March 6, 1865---The Battle of Natural Bridge, Florida

MARCH 6, 1865:       

The Battle of Natural Bridge:

Florida is the forgotten child of the Confederacy. With a tiny population in 1860 (140,000, divided 60% White-40% Black), Florida’s manpower contribution to the Confederacy was less than 20,000. It did, however, send more of its men to fight than any other State, North or South per capita.

Florida’s Civil War history is obscure. There are no great Floridian Generals. No massed armies fought in Florida. Florida missed its opportunity to be the birthplace of the Civil War in early April 1861 when local Confederates permitted the Union to resupply Fort Pickens in the Panhandle rather than draw a line in the sand as the South Carolinians did at Fort Sumter a week later.

The Union bottled up Florida’s ports fairly early in the war, and the State’s largest city --- Key West ---flew the Stars and Stripes throughout the war (although the city acted in effect as a neutral port serving both combatants).

Florida’s role in the war was as a supply depot for the Rebel Cause. The State provided the Confederacy with millions of tons of salt, beef, pork, cereals, grains, fruits, lumber, and other supplies between 1861 and 1865. 

The battles in Florida rate only footnotes in the great histories of the Civil War. Even the largest battle in the State, at Olustee in February 1864, hardly rates a mention but for the fact that it ended in a Confederate victory that saw the slaughter of negro Union troops.

For the most part, the Union dominated Florida in the Civil War though it did not retake it. The State became a refuge for deserters and for people fleeing the battles further north. An unknown number of fighting men disappeared down into the heart of the peninsula or moved southward along the coasts.

There was a strong Unionist contingent in the State, even though Florida’s politics were dominated by the Panhandle-based Plantation Belt. As of March 1865, only two State capitals remained in Confederate hands --- faraway Austin in the Trans-Mississippi, and Florida’s own Tallahassee.

On February 26^th, a large Union force made an amphibious landing at Cedar Key, planning to seize (and burn) Tallahassee before moving north through westernmost Georgia. Opposing them were a mere handful of toothless Confederate regiments worn out from battle elsewhere, a few companies of well-drilled State Militia, and a grab-bag collection of ill-armed, ill-trained, but determined County and local irregulars.

The invading Union force was made up largely of U.S.C.T.

The defending Confederate force was led by Generals William Milton C.S.A. (the son of the Governor), William Miller C.S.A., and Samuel Jones C.S.A. 

The Union troops had been harried in their progress up the St. Marks River, and when they reached Natural Bridge, just before Tallahassee, they were met by a force consisting of every local man who could hold a rifle, including squads of teenaged cadets from West Florida Seminary’s Day School (now Florida State University).

Intending to take the natural bridge that spanned the St. Marks River (and gave the town its name at the time --- it is now Woodville), the Union forces struck aggressively at the C.S. force. Driven back, for a time the Grays yielded the natural bridge to the Blues, but soon regrouped, called for reinforcements, and drove the Yankees away from the river. The Confederates poured fire into the Union ranks, especially the U.S.C.T. units, who sustained heavy casualties.

The Union launched three separate assaults on the Confederate force as the day wore on. The fight degenerated into hand-to-hand combat with bayonets. Battered but defiant, the worn-out Southern regiments and irregulars held the natural bridge against all odds and expectations, denying the Union access to Tallahassee. As the shadows lengthened, the Union commander called off the attack, and withdrew down the St. Marks River back to Cedar Key. The Confederates did not pursue. 

The Union commander, General John Newton, a Virginian by birth, later admitted he was surprised at the tenacity of the local forces. The Confederate veterans of the fight afterward expressed the general opinion that the Union too readily sacrificed U.S.C.T. units. As at Olustee, the Floridian forces were convinced of the inferiority of black soldiers, though no post-battle butchery of blacks went on.  By now familiar with Confederate sentiments toward black fighting men, the Union commanders tried to leave no man behind.

