so-called half breed slave catchers, creating yet another flash point of contention with the army and the slaver gangs. John Horse, himself, was attacked by unknown assailants at one point, thought to have been members of the pro-Creek Seminole faction and came close to death from the bullet he took, but the would-be assassins were never located. After the incident, the officer in charge at Fort Gibson invited John and his family to take up residence inside the fort, which he did, giving up the claim he had staked out in the Indian area. The tensions extended to the Seminole Indian sub-agent, Marcellus Duval, an Alabamian with land holdings back east and connections in Washington. His brother, William Duval, was also a connected attorney at nearby Fort Smith in Arkansas. The Seminole sub-agent hoped to profit with the restoration of the Seminole blacks' slave status and angled incessantly to bring it about. He also began objecting to what he deemed the army's unauthorized protection of the Seminole blacks, including allowing them to remain in their makeshift settlement under Fort Gibson's walls. Slavery again? Some time after John Horse's return from his second mission to Washington, and Jesup's own visit and subsequent return east, John Y. Mason, US Attorney-General at the time, was designated by President James K. Polk to rule on the legitimacy of Jesup's emancipation of the former Seminole slaves. The demand for such a ruling was being pushed by Duval and his allies and urged by his brother, the attorney William Duval, who had been retained by the Seminole tribal council, at the sub-agent's urging, to reclaim their rights to their former slaves. John Mason, a southerner, ruled that, since most of the Black Seminoles were descendants of fugitive slaves and thus legally still considered born into slavery, Jesup's decree had illegally deprived their Seminole owners of their legal property and could not be endorsed by the government. Thus the very reason many of the blacks had agreed to come in peacefully, and which had so seriously undermined the Seminoles' fight to remain in Florida, was suddenly and retroactively revoked. Seminole practice in Florida had acknowledged slavery, though not on the chattel slavery model then common in the American south. It was, in fact, more like feudal dependency since slaves of the Seminole generally lived in their own communities, carried weapons and hunted and fought beside the Seminole