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1 “Our Gallant Little Florida Brigade” Organization of the Second Florida Infantry Regiment A soft, stuttering breeze began to rise in the early afternoon, rippling the long grass and ripening grain in the fields bordering the Emmitsburg Road. Three elderly men, sweat-soaked in the July heat, shivered a little but pressed on toward the base of Cemetery Ridge, stopping occasionally to point with their canes or simply to gaze with dimmed eyes into the horrors of the past. The three old Rebels—David Lang, William Duncan Ballantine, and Walter Raleigh Moore—had spent the morning at the Gettysburg battlefield , marking the field with stakes to pinpoint the positions and movements of Perry’s Florida brigade during the three days of battle. When they had completed their assigned task, the three compatriots were reluctant to leave so the park employee had dropped them off near Seminary Ridge before returning to town. Memories of long-dead friends and comrades drew Lang, Ballantine, and Moore irresistibly to take one last look at the scene of their brigade’s unrecognized sacrifice and near destruction.Thirty-two years earlier they had all been young and confident of victory. Lang commanded three small regiments, the Second, Fifth, and Eighth Florida Infantry, during the battle and agonizing retreat to Virginia. Ballantine and Moore, both of the Second Florida, had been wounded and captured. Now, on July 6, 1895, each step brought a flood of flashbacks.They recalled with anguish and pride that they had purchased each foot of ground with their blood and devotion to the Southern cause. The faces of the dead,forever young,returned to their memories,as did the nagging questions of just how close they had come to victory. In a news article describing the postwar visit, Ballantine (writing in the third person) reported: “We found the spot where Colonel Moore had fallen Second Florida Infantry Regiment / 5 and asked Ballantine to assume command. We found the spot where J. D. Perkins [captain of Company M, Second Florida] was wounded, and Ed Hampton [of the same unit] was killed.We pointed out where we had broken the enemy’s front line and driven them before us pell-mell into their second line and staked off the spot where we were on when the order came to fall back.”1 Reaching the base of Cemetery Ridge, the three friends halted in the shadow of the newly erected Federal monuments bristling along the spine of the plateau , wondering if their gallantry and sacrifice would ever be so commemorated. “We found upon examination of the field,” Ballantine proudly noted, “that our gallant little Florida band had advanced as far as any Confederate troops.” Such claims were generally ignored. Accusations of cowardice had been widely circulated , and little they would do on the field that day would change the historical record.2 Lang had long suspected what would happen. Immediately following the engagement he pleaded: “The men I have the honor to command are staid, sober men, most of them having families, who, knowing the perilous condition of their country, entered the service to do all in their power to avert the impending danger; they fight not for vain dreams of glory, nor yet for newspaper fame or notoriety. . . . All we ask of those who record history, whilst we make it, is simply justice. Give us this, and we ask no more.”3 Modern Florida bears little resemblance to the antebellum state that joined the fledgling Confederate States of America in 1861. After the state entered the Union in 1845 its population began to slowly increase. The 1860 census revealed approximately 140,000 residents (almost half of them black slaves). These numbers placed Florida as “last of the eleven Confederate States, with only thirty percent of the population of Arkansas, [which] ranked tenth.” Of Florida’s total population only about 15,000 were white males deemed eligible for military service.4 Before statehood,“renegades and runaways,”fleeing the law,financial or personal disappointment, and encroaching civilization, were among the territory’s first settlers, but during the period between 1845 and 1860, the new arrivals were pioneers coming primarily from Georgia and South Carolina. The newcomers braved the state’s reputation as a breeding ground for alligators, mosquitoes , and malaria (or in the quaint Cracker phraseology, “Gators, skeeters, and malary”) and the lack of good roads and other transportation facilities.The lure of cheap land, virgin loam for cotton plantations, seemingly endless forests, and an opportunity for...

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