But while General Taylor was thus quietly engaged in the most hazardous service, General Jessup was active in securing negroes, and employing the military power of the nation, so far as able, to seize and return fugitives to their owners. It would exceed the limits of our present work, were we to notice the efforts of various individuals claiming to have lost slaves. The Indian Bureau at Washington was engaged in this service, and applications were constantly made for slaves to the commanding officer. These applications were usually referred to some quarter-master, or pay-master, for decision; and if such inferior officer belonged to the militia, the person claimed was usually delivered over to bondage, whether the claimant had ever seen him previously or not. It is a matter of astonishment that our National Administration, guided by a Northern President (Mr. Van Buren), should have permitted a pay-master or quarter-master of militia, to sit in grave examination of the right of their fellow-men to liberty; to act as judge, jury and counselor, in cases involving the rights with which the God of Nature had endowed them. But to the honor of our army, it was said that both officers and men of the regular service, generally held the work of catching slaves in supreme contempt. More than three hundred heavy documentary pages were communicated to Congress on this subject, nearly all of which are filled with extracts of letters, reports, orders, opinions and directions concerning slaves, connected with this Florida war.[108] Great difficulty arose among the Indians in consequence of the reënslavement of their friends, the Exiles. They felt the outrage with as much apparent keenness as though it had been perpetrated upon themselves. To prevent these difficulties, General Jessup separated the Exiles from their Indian allies, whenever they surrendered or were taken prisoners.[109] In pursuance of this plan, he sent Osceola and the other Indians seized at Fort Peyton; and Micanopy, and others who had come into his own camp for the purpose of negotiating a treaty, to Charleston, South Carolina; while the Exiles were sent, some to Tampa Bay and other places, to be subjected to the inspection of men who professed to have been their previous owners. General Jessup, in the very elaborate defense of his proceedings, dated July, 1838, justifies this policy of separating the Indians and Exiles by saying, that he learned the year previous, from prisoners captured, that the Indians through the Seminole negroes had entered into arrangements with their slaves that so soon as hostilities should commence, the latter were to join their masters, and take up arms against the whites. This information, representing the Indians as entering into negotiation with their own slaves _through_ the "Seminole negroes" (Exiles), bears the character of fiction; yet it is gravely set forth in an official report, and we are bound to treat it respectfully.[110]