Jonathan C. Sheppard is a lecturer in the Department of History at Florida State University.

By the Noble Daring of Her Sons

The Florida Brigade of the Army of TennesseeBy Jonathan C. Sheppard

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1707-2

Contents

List of Maps……………………………………………………………………………………………………….ixPreface……………………………………………………………………………………………………………xi1. Therefore Let Us Unite: Florida’s Secession…………………………………………………………………………13. The War Trumpet Is Sounding Its Blasts in Every Direction around Us: October–December 1861………………………….244. Its Flag Will Show Where the Fight Was Hottest: January–April 1862, West Florida and Shiloh…………………………365. To Maintain Inviolate the Sacred Honor of Florida: January–May 1862, East Florida………………………………….466. Our Cause Is Just and We Need Not Fear Defeat: Floridians’ Rationales for Fighting the Civil War………………………….577. I Am Now As You Know in the Enemys Country: June–August 1862…………………………………………………….638. Another Luminous Page to the History of Florida: September–October 8, 1862………………………………………..749. Our Company and Regiments Mourns the Loss of Their Very Best: October 9, 1862–January 10, 1863………………………9210. I Expect We Will Stay Here All Winter: Winter–Spring 1863, Tennessee…………………………………………….10911. This Seems to Be Our Darkest Times: May 26–July 15, 1863, Mississippi……………………………………………12212. Napoleon’s “Old Guard” Never Fought Harder: July 16–September 21, 1863…………………………………………..13413. I Have Never Known Them to Fail in the Hour of Trial: September 21–December 2, 1863……………………………….15414. The Old Soldiers Are Much Better Satisfied: December 1863–May 5, 1864……………………………………………16715. The Company and Entire Brigade Suffered Immensely and Accomplished Nothing: May 7–September 3, 1864…………………17816. This Is a Kind of Curious Management to Me: September 4, 1864–January 1, 1865…………………………………….199Epilogue. It Is the Duty of Everyman to Obey the Powers Tat Be: January–May 1865……………………………………..220Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..229Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..233Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………….289Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..303Photographs follow page……………………………………………………………………………………………..148

Chapter One

Therefore Let Us Unite Florida’s Secession

The Florida that attracted Americans between 1790 and the early 1800s was a land of natural beauty and promise. Americans probably first arrived in this alluring territory during the 1790s when the Spanish government “invited foreigners to settle in Florida by offering homestead grants.” Thereafter, they kept coming, by both legal and illegal means. These foreigners, with their slaves, supplemented the ethnic potpourri that existed in Florida during the Second Spanish Period. Many were well established by 1821, the year Spain bequeathed Florida Territory to the United States.

The American pioneers arrived via widened Indian trails, such as the “Coffee Road” that wound southward from Georgia and allowed access to the virgin pine forests and oak hammocks of northern Florida. Others, from Virginia and North Carolina, “took a more circuitous route, traveling with their families and slaves from the Atlantic ports by boat, and debarked in Florida at the ancient Spanish outpost of St. Marks.” They forded the spring-fed rivers and streams that flowed sluggishly to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, and camped beneath palms and among Spanish Bayonets until they completed their log cabins.

The early American settlers arrived in Florida for various reasons. Unpropertied men sought to escape states that allowed only property owners to hold voting rights. These tenant farmers “hoped, in new states and territories, to establish themselves as independent landowners, and to demand that planters treat them as equals.” To these whites, Florida offered two inducements: its land prices, which remained cheap throughout the 1850s, and its “soils suitable for many different crops.” Rich soil meant good cotton land, which in turn meant the possibility of one day owning slaves and commanding a vast plantation. As Chandra Manning has appropriately noted of the slave-owning society, “Again and again, southern whites abandoned places of poor soil and disappointing prospects for new locations where land and slave ownership seemed possible.” Many who migrated into the state included the parents of soldiers who would fight for Florida during the Civil War.

