citizens which their proximity to us enabled them to perpetrate. The
invasion of Amelia Island last year by a small band of adventurers, not
exceeding 150 in number, who wrested it from the inconsiderable Spanish
force stationed there, and held it several months, during which a single
feeble effort only was made to recover it, which failed, clearly proves
how completely extinct the Spanish authority had become, as the conduct
of those adventurers while in possession of the island as distinctly
shows the pernicious purposes for which their combination had been
formed.

This country had, in fact, become the theater of every species of
lawless adventure. With little population of its own, the Spanish
authority almost extinct, and the colonial governments in a state of
revolution, having no pretension to it, and sufficiently employed in
their own concerns, it was in a great measure derelict, and the object
of cupidity to every adventurer. A system of buccaneering was rapidly
organizing over it which menaced in its consequences the lawful commerce
of every nation, and particularly of the United States, while it
presented a temptation to every people, on whose seduction its success
principally depended. In regard to the United States, the pernicious
effect of this unlawful combination was not confined to the ocean;
the Indian tribes have constituted the effective force in Florida.
With these tribes these adventurers had formed at an early period a
connection with a view to avail themselves of that force to promote
their own projects of accumulation and aggrandizement. It is to the
interference of some of these adventurers, in misrepresenting the claims
and titles of the Indians to land and in practicing on their savage
propensities, that the Seminole war is principally to be traced. Men who
thus connect themselves with savage communities and stimulate them to
war, which is always attended on their part with acts of barbarity the