The Battle of the Caloosahatchee, also called the Caloosahatchee Massacre, was a battle that took place during the Second Seminole War on July 23, 1839. A large, diverse group of allied Native Americans attacked a trading post and U.S. Army encampment along the Caloosahatchee River near modern North Fort Myers. The U.S. Army troops were part of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment and under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William Harney. The native attackers were from various bands of Miccosukee, Muscogee, Seminole and Spanish Indians.
The battle happened because the natives learned that the United States intended to violate the terms of the Macomb Treaty, a peace treaty they had recently negotiated with General Alexander Macomb that would allow them to remain in Florida. The Seminole warriors overran the trading post and encampment, killing most of the soldiers and civilian traders. Harney and some of his soldiers managed to escape at the last moment. The battle led to a resumption of fighting as the war would continue for three more years.
In May 1839 during a parley between William Harney and Abiaka at Fort Lauderdale, Harney asked Abiaka to try negotiating a peace treaty with the United States. Abiaka agreed to Harney's proposal, and he decided to send one of his warriors named Chitto Tustenuggee (Snake Warrior) to be his emissary for the treaty negotiations. Harney then escorted Chitto Tustenuggee to Fort King, where the treaty negotiations would take place. After reaching the fort, Chitto Tustenuggee then talked with U.S. Army General Alexander Macomb, and they eventually came to a peace agreement. The terms of the peace agreement were that the allied tribes collectively called the Seminole, would be allowed to remain in Florida, as long as they stayed south of the Peace River. Another term of the peace agreement was that the U.S. Army would build a trading post on the Caloosahatchee River for the natives to buy and trade goods. Harney and his unit would later be assigned to build this trading post which was about 15 miles from the mouth of the river along the north shore. This peace agreement would become known as the Macomb Treaty.The terms of the Macomb Treaty enraged the new American settlers of Territorial Florida. These White Floridians wanted the total removal of all natives from Florida, as they considered Native American presence in Florida to be a threat to their security. In order to calm these settlers, Secretary of War Joel Poinsett wrote a letter in which he stated that the Macomb Treaty was only supposed to be a temporary peace agreement, and that the U.S. Government would remove all the Seminoles later in the future. Poinsett's letter was widely distributed throughout Florida, and the Seminoles themselves eventually learned about the contents of the letter. The Seminoles believed they had been deceived after they learned the U.S. Government secretly intended for the peace treaty to only be temporary, and they came to regard the Macomb Treaty as fraudulent. The Seminoles decided to continue fighting. Abiaka decreed that the Seminoles would attack Harney's soldiers and the trading post on the Caloosahatchee River.
The early republic period saw the United States move from the weak Articles of Confederation to the federal Constitution ratified in 1788, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791. George Washington served two terms as president (1789–1797), establishing precedents for executive authority, and the federal capital moved permanently to Washington D.C. in 1800. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the nation's territory for roughly $15 million, opening vast trans-Mississippi lands to American expansion. The War of 1812 against Britain ended inconclusively but produced a surge of American national identity and eliminated most British support for Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi. The Northwest Indian Wars (1785–1795) and the Creek War (1813–1814) broke Indigenous confederacies that had resisted US expansion. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily balanced slave and free states as the nation expanded westward, but embedded the contradiction of slavery in every subsequent territorial debate.
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