The "Rhea letter" was an early 19th-century political controversy of the United States stemming from the First Seminole War and the contingent annexation of what is now the U.S. state of Florida. The controversy involves four (or rather three) key documents:
the "Jackson January letter" sent by U.S. Army general Andrew Jackson to President James Monroe on January 6, 1818, with its later annotation that the "Rhea letter" had been burned; the presumably fictitious "Rhea letter" purportedly sent to Andrew Jackson by Tennessee congressman John Rhea at the behest of James Monroe in February 1818; the vaguely threatening letter sent to former U.S. president James Monroe on his deathbed in June 1831 by John Rhea at the behest of Andrew Jackson; the "Denunciation of the Insinuations of John Rhea" written by James Monroe as the last document he ever signed.
This chain of evidence relates to Andrew Jackson's after-the-fact rationalization and defense of his unauthorized invasion of Florida in 1818, a campaign that now goes by the name First Seminole War. This conspiracy and the extended controversy over Jackson's 1818 Florida campaign played out against the background of the dispossession and expulsion of Indigenous people from their lands in what is now the southeastern United States, the politics of the 1824, 1828, and 1832 U.S. presidential campaigns, and the Jackson–William H. Crawford–John C. Calhoun hate triangle that emerged after the last Founding Father president left office. The controversy surrounding the 1818 invasion, and the Monroe administration's response, resurfaced a dozen years later and played a central role in the Jackson administration backbiting in 1831 that led to Calhoun's departure from the vice presidency in 1832.
Since the late 19th century historians have broadly agreed that Andrew Jackson lied that he had been secretly granted secret special permission by James Monroe to invade Florida, when in fact he had been only copied on orders granting permission to pacify Seminoles, but specifically prohibiting engagement with the Spanish forts in Florida, and that he then conspired to create false evidence that such an order had been given. Jackson wanted Florida, so he took Florida, and both the Monroe administration and the 15th Congress ultimately shrugged at the illegality of the popular 60-day war, but there was, however, just enough heat to the charges that Jackson scrambled to excuse himself through a combination of obfuscation and outright falsehood. Both John Quincy Adams and historian Richard Stenberg described Jackson's "Rhea letter" scheme as "depraved". The notion of the first "Rhea letter" can fairly be put in scare quotes, as historians have variously described it as a hoax, a total fabrication, and a brazen lie, or in the best possible reading, cover for a shambolic imperial blitzkrieg "steeped in an air of guilty complicity". The current editor of The Papers of Andrew Jackson stated in 2010 that "the judgment of most historians" on the "Rhea letter" question is that "not only did [it] not exist, but could not have existed." From Jackson's "self-righteously justified in a rhetorically rigid but flexibly pragmatic" perspective, honesty and honor were foolish notions and quite beside the point. In the words of United States Military Academy history professor Stephen J. Watson, "Old Hickory [that is, Andrew Jackson] was determined to secure the southern borderlands for American landholders, of whom he was characteristic, by whatever means he considered necessary, and his iron will drove this bellicose approach to defense and the aggrandizement of American interests from the War of 1812 until his death."
First Seminole War Andrew Jackson had signaled his interest in annexing Florida for many years. In October and November 1814, during the Creek War, Jackson repeatedly angled for permission from President James Monroe to capture Pensacola from the Spanish; Monroe responded too late to forestall Jackson's request, writing with a hard no on October 21, when Jackson was already on the road, arriving at the gates of Fort Barrancas on November 7; "given the Virginian's record of support for Mathews, Gutiérrez, and the West Florida rebels, and his later convenient lapses of attention as president and commander in chief during Jackson's second invasion of Florida in 1818, one has to be suspicious." (Shorter: Jackson took Pensacola in 1814, but they made him give it back, but there were no consequences for his actions, so he was only minimally discouraged.) Two years later, in 1816, Monroe "reassured Jackson...that the transfer of Florida from Spain to the United States was inevitable," in the course of time, with diplomatic talks ongoing. Simultaneously, the empires based across the Atlantic signaled their "acquiescence, however reluctant" to American adventurism; Spain's long-term strategy was to reallocate forces to secure "the northern boundary of Mexico, hoping for some restraint on American recognition of Latin rebels in return for ceding Florida to the United States."
