Primary Documents - Early Florida Seminole Wars History

Primary Documents – Early Florida Seminole Wars History

August 19, 2015 by Doug Dillon 2574 0 0

Assistant inspector General reports made to U.S. Inspector General: 1817 and 1835-1836.

As a member of the Seminole Wars Foundation, it was my pleasure to transcribe some of the original military status reports of the U.S. Army during the early years when Florida was still a relatively wild territory. I am publishing these documents with the permission of the Foundation in hopes of offering some excellent primary sources material to students, researchers and anyone else who might be interested.

It was the job of the Assistant Inspector Generals to visit the various forts in Florida in order to:

Analyze the status of the forts themselves
Assess the condition of and need for supplies and equipment and to
Evaluate personnel

The reports were made in booklet-like journals and, of course, in longhand.

Transcribing those documents wasn’t an easy task because of the various writing styles, the fading of ink, the compactness of the writing, and the periodic unclear words. But in the final product, I kept each line of words exactly as they were written, which makes them look very abbreviated on a regular sized piece of paper and on a computer screen.

There was no way to reconstruct some of those unclear words so you will find a lot of question marks.

Overall, this isn’t fun reading but it does offer some wonderfully detailed insight as to exactly what was going on in those forts of old. And because of my interest in the Dade battle of 1835 that triggered the Second Seminole War, I found it interesting when I discovered the mention Francis Langhorne Dade. This was when he had the rank of Lieutenant in the year 1817 instead of the rank of Major that he had time of his death in 1835