Hint: Yes, the South did lose its war to preserve slavery. No, the North did not "invade" the South, but came South to recover post offices, naval yards, forts and other facilities stolen by the insurrectionists. No, the South did not secede "legally." There was no right to secession. This chauvinistic article is on the National Guard's webstite.
http://www.floridaguard.army.mil/history/CivilWar.asp?did=1305
Civil War
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Robert Hawk
Many and various were the causes of division between the American states of the North and South. Slavery of course, but also a very real difference in their ways of life, attitudes, values, and cultural mores. Whatever they were, or were not, these differences created the greatest crisis in American history, the temporary destruction of the Republic. It was all done legally: constituent assemblies were called, votes taken and decisions ratified by the voters. Beginning in the fall of 1860, the Southern states began voting themselves out of the larger American union, seceding to the status of independent, sovereign states. Florida was the third state to secede, on the 10th of January 1861. A month later, the Confederate States of America came into existence, complete with a provisional congress and president. The short and violent career of this newest addition to the community of nations had commenced.
In Florida itself, there were no Shilohs, Cold Harbors, or Gettysburgs. There were no great sieges of cities nor major naval battles. There was but one respectable engagement, Olustee. There were many raids, a blockade and lots of guerrilla warfare involving relatively small forces. Indeed, by the standards of that great conflict, there wasn’t much fighting in Florida at all. However, by 1865, more than 15,000 Floridians would see service both within the state, and on the great battlefields in Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia. Of these, 5,000 would be killed or die while in active service.
It is obvious in hindsight that very few people, North or South, expected the long, cruel, and costly war that took place. No state was prepared for a long war, and few for even a short one. Florida was the least prepared of any state. The state arsenal contained only a handful of modern weapons, enough to arm only a few militia companies. The latest militia law, that of 1859, designed like previous laws to provide an organized and equipped state army, had provided many officers, few men, and fewer weapons.
During the first months of Florida’s Confederate existence, frenzied activity took place state-wide as enrolled and volunteer militia companies were organized and equipped. Typically, each city, town, or county armed, uniformed, and equipped its own units. Local women would make the uniforms, even tents. Wealthy local citizens would assume the burden of obtaining modern arms. By the spring of 1861, Florida could field a respectable army, more or less ready for active service.
On the eve of war, nearly all of Florida’s population was concentrated in the northern third of the peninsula. It had but two railroads, very few regular roads, (and those mere sandy tracks), and a few dozen small towns. As a predominantly rural region, its most important products, besides men, were associated with Florida’s vast forests, livestock, general farming, and some extremely marginal plantation agriculture. The Confederate government generally looked of Florida as a resource area for men and supplies. Its 1700 miles of coastline and its 54,000 square miles of sparsely settled forests and swamps were not considered strategically valuable, nor, for that matter, even defendable. For many of the same reasons, Florida wasn’t too attractive to the Union government. Except for those ports open to occupation from the sea, the Union command felt it would be very difficult to conquer and garrison the state to no real advantage for the Union cause. Four years later, this early assessment would be proven valid; the Federals would control the seacoast and port cities and the Confederates would control the interior of the state.
Unofficially, the war in Florida began even before formal secession. There were Federal troops, properties, weapons, and fortifications in the state and Florida wanted the soldiers out and the rest given over to the state’s possession. During the week immediately preceding secession, Florida militiamen seized the Federal arsenal at Chattahooche from the sergeant and three men who guarded it and the Fort in St. Augustine from the single Federal soldier who held the keys. In the weeks following secession, Florida troops had taken positions and established garrisons at Apalachicola, St. Marks, Tampa, Cedar Key, New Smyrna, and on the bluffs of the St. Johns River downstream from Jacksonville. Later garrisons would establish defensive positions on Amelia Island and at Fernandina. These successful preliminary moves were offset by two failures, at Key West and at Pensacola.
In mid-January, the small, forty-four man, Federal garrison in Key West quietly moved from the indefensible barracks to the very defensible Fort Taylor. Despite the overwhelming Confederate sympathies of the local population, Key West would remain under Federal control for the entire war. The situation in Pensacola in that same January was much more complex and volatile than had been the case at Key West. The federal garrison in Pensacola, only slightly larger than that at Key West, was stationed on the mainland in completely indefensible barracks and in two forts whose defenses were oriented seaward. Even before secession, some 500 Florida militia had been ordered to Pensacola. There they were joined by an equal number of Alabama militia. It was a tense situation for the Fedreal commander, Lieutenant Adam Slemmer.
