Florida in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  Florida entered the American Civil War as the smallest Confederate state by population, with roughly 140,000 residents, nearly half of them enslaved. That demographic fact shaped almost everything that followed: the state could not field a large army, could not defend its own coastline, and could not protect its long supply lines. What it could do was feed the Confederacy. Cattle, salt, and smuggled goods moved out of Florida's tangled bays and river mouths throughout the war, making the state far more valuable as a pantry than as a battlefield.

  The questions worth asking are not the ones about dramatic pitched battles, because Florida had almost none. They are quieter questions. How did a territory that had been Spanish for three centuries, and American for barely sixteen years, come to stake everything on a rebellion it was poorly equipped to wage? What happened to the enslaved people who made up nearly half the population? And how did a state so remote from the main theaters of war end up shaping the outcome in ways that still mark its calendar today?

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• 2. A Colony Becomes a Cause

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  Spain governed Florida for roughly 300 years before transferring it to the United States in 1821. At that moment the settled population was thin, clustered around St. Augustine on the Atlantic coast and Pensacola at the western edge of the panhandle. The interior belonged to the Seminoles and Black Seminoles, with scattered pioneers pushing in along river corridors navigable by steamboat.

  By 1840 the English-speaking population had overtaken those of Spanish colonial descent, and the total count had reached 54,477 people, with African slaves making up close to half. Florida entered the Union as the 27th state on the 3rd of March, 1845, with a population of 66,500 including about 30,000 people held in slavery. The growth that followed was rapid but uneven. Fertile farmland across the northern panhandle, centered roughly on Tallahassee, drew large slaveholding plantations. Enslaved labor accounted for 85 percent of the state's cotton production by the time secession came.

  Within days of Abraham Lincoln's victory in November 1860, a large gathering of Marion County pioneers assembled in Ocala to demand secession. Their resolutions were carried to the Florida House of Representatives by Representative Daniel A. Vogt. The secession convention, formally called the Convention of the People of Florida, met in Tallahassee on the 3rd of January, 1861. Of its 69 delegates, 51 held slaves. Only seven had been born in Florida.

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• 3. The Vote to Leave

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  Virginia planter and firebrand Edmund Ruffin traveled to Tallahassee to push the convention toward immediate secession. On January 5, McQueen McIntosh introduced resolutions laying out the constitutional case for leaving the Union. John C. McGehee, who had helped draft Florida's original constitution and later became a judge, was elected convention president. Leonidas W. Spratt of South Carolina and Edward Bullock of Alabama also addressed the delegates.

  Florida's Declaration of Causes for Seceding was explicit. Each grievance it named related to slavery: the North's disregard for the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, John Brown's 1859 failed slave uprising, and abolitionist publications by William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. Convention president McGehee put the matter directly: "At the South and with our people, of course, slavery is the element of all value, and a destruction of that destroys all that is property."

  Opposition existed but was outmatched. Richard Keith Call, a conservative plantation owner and former commander in the Seminole Wars, urged restraint. His daughter Ellen Call Long recorded that when supporters of secession came to his house with the news, Call raised his cane and told them, "And what have you done? You have opened the gates of hell, from which shall flow the curses of the damned, which shall sink you to perdition." Those who shared his view were publicly labeled "submissionists" and "Union Shriekers." One opponent of secession, William Hollingsworth, was shot and seriously wounded by a group calling themselves regulators.

  On the 10th of January, 1861, sixty-two delegates voted to withdraw Florida from the Union; seven voted against. A public ceremony on the east steps of the capitol the following day drew fireworks and a parade. Florida was the third state to secede, following South Carolina and Mississippi.

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• 4. The Pantry of the Confederacy

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  Governor John Milton made the economic case repeatedly: Florida's contribution to the Confederate cause was food, not manpower. Beef cattle from the interior rangelands moved north to feed Confederate armies throughout the war. Salt, extracted from the Gulf coastline between Tampa Bay and the panhandle, was essential for preserving meat. Recognizing this, the U.S. Navy began raiding Florida saltworks in 1862.

  After the fall of Vicksburg severed the Mississippi River and cut off Confederate supply lines from the west, Florida's farms became even more critical to the eastern armies. The state's 8,436 miles of coastline and 11,000 miles of rivers and waterways also made it a natural corridor for blockade runners, who used shallow inlets to evade Union warships and keep a trickle of trade moving with Cuba and, through Havana, with Spain and Europe. Cotton went out; food, cigars, medical supplies, and Spanish army surplus shoes came in.

