The Administration appeared to be paralyzed under this new demonstration of the power and madness of the Seminoles. At the commencement of the war, some officers had estimated the whole number of Seminoles at fifteen hundred, and the negroes as low as four hundred. They had now sent some two thousand Indians and negroes to the Western Country; and yet those left in Florida, renewed the war with all the savage barbarity which had characterized the Seminoles in the days of their greatest power. Indeed, they exhibited no signs of humiliation. The Secretary of War, Mr. Poinsett, a South Carolinian, probably exerted more influence with the President in regard to this war than any other officer of Government. His predecessor, General Cass, had treated the Exiles as mere chattels, having "no rights." He had advised the employment of Creek Indians, giving them such negroes as they might capture; he had officially approved the contract made with them by General Jessup. After he left the office, his successor, Mr. Poinsett, approved the order purchasing some ninety of them on account of Government. He had advised Watson to purchase them; had done all in his power to consign them to slavery in Georgia. He was, however, constrained to make an official report upon the state of this war, at the opening of the first session of the Twenty-sixth Congress, which assembled on the first Monday of December, 1839. That report, when considered in connection with the events which gave character to the Florida War, constitutes a most extraordinary paper. Notwithstanding all the difficulties which he had encountered in his efforts to enslave the Exiles, to prevent at least ninety of them from going West, and the complaints of the Seminoles who had emigrated to the Western Country, at finding themselves destitute of homes and of territory on which to settle, he made no allusion to their troubles; nor did he give any intimation of the difficulties arising on account of the Exiles; nor did he even intimate that such a class of people existed in Florida. [Sidenote: 1840.] He declared the result of General McComb's negotiation had been the loss of many valuable lives. "Our people (said he) fell a sacrifice to their confidence in the good faith and promises of the Indians, and were entrapped and murdered with all the circumstances of cruelty and treachery which distinguish Indian warfare. * * * The experience of the last summer brings with it the painful conviction, that the war must be prosecuted until Florida is freed from these ruthless savages. Their late, cruel and treacherous conduct is too well known to require a repetition of the revolting recital; it has been such as is calculated to deprive them of the sympathy of the humane, and convince 'the most peaceable of the necessity of _subduing them by force_."