It could be said that the war’s first shot was fired at Pensacola. A mob of local citizens with Confederate sympathies, advancing by night on the Federal arsenal building at Fort Barrancas, received a warning shot over their heads from an alert Federal soldier. The local citizens withdrew. But Slemmer’s position was untenable. On the night preceding Florida’s secession, he destroyed the stocks of gunpowder and other military supplies, spiked the fort’s guns, and withdrew his small garrrison across the bay to the uncompleted Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island. The next day, Florida and Alabama Militia troops occupied the city and mainland Federal positions without opposition. The new Confederate government of Florida asked Lieutenant Slemmer to surrender his position, but he refused.
The local Confederate command was in a quandry. There were cretainly enough Florida and Alabama militia troops present to storm the Federal position on Santo Rosa Island, but that would be an overt act of war. Many people, North and South, doubted that secession must lead to war. After a consultation with outgoing President James Buchanan by Florida’s U.S. Senators David Yulee and Stephen Mallory, both still in Washington, it was decided not to fire the first shot if neither side would accept reinforcements. President Buchanan’s policy was very cautious. He promised not to reinforce any Federal garrisons in the South if the Southern states would refrain from attacking them. Thus, at Pensacola, both sides settled into the routine of an uneasy, armed truce on Santa Rosa Island. Additional Confederat troops, mostly Florida militia, waited on the mainland and union ships stood offshore either to reinforce the Federal garrison or evacuate it as future events might dictate. The honor, or dishonor, of formally firing the first shot would eventually go to South Carolina when it bombarded Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, April 12, 1861.
For the remainder of 1861, the war in Florida centered on establishing defensive works at various strategic locations, raising, equipping, and training volunteer militia units, and attempting to resolve the problem of the Federal occupation of Fort Pickens at Pensacola. Once open warfare commenced at Fort Sumter, the truce ended in Pensacola Bay. Union reinforcements were landed at Fort Pickens and Confederate artillery batteries opened fire on the Federal position from forts on the mainland. For several months not much happened. The periodic Confederate bombardment caused no undue distress to the Federal garrison. Fort Pickens controlled the entrance to Pensacola Bay, and Union ships offshore controlled the seaways. Without control of the harbor, Pensacola and its navy yard were useless to the Confederacy. On the 9th of October, 1861, a Confederate Army of more than 5000 men attacked the Federal defensive outworks of Santa Rosa Island, inflicting and receiving casualties to no one’s permanent advantage. As events to the north drew more and more state troops into Confederate service, the quasi-siege of Fort Pickens was abandoned. It, and later Pensacola itself, would remain Union controlled for the rest of the war.
The problems associated with the sending of Florida troops to fight for the Confederacy outside the state was to create many difficulties for the state government and its ability to defend the peninsula from Federal incursions throughout the war. The issue of state militia as state or Confederate troops was never clearly resolved. While both the Union and Confederate government authorized the Regular Army regiments, neither recruited these to full strength. More than 95 percent of all soldiers on both sides would be state troops in national service. In today’s terminology, the Civil War was primarily a war fought by the national guards of the several states. In Florida, during the first year of the war, troops weere raised under existing state militia laws. Men were drawn from the volunteer and enrolled militia. Most of these Florida units were soon called into Confederate service and shipped north. The state’s militia laws themselves were abolished in 1862. Even without a militia law, the state continued to raise militia units for state and Confederate duty. To confuse matters, Confederate authorities came to Florida and recruited men into units without official permission from the state government, often without its knowlege. These were still "Florida Troops", often taking the state oath mere minutes before being officially accepted for Confederate service. Whatever irregularities in their formation and service contracts, all considered themselves as Florida troops and they fought in Florida regiments wherever sent.