Early on, Florida Territory’s good soil also lured established planters away from their homes in Virginia and North Carolina, as the Upper South had experienced a “shift in clime” that “helped drive planters south and west.” In addition to this natural phenomenon, after centuries of use the nutrients of many older fields were depleted, making a search for new lands necessary. When word arrived that Florida’s “soil was especially suited for the growth of Sea Island cotton,” which was “superior to the short staple” and had a “market price per pound … about twice that of short staple,” many planters made the move. Some planters correctly assumed that crops other than cotton would prosper in Florida, and experimented with tobacco and sugar.

Many of the planters and small farmers who migrated to Florida to take advantage of the rich soils and the potential to own slaves settled in the fertile regions between the Suwannee and Apalachicola rivers. This area, which came to be called Middle Florida, grew very quickly from “a wilderness” with few inhabitants in 1821 to one with a population of nearly sixteen thousand by 1830. Over the next decade, its population doubled again; in 1840 more than thirty-four thousand persons called Middle Florida home. The majority of these pioneers were slaves.

With its planters utilizing slave labor, Florida quickly became infused with the economic infrastructure of the South. By 1860 slaves working on several thousand plantations within the state harvested an estimated sixty-five thousand bales of cotton per annum, along with both sugar cane and tobacco. There were also thousands of smaller farms scattered throughout the state.

This area, nestled between the older and more established regions of East and West Florida, became the home of the territory’s American pedigree. Its early counties were called Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison after the Founding Fathers and presidents. Gadsden gained its title from a territorial politician who later served as ambassador to Mexico. Liberty embodied the nation’s freedom, and Leon honored the territory’s Spanish discoverer, Ponce de Leon. The United States made a further mark on Middle Florida by overseeing the establishment of a new capital city, Tallahassee, thus moving the government away from the established towns of St. Augustine and Pensacola.

With the conclusion of the Second Seminole Indian War in 1842, Congress passed the Armed Occupation Act, which “permitted settlements from present day Gainesville south to Peace River and the Seminole reservation.” The act provided 160 acres to any family head who resided on the granted land for five years. The legislation essentially provided a buffer of armed settlers between the reservation and the populated areas of East and Middle Florida.

Subsidized by the federal government, more than six thousand pioneers pushed into South Florida and settled on more than two hundred thousand acres. Some moved to pursue farming, while others discovered that the prairies inland from Tampa Bay supported cattle, and ranching flourished. While some of the settlers who took advantage of the act already resided in Florida, “it was estimated by June 1843, that well over one-half of the people filing claims” under the Armed Occupation Act “were from outside Florida—most from Georgia and South Carolina.”

Generally, Florida’s migrants before 1840 were from the Upper South and politically conservative. This was not so of the immigrants of the 1840s and 1850s who poured into the fledgling state from South Carolina and Georgia. On the eve of the Civil War, the number of South Carolinians living in the Land of Flowers had “almost doubled and the number of Georgians” increased by half: “The largest number of nonnative Floridians were from Georgia and South Carolina, in that order, and together they constituted about one-third of the total population by 1860.” These settlers moved “into Florida with … idiosyncracies developed” and with their numbers could easily influence the ballot box.

Throughout the late 1840s and 1850s, Deep South pioneers added to Florida’s already motley population. These new residents not only wished to re-create their societies within Florida but also sought political dominance. What resulted then were communities of Georgians and South Carolinians who maintained close ties with their native states and eventually helped push Florida toward secession.

Deep South planters flooded into Florida, bringing with them their slaves in an attempt to take advantage of the “affordable and inhabitable acreage … available only a few hundred miles away” from their old plantations and worn-out soil. “Even those who missed the opportunity for free land under the Armed Occupation Act found that acreage relatively cheap.” The South Carolinians and Georgians started new plantations within the state, particularly in Middle Florida and to the southeast in Alachua, Columbia, and Marion counties. By 1860, 78,699 whites lived within the state; 1,888 of them owned the state’s 56,000 slaves.

