On November 21, 1817, U.S. troops from Fort Scott attack the small Seminole Indian village of Fowltown, located in southern Georgia, killing about 20 men and igniting the First Seminole War. The conflict, which lasted less than a year, would not succeed in squashing Native resistance, but it would contribute to the Spanish relinquishing its Florida territory to the United States.
When the soldiers first arrived at Fowltown, they demanded that Seminole chief Neamathla surrender himself, because U.S. officials believed he had been responsible for the murder of several Georgia families. When Neamathla refused, the soldiers killed the 20 Seminoles, then plundered and burned the town.
But reprisal was only the short-term goal. Fort Scott had been built as a military base on the Georgia/Florida border to facilitate actions against local Creek and Seminole Indians, who were seen as an obstacle to American settlement of the land. Southern militias had long conducted raids of Seminole territory (in northern Florida and southern Georgia), looking to steal land or livestock—or to stem the steady tide of Black people escaping enslavement and finding refuge with Seminoles. Many of the Indigenous and formerly enslaved people had sided with the British in the War of 1812, further antagonizing the Americans.
The Fowltown attack prompted its own retaliation and ongoing skirmishes, escalating bloodshed—and tensions—for the good part of a year.
Within weeks after the Fowltown attack, General Andrew Jackson took command of area troops, with the goal of increasing U.S. control over the region. He led invasions of Seminole territory, pushing the Indigenous people further south into Spanish-controlled Florida, and forcing some into the Okefenokee Swamp. Jackson’s forces then proceeded to destroy Seminole villages, Spanish forts and British-owned plantations.
While Spain initially opposed America’s military presence in Florida, to avoid further conflict, it eventually decided to cede its territories there to the United States in February 1819. And while Americans kept pushing relentlessly to remove the Seminoles from their ancestral lands, they kept on fighting, prompting the Second Seminole War in 1835–42 and the Third Seminole War in 1855–58.
