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LIVING HISTORY
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Ulysses S. Grant and Sherman supported one another through desperately
trying times. President Grant made Sherman America’s top general.
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at Bennett Place in Durham, N.C.? That’s where Sherman
negotiated the final surrender of Confederate forces after
Lincoln’s assassination.
But he offered the Southerners such magnanimous terms,
he was accused of treasonous intent by Secretary of War
Edwin M. Stanton and the Northern press. After all he had
risked to make his country whole, being called a traitor did
not sit well with the proud conqueror. Sherman publicly
threatened his superiors in the War Department and waged
his politics like his war; he’s remembered for making it hell.
When Grant became president, he appointed Sherman
the top general in the nation. That meant Native Americans
standing in the way of railroads and progress were going to
continue to have a hard time.
REGRETS TOO LATE
And yet in the end, he did have some regrets about the way
the Seminoles were treated.
“Indeed, Florida was the Indian’s paradise,” Sherman
wrote in the 1885 revised edition of his memoirs, “…and it
was a great pity to remove the Seminoles at all, for we could
have collected there all the Choctaws, Creeks, Cherokees, and
Chickasaws, in addition to the Seminoles. They would have
thrived in the peninsula…”
Those sentiments came much too late for Coacoochee to
hear or reflect upon —and most certainly lament. The Seminoles’
charismatic leader died in exile during a smallpox epidemic
in 1857. As reported in The New York Times more than
30 years after his death, when once asked how he liked his
new home, Coacoochee responded: “I have no home. Florida,
which I love, was my home, but it is no more.”
RICK CRARY
Coacoochee’s secret island hideaway in Central Florida was his safe retreat for most of the war, until a Native American betrayed its location. Although
surrounded by conurbation, the area is still very hard to reach.