South Carolinians and Georgians seemed to dominate the peninsula, perpetuating Democratic politics within their counties. Because two-thirds of Madison County’s large planters hailed from South Carolina, the area became known as the Palmetto County. By 1860 in Alachua County, “native Georgians accounted for 309 of the county’s heads of household,” and South Carolinians headed 338 families. Combined, residents from these two states represented “74.9 percent of Alachua County’s slaveholding population.” Georgians also composed the second-largest group of citizens within Leon County.

To be sure, these South Carolinians and Georgians, who brought with them their politics and society, helped tether the ties between the peninsula and its Deep South neighbors. As the decade of the 1850s wore on and the Democrats gained tight control over Florida, South Carolinians began to realize that in the event of a crisis they could count on their kin living to the south.

Many of these new residents adhered to the radical principles of John C. Calhoun and out of their ideals developed the “‘South Carolina School’ of Florida politics.” South Carolinians in Florida practiced this “school’s” teachings, which “desired to replicate the Palmetto State in Florida.” The “supreme aim” of the Democrats who belonged to this informal clique “was to protect Southern Rights and the institution of slavery” within Florida. This group included Madison Starke Perry, the firebrand and future president of Florida’s Secession Convention, and David Levy Yulee, who served as a U.S. senator through much of the antebellum period.

During the 1840s and early 1850s, the conservative Whigs and radical Democrats, whose parties formed during Florida’s Union Bank crisis of the late 1830s, maintained the two-party system in Florida. The latter party gained an upper hand early, as countrymen who wished both to assert their influence in the territory’s political affairs and to exact revenge on a bank that was very particular with regard to whom it loaned money joined. Later, the two parties adhered to the ideology of their national namesakes.

Though the Whigs managed to gain power in the election of 1848, because of their portrayal as a party that “expressed concern for the entire nation” and one that “would not be influenced by a section of the party but would rather function as an American body,” their fortunes turned with the Compromise of 1850. Florida Whigs supported the Compromise, which among its many provisions allowed California to join the Union as a free state in the hope that it would maintain national party unity. Southerners understood that this addition would upset the balance maintained in the Senate and bar slavery from the shores of the Pacific. Because the Whigs demonstrated a reluctance to fight for what many considered Southern interests during that tumultuous congressional session and “as the perceived threat to the institution of slavery increased,” Floridians saw the Democratic Party as the institution’s ablest defender.

The Whig Party’s decline accelerated with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which opened these two territories for settlement on the grounds of popular sovereignty. Southern Whigs, unwilling to compromise their remaining power to satisfy national unity, voted for the bill and the party soon collapsed. It passed into history for it no longer could claim to “express concern for the whole nation,” as its members could not find a middle ground on the vital issue of slavery in the territories.

The Democrats of Florida first advocated disunion during the debates over the Compromise of 1850. Individuals first supported secession; it was not party policy initially. Following the passage of the Compromise Omnibus Bill, some of Florida’s Deep South agitators who thought the North had treated the South unjustly formed the Southern Rights Association in Middle Florida. The association members pledged to provide “resistance to the encroachments of the North on the constitutional rights of the South.” Members also promised to “vote only for open and zealous advocates of southern rights, to give preference to goods of southern manufacture and boycott northern firms professing abolitionist sentiments.”

During the 1850s, the state Democratic Party was influenced by the influx of South Carolinians and Georgians into the Land of Flowers, but the party’s radicalism grew due to other outside forces as well. John E. Johns, a historian of Florida’s role in the Civil War, identified the “formation of the Republican party” in 1854 as the “primary cause for the vast popular support which aligned itself behind Florida Democrats.” Floridians saw the party, which contained abolitionist elements, as a direct threat to their society.