The Union attitude toward Florida was a bit confused and periodically changeable. Obviously, as part of their Anaconda blockade strategy, Florida’s seaports had to be occupied and the coast secured. During the first year or so of the war, Union forces captured and occupied Cedar Key and Fernandina (the eastern and western ends of one of Florida’s two railways), Apalachicola, St. Marks, the Confederate batteries on thebluffs of the St. Johns River, and the old fort and city of St. Augustine. All of these positions were seized with little or no loss to either side. Union troops also occupied the city of Jacksonville. After several feeble and profitless raids into the interior of the state, they withdrew from the city. Jacksonville was destined to be occupied and abandoned several more times before the war ended. During 1862 and 1863, Union activity in Florida was largely confined to those areas adjacent to the coastal cities they controlled. If they had a consistent strategy, it was to liberate and recruit former slaves for service in the Union Army and to try to corral enough Union loyal Florida citizens to establish a state government under President Lincoln’s reconstruction program. The Federals were modestly successful in the second of these objectives. Throughout this period, the interior of the state was controlled by a few companies of Florida militia and cavalry units formed for that purpose. As Union troops rarely penetrated the interior, the militia units stationed there proved adequate for its defense.
In January of 1864, the supreme Union command determined to mount a campaign to eliminate Florida as a source of Confederate manpower and supplies. Major General Quincy Gilmore brought another army to Florida and occupied Jacksonville. He planned to invade and occupy the north-central portion of the state, thus denying the use of Florida’s modest rail and road network to Confederate armies. Of course, he also hoped to liberate recruits for the Union Army and to locate that elusive Union-loyal ten percent of the voting population necessary to establish a reconstruction government in Florida.
After establishing his base of operations in and around Jacksonville, General Gilmore sent raiding and scouting parties into the interior of north-central Florida. While awainting the information his scouting parties might obtain, he decided to go the Union base at Port Royal, South Carolina, to consult with other department generals and arrange for supplies and reinforcements. He left his Florida command in the temporary control of Brigadier General Truman Seymour. He gave absolute instructions to Seymour to take no major action until his return from Port Royal. Gilmore should never have left Florida, even for a moment. Truman Seymour was not just another wartime political general, so common in both the Union and Confederate armies. He was Regular Army, a veteran of the Seminole and Mexican Wars and of Indian fighting in the Far West. He had been one of the Federal officers at Fort Sumter during the climactic first action of the war and had served in all the major campaigns of the Army of the Potomac. He had never quite achieved the recognition he felt he deserved and wanted so badly. Now was his chance. Shortly after Gilmore’s departure, Seymour sent strong cavalry detachments to raid the interior. He led a reinforced division of seasoned Union soldiers westward out of Jacksonville, headed for Lake City, the crossroads for Florida’s two railroads and the most important communications center in the entire state. He believed his intentions and destination were unknown to the local Confederate command. They were not.
Having knowlege of Union objectives and intentions was one thing, being able to do anything about them was something else again. When Gilmore had first occupied Jacksonville and established his army of invasion, virtually all experienced Florida troops were serving outside the state. There was a good local Confederate commander, Brigadier General Joseph Finnegan, an Irish soldier of fortune in the Southern service. He had commanded Florida troops since 1861 and had been district commander in norht-central Florida since the beginning of the war. By mid-February, Finegan managed to bring together a scratch force of nearly 5,500 infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Most of these were green, inexperienced Florida militia, the relatively new 9th,10th, and 11th Florida Infantry, plus the more experienced 2nd Florida Cavalry. Fortunately, he was able to secure the temporary emergency help of more than a brigade of seasoned Georgia troops. They arrived just in time to participate in the impending battle near Lake City.
Seymour proceeded westward from Jacksonville along the railroad linking that city with Lake City. He had almost exactly the same number of troops as those commended by Finegan. Seymour also sent strong cavalry probes toward Gainesville, forty miles south of Lake City. A dozen miles east of Lake City, the Union force encountered entrenched Confederates, much to Seymour’s surprise and disappointmant. The place was called Olustee. The Confederate positions were where a narrow neck of partially wooded ground passed between a lake and a swamp. Seymour gave the order of advance.
The Confederates held the their ground. The Union forces were unable to fully deploy their troops due to the restricted nature of the terrain. Effective flanking fire by several repositioned Confederate regiments, and cavalry probes into their rear-assembly areas forced the Federals to abandon the battlesite in some disorder. Seymour’s invading army suffered 1900 total casualties, while Finegan lost less than 1000 men killed, wounded, and missing. The demoralized Union force made best speed back to Jacksonville, nor very closely pursued by the victorious Confederates. There the Federals learned their cavalry probe to Gainesville had also been defeated. Soon, Seymour was relieved of his command. It was a little late. Seymour never did receive the fame he so desired. The Confederate victory at Olustee made a hash of all Union plans for the subjugation of Florida. By early May, 1864, two thirds of all Union and Confederate troops had been withdrawn from the state and sent to participate in the more important battles in Virginia and northern Georgia.
