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LIVING HISTORY
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Micanopy, the Seminole nation’s leading chief during the Second Seminole
War, was Coacoochee’s uncle.
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signment was to wipe out nearly every large sugar plantation
on the east coast of Florida. He took scalps, liberated black
slaves who joined him and burned everything to the ground.
His warriors even tore up the lighthouse at Ponce de Leon
Inlet near New Smyrna, and soon thereafter, Coacoochee was
seen wearing one of the shiny lighthouse reflectors as part
of his flamboyant outfit. He became famous for outlandish
attire. Most notably, he ambushed a group of Shakespearean
actors on a road near St. Augustine and stole their costumes.
He sometimes dressed as Hamlet after that.
YOUNG ARMY CADET
While Coacoochee was busy clearing hutkes white settlers
out of Florida in 1836, the future American warlord who
would capture him five years later was still a 16-year-old
orphan in Ohio. Ironically named for one of history’s greatest
Native American leaders, William Tecumseh Sherman — better
known to family and friends as “Cump”— received an
appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Of course he had no idea that his first assignment after
graduation would send him to the lonely outpost at Fort
Pierce. Nor did anyone foresee the war driving the great
Seminole leader to the Treasure Coast to make one last play
for time.
Coincidentally, both Sherman and Coacoochee had major
political connections within their respective cultures.
Coacoochee was the young nephew of the Seminole nation’s
leader, Micco Nuppa Micanopy, and his father, Emathla
King Philip, was a highly regarded leader of the Seminoles
living in the St. Johns River region. In essence, within the
bounds of the Seminoles’ complex social order, Coacoochee
was born to royalty, which Osceola was not.
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RICK CRARY
No less than 16 plantations along the east coast of Florida, including sugar mills and cotton gins, were destroyed by Coacoochee and his father’s warriors.
Some of the ruins still exist today and can be found in places like New Smyrna Beach.