LIVING HISTORY
22
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
President Zachary Taylor was one of the powerful politicians who attended
young Sherman’s wedding in 1850.
POPULAR ENEMY ESCAPES
One of the best glimpses we have of the marauding guerilla
tactician and his baffling popularity with his enemies came
when Coacoochee was the star guest at a grand party thrown
by Brig. Gen. J.M. Hernandez in St. Augustine. There were
60 ladies in attendance according to army surgeon Samuel
Forry. On Oct, 19, 1837, Forry wrote to a friend the day after
the waltz:
“Coacoochee was the lion of the night, attracting the special
attention of the ladies. He has the countenance of a white
man — a perfect Apollo in his figure — dresses very gaudily,
and has more vanity than a woman.”
Forry went on to report that the famous Seminole leader
was so inebriated he needed two men to hold him upright. All
the while he “continued to receive the applause of the ladies.”
Days after that big party, Jesup grew weary of delayed
and broken promises of surrender. He seized Coacoochee,
Osceola and other leading Seminoles while they were still
under a white flag of truce. He had them imprisoned in Fort
Marion now known as Castillo de San Marco.
Osceola became sick and subsequently died in captivity,
but Coacoochee escaped. According to legend, the Seminole
leader starved himself down to a size skinny enough to
crawl through a narrow air hole high at the top of his dungeon
cell. Jesup was about the only person in America who
never bought that story. He suspected the getaway — which
included at least 17 other Seminole captives — had been an
inside job.
BATTLE OF OKEECHOBEE
As soon as he was free, Coacoochee summoned his
warriors and hightailed it to the swamps around Lake
Sherman’s foster father and later his father-in-law,
Thomas Ewing Sr., was one of the most powerful politicians
in Washington — first as a senator and then as a member of
the cabinet in three presidential administrations. That’s how
young Cump got his appointment to West Point. It’s also the
reason why, when he later married Ewing’s daughter, Ellen,
in 1850, President Zachary Taylor attended Sherman’s wedding,
along with other icons of American history like Daniel
Webster and Henry Clay.
But Sherman’s powerhouse connections got him nowhere
militarily for more than 20 years. The career soldier missed
every bit of fighting until the Civil War broke out in 1861.
Until then, his confrontation with Coacoochee at Fort Pierce
was the biggest thing of historical import that ever happened
to him.
NATIONALLY FAMOUS WARRIOR
At the time of their encounter, Coacoochee was already famous
nationwide via newspaper accounts. In the 1836 book,
Notices of Florida and the Campaigns, Myer M. Cohen, a young
staff officer, described what it felt like to be on the receiving
end of one of Coacoochee’s surprise attacks. After weeks in
the wilderness with nothing happening, the soldiers became
lax and some of them wandered away from camp without
any weapons.
“What a scene presents itself!” Cohen wrote in his published
journal. “A half hundred hideous, copper-colored savages,
some dressed most fantastically and frightfully; others halfclad
with hunting shirts; the rest naked; all with glaring eyes,
black hair, and red-painted faces; jumping and screaming like
insensate brutes, looking like gaunt and famished wolves
thirsting for blood and springing on their prey. Our unarmed
men hurrying towards camp, bleeding, falling, dying!”
Gruesome accounts of ambushes filled the public with terror,
and yet, as with pirates, bank-robbers and other outlaws,
there was fascination, too. It is an oddity of the Florida War
that notorious Seminoles could come into forts and camps
and even towns like St. Augustine during periods of truce to
get free whiskey and other supplies.
The official policy of the United States was to coerce the
Seminoles into choosing to move out West voluntarily. A
combination of getting them hooked on products they craved
and needed, plus making life in Florida otherwise too uncomfortable
to stay, seems to have been the strategy early on.
INFLUENCE RECOGNIZED
During truces, Gen. Thomas S. Jesup became acquainted
with Coacoochee while Osceola was still very much alive and
in the field.
In a letter dated April 9, 1837, Jesup wrote to the Secretary
of War: “Co-a-co-chee is the son of Philip, the principal chief
on the St. Johns River. His influence is greater than that of
his father. He is decidedly the most talented man I have seen
among the Seminoles, and should, and no doubt will, be the
principal Chief of the Nation.”
Capt. John T. Sprague, the army’s main compiler of intelligence
concerning the Florida War, later described Coacoochee
as “by far the most dangerous chieftain in the field. War to
him was a pastime. He became merry by the excitement, and
more vindictive and active by its barbarities...”
Those were characteristics that would one day apply to
the conqueror Sherman, when he opted for total war against
civilians in the towns, cities and countryside of the South. >>