The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression

Historians who have written about the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) agree that it shaped Jacksonian America and that our discipline has ignored its importance. C. S. Monaco addresses those points in an elegant recounting of the war, its context, and its effect. The story gains a sharp interpretive edge from Monaco's use of settler-colonialism theory and models well what could become an important cross-fertilization between the provocations of indigenous studies and the more theoretically conservative currents of nineteenth-century American historiography. A combination of Seminole acumen, American hubris, and Florida's environment yielded a protracted conflict that began with a series of decisive defeats for the army and ended with an uneasy truce that allowed a few hundred Seminoles who had avoided deportation to Indian Territory to remain in the Everglades. The war imperiled both a race-based nation with continental ambitions and a small group of people who simply wanted to remain in their homes. Complicating the situation was the participation of people who had fled slavery. To citizens, the specter of what they perceived as a racial alliance that threatened enslavement and affronted the “laws of civilization” endowed the war with existential importance. It was a war for the soul of Jacksonian America that culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the American South

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