Osceola in the New Charleston Theatre, January 6, 1838

Osceola, oil on canvas, by Robert John Curtis (1816–1867). Painted from life at Fort Moultrie, Sullivan's Island, January 1838, for Dr. R.L. Baker. Curtis and Osceola developed a close friendship during the painting sessions, conversing at length while Osceola sat for the portrait. The clothing depicted is in the style of the Creek Indians, itself influenced by British military uniforms of the eighteenth century. The original hangs in the Charleston Museum. This is the portrait painted in the same weeks Ransom watched Osceola at the theatre — by a Charleston artist who knew him.

In early January 1838, the imprisoned Seminole chief Osceola was taken by his captors to watch a play at the new Charleston Theatre on Meeting Street in Charleston. Osceola had led his people through years of fierce resistance against the U.S. Army's efforts to remove them from Florida to Indian Territory. By late 1837, Osceola had been captured under a flag of truce—a betrayal widely condemned even in the American press—and was imprisoned at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island.

It was during this Charleston winter that Osceola, too ill to do much else, was brought by his captors as a kind of living exhibit. Witnessing this event was North Carolina-born writer/frontiersman James Burchett Ransom (1783–1843), who was moved to write a poem about it on the spot.

The 1,200-seat New Charleston Theatre had opened on December 15, 1837. Designed by Charles Reichardt — architect of Charleston City Hall — it would burn in the great fire of December 1861. Today's Meeting Street Inn was built on the same site in 1874.

In its lines, the New Charleston Theatre is three weeks old and packed to the rafters — beauty, fashion, and learning, as Ransom puts it, not a seat to be found. Into that glittering room walk Osceola and his warriors: earrings, feathers, necklaces, rings—a sight Charleston has never quite seen from a theatre seat.

Ransom watches the chief closely. What he sees is a man who isn't there. Osceola sits through the play but doesn't watch it. His lips move in what Ransom reads as a private vow. His eyes are back in Florida. The actress playing Juliana—her tears, her smiles, her grace—registers as nothing. The music falls unheard.

Juliana — Miss Priscilla Cooper (1816–1889) playing Juliana that evening was twenty-one-year-old Priscilla Cooper. Three years after the night Osceola ignored her performance, she married Robert Tyler — son of John Tyler, who became the tenth President after William Henry Harrison died thirty-one days into office. Harrison, of course, had made his name fighting Tecumseh's confederacy at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811 — the same war, the same cause, the same resistance that Osceola had continued in Florida.

Osceola died three weeks later from malaria and tonsillitis, at roughly 34 years old. He died in the Fort Moultrie infirmary, having never been tried or released.

But neither—the poem argues—was he ever fully imprisoned. Whatever Charleston thought it was showing off that January evening, Ransom argues that Osceola was somewhere else entirely. What Ransom caught—and the poem holds—is not a defeated man. It's a caged one. The tiger lies still, but the demon in the eye is still there. In Ransom’s reckoning, Osceola wasn't broken by the betrayal, the fort, or the theatre.

Twenty-four days after the performance, on the morning of January 30th, Osceola got up from his bed for the last time. With difficulty, he dressed himself in full war regalia—leggings, moccasins, war belt, bullet pouch, powder horn—and applied red war paint in the traditional manner that preceded battle. Then he lay back down and shook hands with his doctors, the officers, the captured chiefs, his wives, and his children. He placed his knife across his chest. He smiled and died. He was thirty-four years old.  

The next morning, boats crossed a choppy Charleston Harbor all day carrying people from the Peninsula to Sullivan’s Island. A large crowd gathered outside Fort Moultrie's walls in a cold salt wind—Charleston's winter society, army officers, and captured Seminole chiefs Micanopy, Cloud, Coahadjo, and King Philip, standing near Osceola’s family in their ceremonial dress. The mayor of Charleston was there. Captain Morrison had a marble headstone already cut and inscribed. William Patton, Esquire, delivered an oration on Osceola’s courage and character and presented the stone.

Then Ransom stood up and read the verses he’d written twenty-five days before at the theater. Somewhere in that crowd stood a fifteen-year-old girl named Mary Boykin. She’d been at the theater on January 6th too, and she wept openly now at the graveside. She would grow up to write A Diary from Dixie, one of the essential documents of the Civil War South. But that was a long way off.  That day she was fifteen, standing in the cold wind at a Seminole chief's funeral, crying for a man she’d seen at the theatre three weeks before and had decided was her friend.

Ransom went to Texas the following year. He served as private secretary to President Mirabeau Lamar, rode dispatches, escorted the widows and children of a Cherokee chief back across the border, recruited soldiers, ran unsuccessfully for Congress, and kept writing — sketches, legends, poems—for the Austin newspapers. He kept moving. Five years after the funeral on Sullivan's Island, Ransom was crossing a branch of Tehuacana Creek on a buffalo hunt when his gun went off accidentally, bringing a sudden death to a man who had been born on the American Frontier and had written to honor it wherever it still remained.

Osceola at the Charleston Theatre

The chandeliers sent forth a dazzling light,

And splendid lamps and paintings shone around;

The scenery was superb, and all look'd bright,

While not one single seat could there be found.

Indeed, a prince of high pretensions might

Have view'd the scene, and never once have frown'd:

For beauty, fashion, learning, all combined

To form a crowd, genteel, polite, refined.

Then Osceola with his warriors came,

A stern, unbending, stoic band they were,

Whose names, in truth, “will long be known to fame,

”For deeds of valour, and for love of war;

With earrings, trinkets, necklaces, and bands,

Heads deck'd with feathers, rings upon their hands;

A group so wild, grotesque, and yet so sage,

Have very seldom look'd upon the stage.

I mark'd the gloomy thought upon his brow,

Which clung like mist around the mountain's top,

And watch'd his listless mien and careless bow,

As though he saw the play, but heard it not.

And then his lips would breathe some secret vow

To strike for injuries ne'er to be forgot,

And peril all, though life should be the cost,

To save his native home and country lost.

The lovely glow of Juliana’s face,

Her smiles and blushes, and the tears she shed,

Her splendid attitude and native grace,

Were to his war-lit spirit stale and dead.

Yes, there he sat, subdued, but still enraged;

Like the fierce tiger, when he's caught and caged,

Will lie composed ; yet, when you pass him by,

You'll see a demon spirit in his eye.

The softest strains of music fell unheard,

And every sound seem'd lost upon his ear,

And song that spoke of love in every word,

Nor made him sigh, nor smile, nor drop a tear;

For his wild thoughts, like some unfetter'd bird,

Flew swift as lightning to that home too dear,

Where his undaunted host still long'd to go,

To raise the savage yell, and fight the foe. 

[Link to michaelsigalas.com]

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