During the latter half of the 1850s, one particular development drew even more of Florida’s citizens to stand with the radical Democrats. In October 1859 the abolitionist John Brown and more than a dozen followers attempted to seize the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, with the purpose of arming a planned slave revolt. Though U.S. Marines quickly captured Brown and quelled the rebellion, Southerners were hasty to lay blame for the attempted insurrection at the feet of the Republicans and were ever watchful for other abolitionist plots.

Within Florida, as elsewhere throughout the South, “Democrats were prominent in this agitation. Local leaders were vigorously at work throughout Florida during the spring and summer of I860. The state administration was Democratic and the governor used the influence of his position to arouse the state.” In December 1859 the Democrat-controlled Florida legislature established Florida’s policy toward a Republican presidential victory: in essence, if a Republican were elected, Florida would take action for “self-defense.”

Southerners were further roiled by the “publication of [Hinton Rowan] Helper’s Impending Crisis of the South with the sanction of northern congressmen.” This work infuriated Southerners because Helper was a North Carolinian, who, while praising the free labor system of the North, demonstrated, using mounds of statistical data, that the institution of slavery would lead the South to ruin. Fueled by fear that a Republican president would disturb the institution of slavery, the South’s economic and social base, the Democrats ensured “Florida was ready to follow South Carolina over the cliff that was secession into the abyss of disunion and defeat in the Civil War.”

The strain that the burden of slavery placed on the United States came to a breaking point in November I860. The upcoming presidential election and its pressing issues were the subject of Florida’s major newspapers and journals. The majority of the state’s journals endorsed Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, the sitting vice president. He hailed from Kentucky and became the choice of Southern Democrats following a divisive schism that rocked the National Democratic Convention in Charleston.

At the convention, when Northern proponents of the party failed to appease their Southern comrades with a pro-slavery platform, delegates of the Deep South stalked angrily from the hall. The two wings of the party tried again in Baltimore, but that turmoil-filled experience ended as well with delegates walking out. Finally, Southern Democrats took it upon themselves to nominate a national candidate, Breckinridge, to defend their interests. Northern Democrats chose as their nominee party stalwart Stephen A. Douglas. The champion of popular sovereignty, the short and stocky Illinois senator had also gained fame for winning passage of the Compromise of 1850, taking over the troubled set of bills from an ailing Henry Clay.

Florida’s citizens read numerous editorials vilifying Douglas, one of which claimed that “the principles enunciated by Mr. Douglas, are contrary to all Democratic doctrine.” Florida’s editors, however, did not reserve all of their harsh criticism for the Illinois senator. Though there was little chance that the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, would receive any votes in Florida, a likely threat existed in the Constitutional Union candidate John Bell.

The Constitutional Union Party arose in May 1860 when “old-line Whigs and [the] Americans [Party], met in convention in Chicago … in an effort to allay sectional animosities and in an attempt to save the Union.” The leaders of this party hoped to convince voters that they remained the only true national party, pledging to “uphold the Union as it is, … oppose the efforts of all sectionalists, North or South, to weaken undermine or destroy it.” The party attempted to draw the nation’s moderates, arguing in its platform that “the continued agitation of the slavery question, either for the protection or prevention of slavery by Congress, can have no effect, except in tending greatly to … sectional divisions merely to promote the ambitious and dangerous views of designing demagogues, while it endangers the safety of the Union, and should therefore be discountenanced, and frowned down, by every friend of his country.”

Though Florida’s Constitutional Union Party claimed to adhere to the national party platform, many historians have debated the degree to which its members were committed to preserving the Union. Some Florida voters certainly believed in these centrist principles, but at least one historian has argued that because the Democratic rhetoric had so saturated the voting public, “there were now no real Unionists among politicians: all were secessionists of one stripe or another.” However, the historian Herbert Doherty Jr. argued that Florida’s Constitutional Union Party was simply a facade behind which “did old Whigs bestir themselves to a last effort against the Democrats” in an attempt to reestablish a conservative voice within Florida politics.

(Continues…)

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