Last in Their Class. James Robbins
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Alexander Montgomery came to Florida in 1839. He was a classmate of Edgar Allan Poe’s and graduated the Goat of the Class of 1834. While stationed at Newport, Kentucky, he won the hand of Miss Sarah Taylor, a local belle and member of the wealthy Taylor family that founded the town, and distantly related to Zachary Taylor.45 He convinced her to accompany him to Florida, and she soon found herself at Fort Wheelock, one of the interior posts, far from the comforts of the family home and with few of the diversions to which she was accustomed. In December 1840, a friend of hers, wife of Kentucky native Lieutenant Nevil Hopson, an Immortal of the Class of 1837, invited her to visit Fort King. Sarah Montgomery set off on a pleasant morning, dressed in a stylish riding habit, accompanied by Lieutenant Hopson, his classmate Lieutenant Walter Sherwood, Sergeant Major Carroll, and ten privates. Alexander Montgomery, who was not feeling well, stayed behind.
Three miles from the fort, at a creek crossing called Martin’s Point, a volley of fire from the bushes took down the mounted men in front of the wagon. The ambush party was led by Halleck Tustenuggee, who had fought Taylor at Okeechobee and had made peace with General Macomb in May of 1839. Lieutenant Sherwood dismounted, began organizing a defense, and ordered Mrs. Montgomery into a covered wagon for safety. He sent Hopson back to Fort Wheelock for reinforcements. Hopson raced back to the fort, preceded by Sarah’s horse, which reached the fort before he did, alerting the troops that something was wrong.
Meanwhile the defenders had formed around the wagon and were being picked off one by one. Sherwood went down, shot in the chest, but still living. Sergeant Major Carroll stood over him, defending the wounded officer until he was cut down in hand-to-hand struggle. As the defensive cordon collapsed, the driver and Sarah knew they had to make a break for it if they hoped to survive. They leapt from the wagon and dashed down the road. But Sarah tripped over her long riding dress. The driver tried to help her, and she stood, ran a few more steps, fell, rose, ran, and fell again. Meanwhile the Indians had spotted the pair and were pursuing, laughing as they came. The driver decided that discretion was the better part of valor and saved himself. Sarah, confused in her terror, rose and ran towards the Indians, who quickly killed her.46 It was exactly five years to the day of the Dade Massacre.
The Martin’s Point incident intensified the lingering sense of futility. Taylor gave up command in 1841 and was replaced by Colonel William “Haughty Bill” Worth. The former USMA Commandant was handsome, a good fighter, yet rash and vain. Ordered to end the war, he settled on a strategy of vigorous military action coupled with negotiations and resettlement. His operations order was simple and straightforward: “Find the enemy, capture or exterminate.” A bounty of $100 was placed on every warrior killed or captured. Worth pressed a joint Army-Navy-Marine incursion into the Everglades, rooting out Seminole sanctuaries and isolated croplands on small islands, showing the Indians they had nowhere to hide.47 Elsewhere he kept troops in motion, pushing them into the field even through the summer, forcing the Seminole bands to keep moving too. Some small indecisive actions were fought, but Worth was not seeking decisive engagement. His plan was to wear the enemy down through continual pressure. He brought emigrant chiefs such as Billy Bowlegs back to convince others that life in Oklahoma Territory was a better option than slow, inevitable destruction in Florida.
In the spring of 1841, Worth captured Coacoochee, a respected and eloquent leader who had commanded at Okeechobee, whose band numbered 189 men, women and children. Coacoochee had come to Worth with a small delegation, dressed in the costume of Hamlet he had taken from a theatrical troop his men had waylaid on the road a short time before.48 Worth made an impassioned plea to the chief to have his people surrender (threatening to hang him if they did not). Eventually they all came in and the group emigrated.
