Osceola and the Seminole Prisoners
Near St. Augustine, Florida
The old fort by the bay, which the Americans renamed Fort Marion, holds one of the darkest chapters in the Seminole Wars. It became a prison for Native people, and for the war leader Osceola it became the beginning of the end. In October of eighteen thirty-seven, Osceola came to talk peace near Saint Augustine, approaching under a white flag of truce.
On the orders of General Thomas Jesup, he and some eighty followers were seized anyway. There was no battle. It was the capture of men who had come to negotiate, and it caused an outrage across the nation and beyond, condemned as one of the most dishonorable acts in American military history.
More than two hundred Seminole prisoners were eventually held within these walls. That November, a war leader called Coacoochee, or Wild Cat, escaped through a narrow window opening and dropped into the moat. Accounts differ on how many fled with him, from just one companion to some twenty prisoners.
Osceola was too sick to follow. He was moved to Fort Moultrie in South Carolina, far from his homeland, and there he died in January of eighteen thirty-eight, only about thirty-four years old, a captive to the last.
