Jesup's Tactics

From his intelligence sources, Jesup estimated between 480 and 800 "Indian and negro warriors -- the latter, perhaps, the more numerous." The general took immediate aim at the blacks, reasoning (as he would later say) that splitting them from the Indians would "weaken [the Indians] more than the loss of the same number of their own people." It was a basic policy of divide-and-rule, which the general would follow in various forms for the next eighteen months.