During his captivity, Coacoochee made an enduring contribution to U.S. military culture. At a banquet, he noticed that the soldiers would raise their drinks and make brief toasts before drinking. Toasting was not a Seminole custom, and he asked the interpreter, Gopher John, what the soldiers were saying. Gopher John said that toasting was a form of greeting. Coacoochee, with great dignity, then raised his cup high and said to the assembled in a great deep voice, “Hoo-ah!”49 The toast was echoed by the soldiers around the table, and was before long adopted across the Army, being immortalized in the chorus of a contemporary drinking song:
Hoo-ah! boys, hoo-ah—hoo-ah! boys, hoo-ah.
Let the soldiers’ toast be ever, Hoo-ah!50
Years later, Coacoochee became an officer in the Mexican Army, fighting Comanches in New Mexico. One night he got into a drunken brawl with Gopher John, who caved in the old chief’s head with a whiskey bottle, killing him.
By February of 1842, Worth estimated that there were approximately 300 Indians left in Florida, including 112 warriors.51 Among the holdouts was Halleck Tustenuggee, who with his band of 114 followers resisted to the very end. He participated in the last significant action of the war in April and was taken captive with his band shortly thereafter. When he was finally shipped west on July 14, the bitter chief said, “I have been hunted like a wolf, and now I am sent away like a dog.”52 Worth declared the war over on August 14, 1842.
In the seven years of the Second Seminole War, the Army lost 1,446 dead, 328 of them killed in action, most of the rest to disease. With 10,169 soldiers serving in Florida, the death rate was 14 percent, making it by far the deadliest of any of America’s wars. The losses included 74 officers dead and 20 killed in action; 13 of the dead were Academy graduates. The conflict cost between $10 and $40 million, depending on who was doing the estimate.53
In addition to the mortal and monetary costs, there were also the intangibles—the suffering, fear, and hollow sense of accomplishment. The Second Seminole War was a brutal, difficult pacification in which progress was measured by inches, and success by the gradual diminishing of Indian attacks. A period observer said it was “indeed, a most remarkable war, and will hereafter be regarded as one of the most successful struggles which history exhibits, of a barbarous, weak, and almost destitute people, with a civilized, strong, and abundantly provided nation.”54 Of the Seminoles, 3,800 were shipped west, an unknown number killed or dying of wounds, starvation or disease in the trackless wilderness. For the troops who fought the Second Seminole War, even for those who later saw action in Mexico and the Civil War, it was universally regarded as the worst service they had ever known. Nathaniel Wyche Hunter likened the sight of the ship coming to take him from Florida to the vista of the Promised Land when the Children of Israel first gazed upon it.
DABNEY MAURY, A VIRGINIAN who graduated near the middle of the Class of 1846 and who later served as a Confederate major general, said that the four years he spent at West Point were “the only unhappy years of a very happy life.”1 Maury’s friend Henry Heth, fellow Virginian and Goat of the Class of 1847, had a much different experience. “Dabney was a good boy at West Point,” Heth observed, “but he was not happy; I was not good, I was happy, and had a good time.”2 It was clear from the very beginning that Heth would enjoy his stay at West Point—he chalked up his first two of many demerits for “Laughing in ranks at morning parade.”3
Henry Heth was born in 1825, the fourth of eleven children of John and Margaret Pickett Heth of Blackheath, Chesterfield County, Virginia. John had served in the Navy under Decatur in the War of 1812, and later was a successful plantation owner who, as head of the Heth Manufacturing Company, also ran lucrative coal and iron concerns. Henry had been well prepared for the academic rigors of West Point. He had matriculated at Georgetown College, which was then a prep school, at the age of twelve, moved on to the Muhlenburg School on Long Island, and finally attended the Peugnet Freres School for Boys in New York. The Peugnet brothers were former French officers who had fought under Napoleon, and they thrilled their charges with tales of the great European battles of the past. The Peugnets specialized in preparing candidates for the Military Academy, and in his two years there Henry grew proficient in French and mathematics, still mainstays of the West Point curriculum.4 Henry’s father died