Wartime Prisoners and the Rule of Law: Andrew Jackson’s Military Tribunals during the First Seminole War

In April 1818, during the First Seminole War, General Andrew Jackson captured and executed two British allies of the Seminoles in Spanish Florida. During the months following the executions, Americans vigorously debated the validity of Jackson’s conduct, contesting and defending the general’s decision to deny Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister the rights normally accorded to prisoners of war. The extensive congressional discussion of the executions and the comprehensive newspaper coverage indicate that the incident was prominent and important to contemporaries. As the Boston Intelligencer observed, the public mind was “in a ferment” on the subject.¹

Jackson’s conduct during the war—his invasion of Florida, seizure of Spanish forts, and treatment of prisoners—occasioned the first major investigation by Congress, as well as the lengthiest debate engaged in by the House of Representatives up to that date. In the winter of 1819, House and Senate committees investigated the matter and issued reports summarizing their findings, and the full House discussed the issues raised by Jackson’s actions in the Seminole War for three weeks, from January 18 to February 8, 1819. Because many newspapers were edited by close allies of party leaders, the fiercely partisan views they expressed often paralleled those articulated in Congress. Beginning in the summer of 1818 and continuing into 1819, the papers extensively covered the war, the executions, the congressional debate, and the larger questions of who qualified as a prisoner of war and what rights and protections wartime prisoners legally held. In fact, in some newspapers, the Seminole War debate attracted even more attention than the issue of Missouri’s admission as a slave state.²

Although published scholarship provides excellent accounts of the First Seminole War, including general descriptions of the events and proceedings leading up to the prisoners’ deaths, scholars have paid little attention to the contemporary debate and the conflicting ideas it revealed. Some commentators, for example, condemned Jackson for his failure to provide proper legal process to the two Britons. Arbuthnot and Ambrister were tried and convicted by a military tribunal, a process that these critics claimed violated the Constitution, federal statutes, and the laws of war and undermined the very principle of rule of law. Other writers derided the critics as obsessed with meaningless legal technicalities and praised Jackson for having achieved important national goals through the executions. The rhetoric of the commentaries evinces the early emergence of important ideals that later came to be associated with Jacksonian America. Occurring at the midpoint between Thomas Jefferson’s and Andrew Jackson’s presidencies—a decade after Jefferson left office, and a decade before Jackson became president—the executions came at an important moment in political, legal, and social developments of the early national period. The ensuing debate marked an important stage in the transition from Revolutionary to Jacksonian America, because it provided an opportunity to express core American values, with the sharp disagreement among commentators revealing how those values were changing.³

Alexander Arbuthnot was a Scottish trader who had been based in the Bahamas before going to Spanish Florida to sell goods to the Seminoles. He had also become a spokesman for the Red Stick Creeks who had fled to Florida in the wake of the disastrous Creek civil war of 1813–1814. U.S. troops led by General Andrew Jackson had played a role in that war, killing hundreds of Red Stick fighters at the decisive Battle of Horseshoe Bend. In Florida, Arbuthnot served as an advocate for the restoration of Creek lands in Alabama and Georgia, which they had ceded to the United States in the 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson. Robert Christie Ambrister, a native of the Bahamas, was a former naval officer who had served with the British marines against the United States during the War of 1812. After helping to train the pro-British Creek Indians to fight against the Americans in 1814, Ambrister returned home to the Bahamas at the end of the war. In 1818, he was engaged in filibustering...