West and East Florida were backwater provinces of the Spanish Empire, populated by Indigenous natives and refugees from displaced tribes, fugitive slaves (some of whom had escaped there as early as the American Revolutionary War; the most Florida-naturalized early arrivals were sometimes termed maroons or Exiles), mixed-race people, and a few thousand settlers in the capitals of Pensacola and St. Augustine. Part of Jackson's motive for conquest was that he had unfinished business with Red Stick survivors of the Creek War of 1813–1814. Many Red Stick warriors and their families had been killed in the battles at Tallusahatchee and Tohopeka, but a number of Red Stick refugees settled just beyond the southern border of Alabama in the Florida lands. Eventually the increasing population of white settlers in the area and the combined population of Creek refugees, fugitive slaves, and a developing community known to history as the Seminoles were tangling with each other across the border, raiding cattle and horses, and retaliating in turn. The immediately precipitating incident of Jackson's blitzkrieg action through Florida in the spring of 1818 was the Scott massacre, the slaughter of U.S. soldiers and their families on the Apalachicola River. The actual commander of U.S. troops in the south at the time was Edmund P. Gaines, but he had been ordered to Amelia Island in the Atlantic Ocean on the far side of Florida near the Georgia border, so Jackson took the initiative to invade without clearing it with any superior officer or the federal government. On January 8, 1818, he wrote James Monroe stating his goal of seizing East Florida and asking that the government give its approval with a wink and a nod in the form of a letter from John Rhea.
Jackson's actions, while ultimately defended by the executive branch, including President Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, were clearly both illegal and insubordinate. Among many other "irregularities," Jackson's orders were to "call on the governors of Georgia and Alabama for militia," but he ultimately assembled a force composed largely of Tennessee volunteers who were veterans of his Creek War campaign. With these loyal followers at his back, he wrote John Coffee, he had a hedge against a possible Georgian "mutiny" against his command, which he could then "put down, & drive into the Gulf all the Indians and adherents be them who they may." (By adherents Jackson meant Blacks, Brits, and Spaniards.)
Jackson's circle was already congratulating itself in July 1818 when Robert Butler, Jackson's ward, and aide, and soon to be the acting American governor of East Florida, toasted at a dinner to "The Floridas—Ours, without 16 years negotiation."
In the words of historians Jeanne T. and David S. Heidler, Jackson's capture of Pensacola and Spanish forts were "not only beyond the scope of Jackson's orders but explicitly prohibited by them. Quite obviously Jackson had made war on a foreign power without congressional approval." During the course of the raid, troops led by Jackson sacked and burned at least 300 houses of Seminole and Black families along Lake Miccosukee, and on the right bank of the Apalachicola. They also demolished the black refugee settlements near the Suwannee River (estimated population 400), "indiscriminately" killing, detaining, and generally terrorizing blacks, Seminoles, and Creek people along the way.
Jackson's first-phase defense of the invasion was "ambiguity." Stenberg concludes that Jackson's invasion of Florida was not just self-authorized and premeditated but that he intended to force the annexation of Florida on the Monroe administration. Per Stenberg, Jackson says as much in letters of June 1818 to James Monroe and August 1818 to Secretary of State John C. Calhoun. Jackson's awareness of the existence of laws of war and the need for both justification and jurisdiction is found in his message to Washington that his capture of the Spanish fort at St. Mark's was warranted because "hostile Indians threatened the garrison, the Spaniards were too weak to defend it, and the Americans needed it as a supply depot during the war."
Immediately before departing for the invasion, Jackson had written to Monroe saying that if he wanted to approve the capture of Florida to please send a letter through John Rhea, who had served in Congress as a Representative from 1803 until 1815, and again 1817 to 1823; but "neither the evidence nor anyone's behavior in the months that followed indicates that Jackson ever received a direct answer from Monroe or an indirect response from Monroe through John Rhea that would have altered the instructions in the December 16 orders." As historian James Schouler told it in 1896, "Jackson's January letter, it is perceived, indicates on the general's part a personal wish to carry the war into Spain precisely as he afterwards did. Heedless, perhaps, of the duplicity, of the lawlessness to which such a course must have committed the responsible Executive of the United States, Jackson urged Monroe to drop only a sly hint, and in sixty days the Floridas would be ours. The secret channel indicated was through John Rhea, better known to statesmen of the day as 'Johnny Rhea,' — a member of Congress for many years from Tennessee, a native of Ireland, a man never of much reputation, who is remembered in history only as one of Jackson's constant parasites." However, "Monroe never read nor reflected upon Jackson's January letter at all until after Pensacola had fallen." Letters written by Monroe in both 1818 (to Jackson) and 1827 (to Calhoun) both state this, and Monroe's claim is validated by J. Q. Adams' contemporaneous journal entries. The journal of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams shows "the capture of Pensacola was an entire surprise to the Cabinet, Calhoun included, and to the President, who had summoned them for counsel."