Before the Storm

While Thompson gave rifles to Osceola, the citizens of Florida boasted that the Seminoles were too weak to pose a threat. "It is confidently hoped," wrote one journalist, "that ten years intercourse with the whites has so far corrupted and demoralized the Seminoles as to make them incapable of protracted resistance." If war should come, predicted the editors of the Niles Register,

"[T]he miserable creatures will be speedily swept from the face of the earth."