  Not everyone cooperated with the Confederate vision of Florida as a food producer. Many planters kept growing cotton and other cash crops despite direct appeals from Governor Milton and Confederate officials to switch to food. That resistance complicated supply at exactly the moment the Confederacy could least afford it. By 1864, the cattle supply chain had been so disrupted by Union raids and deserter activity that a special unit, the 1st Florida Special Cavalry Battalion, was organized in April of that year specifically to protect and drive cattle to Confederate forces. Florida crackers John T. Lesley, Francis A. Hendry, and W. B. Henderson were among those who rode with it.

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• 5. Enslaved People and the War's Turning

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  About 63,000 of Florida's 140,000 residents in 1861 were enslaved persons. Confederate authorities put them to work producing salt, constructing fortifications, and driving cattle, forms of compelled labor the Confederate government codified through legislation. Florida was the first Confederate state to pass a law authorizing the government to impress enslaved people. Slave owners received $25 a month per person impressed.

  Wartime conditions created openings that many people seized. Union control of coastal enclaves drew thousands toward freedom. Key West was a particular destination: the 1860 census listed 435 enslaved people and 156 free Black residents there alongside the Union garrison. Fort Zachary Taylor averaged 45 enslaved laborers per month on the War Department payroll during 1861 and 1862, a number that reflects how the Union itself relied on enslaved labor even while fighting a war that would end slavery.

  After 1863, more than a thousand Floridians who had been enslaved enlisted in the United States Colored Troops or served as sailors in the Union Navy. Companies D and I of the 2nd USCT moved from Key West to Fort Myers on the 20th of April, 1864, where they worked to disrupt Confederate cattle supplies and help free enslaved people in the surrounding region. In mid-May 1864, a delegation of Miccosukee entered Fort Myers and told Union officers they had been deceived by the Confederates. The presence of Black soldiers in the garrison helped persuade them to work with Federal forces rather than Confederate ones.

  Many enslaved people who reached Union lines became intelligence sources for Union commanders. A total of 1,044 African Americans from Florida ultimately served in the Union Army.

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• 6. Olustee and the Limits of Invasion

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  The one major battle fought on Florida soil took place near Lake City in February 1864. Union General Quincy Gillmore selected Brigadier General Truman Seymour to lead an invasion, landing at Jacksonville on the 7th of February. The goal was to disrupt Florida's food-producing region and, potentially, to restore the state to the Union ahead of the 1864 presidential election.

  Confederate General Joseph Finegan skirmished with Union forces at Barber's Ford and Lake City on the 10th and the 11th of February. The armies met in force at Olustee. Finegan's Florida and Georgia troops, numbering over 5,000, repelled Seymour's force and drove it back to its fortifications around Jacksonville. The losses Seymour's command sustained were high enough that Northern legislators and citizens began questioning whether further operations in militarily peripheral Florida made sense. Many Federal troops were withdrawn and sent to more active theaters.

  Through the rest of 1864 and into 1865, the 2nd Florida Cavalry under J. J. Dickison repeatedly blocked Union raiding parties from penetrating Confederate-held territory in the north and center of the state. Dickison's most celebrated action came on the 21st of May, 1864, when a spy named Lola Sanchez alerted Confederate forces to a Union naval movement, and Dickison's troops captured the Union gunboat Columbine at what became known as the Battle of Horse Landing.

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• 7. Surrender and Emancipation

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  Governor John Milton did not wait for Union troops to arrive. On the 1st of April, 1865, he committed suicide rather than submit to Union occupation. In a final message to the legislature, he had written that Yankees "have developed a character so odious that death would be preferable to reunion with them." Convention delegate Abraham K. Allison replaced him.

  The Florida Brigade surrendered with Lee's army at Appomattox Court House on the 9th of April, 1865. David Lang, who had risen from company commander to lead the Brigade after a shell fragment struck him in the head at Fredericksburg, was in command at the surrender. The Brigade had charged Cemetery Ridge twice at Gettysburg, losing about 60 percent of its strength of more than 700 soldiers in those assaults alone.

  On the 13th of May, G. W. Scott surrendered the last active Confederate troops in Florida to Union General Edward M. McCook. A week later, on the 20th of May, McCook read Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation aloud at the Knott House in Tallahassee, officially ending slavery in Florida. That same day, Union troops raised the U.S. flag over the state capitol. Because the proclamation had been issued more than two years earlier but never enforced in Florida, the state now marks the 20th of May as Emancipation Day with annual commemorative events.

  Florida was fully restored to the United States on the 25th of June, 1868, after meeting Reconstruction requirements including ratifying constitutional amendments abolishing slavery and granting citizenship to formerly enslaved people. Tallahassee was the second-to-last Confederate state capital to rejoin the Union; Austin, Texas, followed the next month.

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