Elizabeth Warren is a Direct Descendant of Militia 'Indian Fighter' Who Fought the Seminole Tribe Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) great-great-great grandfather Jonathan Crawford served in Major William Lauderdale’s Battalion of Tennessee Volunteer Militia from November 1837 to May 1838, a six month time period during which it fought two battles in Florida against the Seminoles. Lauderdale’s battalion fought against the Seminoles at the Battle of Loxahatchee River, in present-day Jupiter, Florida, on January 24, 1838. Then on March 22, 1838, they fought against the Seminoles again at the Battle of Pine Island, in present-day Fort Lauderdale. Evidence supporting Jonathan Crawford’s service under Lauderdale in Florida was brought by his widow, Neoma O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, also known as Neona Crawford, to the Bledsoe County Commission of Bledsoe County, Tennessee in 1850 and 1851, when she applied for a pension from the U.S. government for her husband’s service during the 1837-1838 Second Seminole War. Neoma O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is Sen. Warren’s great-great-great-grandmother. She and Jonathan Crawford were parents of Sen. Warren’s great-great-grandfather Preston H.Crawford. In that time period, widows of soldiers who served the United States in the Tennessee Militia began their request for pensions at the county level. William Brown, the chairman of the Bledsoe County Court in 1851, offered these observations about Neoma O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford’s request for a pension when it was brought to his attention. According to an entry in Sequatchie Valley Revolutionary War Soldiers, which was confirmed to Breitbart News on Wednesday by James Douthat, who compiled and published the book at his company, Mountain Press: Wm. Brown, Chmn of County Court, requests increase in Sibby Reed’s pension; mentions Thomas Pope of Sparta; and on October 12, 1851 writes that JONATHAN CRAWFORD was a Private in Capt. Richard Waterhouse’s Company in the “Florida War” and died shortly after his return, from disease contracted there. Is not his widow entitled to a pension? Douthat also confirmed that records show Jonathan Crawford was enrolled in Captain Richard Waterhouse’s company during the Second Seminole War from 1837 to 1838. The pension for which Neona Crawford, widow of Private Jonathan Crawford, applied in Bledsoe County in 1850 and 1851 was granted by the U.S. Department of War for Neona in 1853. She received a pension of $3.50 per month for a period of six years, ending in 1859. The pension was apparently administered out of the U.S. Department of War’s offices located in Knoxville, Tennessee. Jonathan Crawford is the same ancestor of Elizabeth Warren who one year earlier in 1836 served in the Tennessee Militia that rounded up Cherokees living in Tennessee at the beginning of the Trail of Tears. Crawford was among 600 Tennesseans who volunteered to serve in the battallion recruited by William Lauderdale to fight against the Seminoles in Florida. The Seminole Tribe of Florida offers this description of the Second Seminole War in which Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandfather fought against them: Through the Treaty of Moultrie Creek (1823), the Treaty of Payne’s Landing (1832), and numerous “talks” and meetings, US Indian Agents sought to convince the Florida Indians to sell their cattle and pigs to the US government, return runaway slaves to their “rightful owners,” leave their ancient homelands in Florida, and move west of the Mississippi River to Arkansas Territory. In 1830, soon after Jackson the Indian fighter became Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States, he pushed through Congress an Indian Removal Act. With this Act, the determination of the government to move Indians out of the Southeast and open the land for white settlement became the official policy of the US, and the willingness of the government to spend monies in support of military enforcement of this policy increased. The clash that inevitably resulted from this policy finally began in 1835, and the seven years that it lasted frame the last, the greatest, and arguably the most tragic years in the history of US-Indian relations east of the Mississippi River. Known to history as the Second Seminole War, the US government committed almost $40,000,000 to the forced removal of slightly more than 3,000 Maskókî men, women, and children from Florida to Oklahoma. This was the only Indian war in US history in which not only the US army but also the US navy and marine corps participated. Together with the desultory Third Seminole War, a series of skirmishes that took place between 1856 and 1858, the United States spent much of the first half of the 19th century in trying, unsuccessfully, to dislodge about 5,000 Seminoles from Florida. Unlike the “Trail of Tears” that took place in a single, dreadful moment, in 1838, in which several thousand Cherokee people were sent on a death march to the West, the removals of the Seminole people from Florida began earlier and lasted 20 years longer. Just like that other event, however, the toll in human suffering was profound and the stain on the honor of a great nation, the United States, can never be erased. The Seminole people – men, women, and children, were hunted with bloodhounds, rounded up like cattle, and forced onto ships that carried them to New Orleans and up the Mississippi. Together with several hundred of the African ex-slaves who had fought with them, they were then sent overland to Fort Gibson (Arkansas), and on to strange and inhospitable new lands where they were attacked by other tribes, in a fierce competition for the scarce resources that they all needed to survive. Much, much more in the link ... https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/12/elizabeth-warren-a-direct-descendant-of-militia-indian-fighter-who-fought-seminole-tribe/