We have felt this sketch due to the cause of truth, inasmuch as during the war, and even up to the present day, public newspapers have spoken of Wild Cat as a cruel and vindictive savage. His efforts in behalf of freedom have been represented by public officers as crimes, and he has been held up to the public as an unprincipled brigand. We would judge him, as we would all others, by his acts. Wild Cat's band, now convened at Tampa Bay, had been previously diminished by emigration. It now numbered seventy-eight warriors, sixty-four women and forty-seven children--making in all one hundred and eighty-nine souls. We have no official statement of the number of Exiles who surrendered with this band. We suppose, however, from the warm interest which Wild Cat always took in behalf of the Exiles, that more would have flocked to his standard than to those of other chiefs; but we have no evidence that such was the fact. Probably the Exiles constituted about one-sixth of the band--that being the proportion of Exiles who accompanied him to Fort Cummings, and were seized with him by Colonel Childs. Indeed, we have had no official data by which to determine the proportion of Exiles who constituted the several parties that surrendered after General Jessup left the army. No subsequent commander in Florida appears to have drawn distinctions as to the color of his prisoners. They were all reported as _Seminoles_, and the term "negro" occurred only incidentally in their official reports, when speaking of the class of interpreters and agents who were employed; nor do we find that General Worth made any effort to send any of his prisoners into slavery. So far as we are informed, like General Taylor, he treated them all as _prisoners of war_, entitled to the same rights, the same respect, and the same attentions, agreeably to the doctrine advanced by General Gaines at New Orleans. General Worth appears to have felt authorized to send every Exile who surrendered, to the Western Country. If any of them were claimed by the slaveholders of Florida, he directed the proofs of ownership to be taken and the value of the negro estimated, and then, without waiting for further contest, the negro was treated as other prisoners, and sent West with his Seminole friends, leaving the Government to pay for the slave or not, as the Executive and Congress should determine.[130] It was this policy which enabled General Worth to conduct the war with so much greater success than his predecessors. It enabled him to avail himself of all the influence of Wild Cat, now exerted in favor of emigration; while General Jessup, by delivering over the Exiles to slavery, had induced the same chief to exert absolute violence to prevent emigration.[131]