The Union lost 150 men in the battle, while the Confederates lost only 25. A small battle in scale, the Battle of Natural Bridge nevertheless was historically significant as the final Confederate strategic victory of the Civil War.  The South held on to Tallahassee, and the destruction planned for far western Georgia never took place.

March 5, 1865---"Lincoln's Sword"*

MARCH 5, 1865:       

Among the mass of spectators who attended the Inauguration is John Wilkes Booth, within only a few yards of Lincoln as the President speaks. Within six weeks, the famous actor will kill the President.

As day dawns on a world altered by the Second Inaugural, small battles are raging in northern Florida, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and outside of Petersburg, Virginia.  In South Carolina, General Sherman burns the town of McPherson.

The author and historian Douglas L. Wilson refers to Lincoln’s skill with words as “Lincoln’s Sword,” and in an eponymous book, Wilson titles the chapter on the Second Inaugural simply as “ A Truth That Needed To Be Told.” The Second Inaugural, along with the “House Divided” speech of the prewar years,  Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech in Brooklyn and the “Lost Speech” at Chicago, the lyric but ultimately ineffective First Inaugural, and the Emancipation Proclamation form the canons of what historian Gabor Boritt calls “The Gettysburg Gospel” along with the Gettysburg Address itself. In these remarkable public announcements, Lincoln laid the true foundations of the secular religion that is America. Building upon the work of The Founders, Lincoln changed America from a minor provincial democratic republic into a world superpower, though in Lincoln’s lifetime that power that was America lay quiescent, a quickening seed which would birth a mighty offspring in its appointed season. Indeed, with the Second Inaugural, Lincoln became one of The Founders.

Over the course of the war, Lincoln had written perhaps thousands of short reflections, epigrams, and notes on both the practical and philosophical aspects of the conflict. Meant for no one but himself, they constituted what he referred to as “Meditations.”  Some survive. No doubt many have been lost to time. Sometime in 1864, he wrote a few thoughtful paragraphs which, quite unusually, he felt were worthy of being shared in their rough state. He read them out loud to the portraitist Francis B. Carpenter during one of their frequent sittings. Carpenter later said that Lincoln himself seemed arrested by the pith of his own thoughts: “Lots of wisdom in that document, I suppose,” Lincoln mused. Quite characteristically for Lincoln the wisdom lay in the document, not in the mind that had produced it. Carpenter later heard its phrases in the Second Inaugural.

The Second Inaugural is a call to end the war, and a call to remake the United States as “a more perfect Union.” Clearly, Lincoln abjures slavery, seeing in it the fundamental bedrock reason for the conflict, but in quoting St. Matthew --- “Judge not” --- he looks not toward blame but toward mutual healing, rapproachment, and sublime change. In Lincoln’s vision, the terrible war takes on a cast of inevitability not because of the South’s intransigence but because of the failure of all Americans to dispassionately and humanely address the issue of bondage throughout nearly nine decades of the national life.  Importantly, indeed critically, in the last words of the Second Inaugural he distinguishes not at all between North and South nor Black and White. Had Lincoln’s successors taken to heart the lessons which this man’s soul had wrung out of the agony of the Civil War, the United States would be a much different and far finer nation today.

The Second Inaugural is more. It is a glimpse at the face of Divine Providence --- Lincoln was not conventionally religious but was deeply spiritual --- and he perfectly describes the next and ongoing task of We The People:

To bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

As is the custom until today, the Vice-President was sworn in before the President. Then as now it was customary for the new Vice-President to make a few brief remarks.  In a foreshadowing of future troubles, the newly-inaugurated Andrew Johnson is drunk at the podium, and rambles incoherently for some minutes before he is led back to his seat. Lincoln does not bother himself to see his new Vice-President again until the afternoon of April 14^th.

As was common in the Nineteenth Century, the Inaugural speech was delivered prior to the actual swearing-in. After speaking, Lincoln takes the Oath of Office from his old political rival and Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, who he elevated to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court after the death of Roger B. Taney in 1864. 

*I have borrowed the title of Douglas Wilsom's excellent work on Lincoln's writings for the title of this post.