Representative Duncan Lamont Clinch

Duncan Lamont Clinch (April 6, 1787 – December 4, 1849) was an American army officer, slave-plantation owner, and politician who served as a commander during the War of 1812 and the First and Second Seminole Wars, and later as a Whig member of the United States House of Representatives from Georgia. He was born on April 6, 1787, at “Ard-Lamont,” a family plantation in Edgecombe County, North Carolina. He was the son of Joseph John Clinch, Jr. (1754–1795), a veteran of the American Revolution who served in both the Continental Army and the North Carolina Militia (Edgecombe County Regiment), attaining the rank of colonel. His father also held local political offices, including justice of the peace and member of the North Carolina House of Commons, providing the younger Clinch with an early example of both military and civic service.

Clinch received his early education in local schools and from private tutors, a common pattern for sons of the planter class in the early republic. In the summer of 1808 he entered the United States Army as a first lieutenant. His first assignment was as regimental paymaster for the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment in New Orleans, then a key post in the recently acquired Louisiana Territory. Initially assigned to the 3rd Infantry Regiment, he advanced steadily through the ranks, being promoted to captain in 1810, lieutenant colonel in 1813 during the War of 1812, colonel in 1819, and brigadier general in 1829. Over the course of his early and mid-career, he served primarily at frontier posts in what were then the southwestern United States, gaining extensive experience in frontier warfare and Indian affairs.

Clinch’s military career became most prominent in connection with the Seminole conflicts in the Southeast. In 1816, while commanding forces in southern Georgia, he was ordered by Major General Andrew Jackson to move against Seminole and Black Seminole positions at Negro Fort, an abandoned British post along the Apalachicola River that had become a stronghold and refuge for escaped slaves. Acting under orders to recover runaway slaves and neutralize the fort, Clinch led an attack supported by U.S. naval gunboats. During the engagement, naval artillery struck the fort’s powder magazine, causing a massive explosion that killed hundreds of Seminoles and formerly enslaved people. This action at Negro Fort is widely regarded as the first battle of the Seminole Wars and contributed directly to the outbreak of the First Seminole War.

By the mid-1830s, Clinch was a senior officer in Florida during the growing crisis that led to the Second Seminole War. In the summer and fall of 1835, as the officer in charge of removing the Seminole from Florida under federal removal policy, he became increasingly convinced that a large and active military force would be required to enforce emigration. Tensions escalated when a soldier carrying mail between Fort Brooke and Fort King was killed and mutilated by Seminoles, and when Charley Amathla, a Seminole leader who favored emigration and had sold his property in preparation for removal, was killed by Osceola. In response to these events, Clinch ordered Major Francis L. Dade to move his company from Key West to Fort Brooke, a movement that preceded the infamous Dade Massacre. Clinch himself saw active service in the Second Seminole War, including at the Battle of the Withlacoochee, before resigning from the Army in 1836.

Contemporaries offered differing views of Clinch’s character and leadership, but one detailed reminiscence by Steward John Bemrose, who served in the Second Seminole War, portrayed him as a humane and plain-living commander. Bemrose recalled that although Clinch had a reputation in St. Augustine as a strict, unfeeling disciplinarian, in person he appeared “fatherly,” kind, and accessible, earning the sobriquet “The Spartan General” from fellow officers. Bemrose described Clinch as an older, gray-haired man of about five feet ten inches, muscular and weighing over 250 pounds, who would sit on the dirt floor to comfort dying enlisted men. He noted that Clinch lived simply in a tent like other soldiers, with only a bed and mattress as extra comforts, dined on the same plain fare—often pork and beans, with occasional beef or Indian corn—and drank only water, which Bemrose sometimes fetched from a nearby spring. Unlike some senior officers, Bemrose wrote, Clinch required little in the way of personal retinue or luxuries, his only special requisition on the march being a campstool.

After leaving the regular army, Clinch settled more permanently in Georgia, where he lived on a plantation near St. Marys and continued as a slave-plantation owner and member of the Southern planter elite. His standing in the community and his military reputation helped propel him into politics. In a special election in 1844, he was elected as a Whig to the United States House of Representatives from Georgia, filling the vacancy caused by the death of Representative John Millen. Clinch took his seat in the 28th Congress on February 15, 1844, and served until March 3, 1845. During his single term in Congress, he participated in the legislative process at a time of intense national debate over territorial expansion, slavery, and relations with Native American nations, representing the interests of his Georgia constituents within the Whig Party framework. He did not seek election to a full term later in 1844 and returned to private life at the conclusion of his service.

Clinch married three times. His first marriage was to Eliza Bayard McIntosh, daughter of John Houston McIntosh, a prominent figure in East Florida who led the Patriot Group in a failed uprising against Spanish rule during the Patriot War in Florida. After Eliza’s death, Clinch married Elizabeth Houstoun, a member of another established Southern family. His third marriage was to Sophia Hume Clinch, to whom he was married at the time of his death. Clinch’s family remained prominent in Southern military and political affairs. His son, Colonel Duncan Lamont Clinch Jr., commanded the 4th Georgia Cavalry, Confederate States Army, during the American Civil War; this unit fought at the Battle of Olustee in Florida and later in the Atlanta Campaign in 1864. Another son, Captain Nicholas Bayard Clinch, commanded “Clinch’s Light Battery,” also known as “Clinch’s Artillery Company,” a component of his brother’s 4th Georgia Volunteer Cavalry, and was noted as an inventor. Through one of his daughters, Clinch was the father-in-law of Robert Anderson, the U.S. Army officer who commanded Fort Sumter at the outset of the Civil War.

In his later years, Clinch’s health declined. He died in Macon, Georgia, on December 4, 1849, at the age of 62, after a prolonged struggle with erysipelas, a serious bacterial infection. He was buried in Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, a resting place for many members of the region’s political and social elite. His legacy endured in several geographic and military designations. Clinch County, Georgia, was named in his honor, and during the Civil War the first company of the 5th Georgia Volunteer Infantry, raised in that county, also bore his name. Fort Clinch on Amelia Island, Florida—now preserved as Fort Clinch State Park in Fernandina Beach—was named for him, as was another, earlier Fort Clinch located farther south in what is now Frostproof, Florida.

Clinch’s life and career have remained subjects of historical interest, particularly in the context of U.S.–Native American relations and the Seminole Wars. The Library of Florida History, Special and Area Studies Collections at the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, in Gainesville, holds a collection of General Duncan Lamont Clinch Family Papers, some of which have been digitized. This collection includes correspondence and newspaper clippings related to Clinch and provides primary-source material for scholars examining his military service, plantation life, and political activities in the early nineteenth-century American South.