitution count slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation, but Article IV, Section 2 required that