Much of the military activity in Florida for the ten months following Olustee could be entitled "The Union Army versus Captain J.J. Dickison, C.S.A.". This resourceful Florida officer led a small force of regular Florida and irregular militia cavalry, never numbering more than 300 men, that was largely responsible for the defense of central Florida. His assigned territory extended coast to coast and from near Lake City to today’s Orlando. Periodic Union raids into the interior of central Florida were everywhere stopped by Dickison and his men. A major force of several hundred Federal troops raided Gainesville and were soundly trounced by Dickison, losing two thirds of their strength to his slashing attacks. Another Federal force, including a gunboat, was trapped in the upper reaches of the St. Johns River system. The gunboat was sunk and most of the Union troops captured and sent to prison camps in Georgia. Another Union force in excess of 500 soldiers attempted the back door approach to central Florida, advancing inland from Cedar Key on the west coast. They were intercepted by "Dickison’s Army" and defeated with singular dispatch and sent scurrying back to the shelter of Union ships. During the final 14 months of the war, including the Olustee campaign, Dickison and his men fought several dozen battles and skirmishes and while losing less than three dozen men, inflicted more than a thousand casualties on various Federal units.
There were other military activities in the state during this period. A kind of mine known as a "torpedo" placed in the narrow parts of the St. Johns River sank three Union gunboats. A small Confederate attack on the Federal base at Fort Myers in the southwestern part of the state failed, but then so did a Federal attack at New Smyrna on the east coast. union troops landed and looted Tampa; it was undefended. Aside from these and Dickison’s activities, the war in Florida was winding down.
At Marianna on the 27th of September, 1864, there occurred the nearest thing to a pure militia battle of the war, at least on the Southern side. When a 700 man strong Union force from Pensacola on a horse and cattle stealing raid approached the small Panhandle town of Marianna, they found themselves opposed by a home guard Florida militia force of approximately 150 very young boys, very old men, and a few convalescing Confederate veterans. This scratch of Florida militia put up a spirited, though brief, resistance the the invading Union troops, killing 15 and wounding more than two dozen, while suffering only 5 killed, 16 wounded, and 54 captured. It was a Union victory of sorts; yet when it was over, the Federal force returned to Pensacola.
There was still time for the Union to mount one more invasion into the interior of Florida. It was directed at Tallahassee, the state capital. As with many union operations, this was to be a combined Army-Navy effort. The Navy seized the town and fort at St. Marks, on the river of that name, south and east of the capital. (St. Marks had been occupied and abandoned by both sides several times during the war.) The core of the Union invasion force consisted of the 2nd and 99th U.S. Colored Infantry and the 2nd Florida Colored (Union) Cavalry. The Union troops moved out of St. Marks and up the river. They intended to cross the river where most of it disappears underground at a natural bridge, and then proceed to Tallahassee. They were under the command of Major General John Newton.
To oppose this latest Federal invasion, Confederate Generals Samuel Jones and William Miller commanded a diverse collection of home guard militia, disabled veterans, cadets home from the West Florida Seminary, and parts of the 2nd and 5th Florida (Confederate) Cavalry; a total force of barely 600 men and boys. They would be facing approximately 1300 Union veterans. The two small armies met in battle at the natural bridge on the 4th of March, 1865. It was a hotly contested affair with bravery on both sides. But the Confederate position was strong, and their leadership slightly better than that of the Federals. The Bluecoats lost 23 killed and 112 wounded, and retreated to St. Marks where they embarked to go elsewhere. Florida’s capital remained Confederate for the month and a half of the war still remaining.
The war in Florida ended as a draw at best, but the fall of the Confederacy itself finally ended the state’s defense effort. Union troops quietly entered the capital a few months later as an army of occupation. The Florida war had been a peripheral war on a relatively small scale, but no less vigorously fought and bloody for all that. The Stars and Stripes of the American Republic flew over Florida once more. The flag would not change again, but the wars of Florida were not over yet.
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