Confederate Florida: The Road to Olustee (review)

BOOK REVIEWS177 Confederate Florida: The Road to Olustee. By William H. Nulty. (Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, 1990. Pp. xi, 288. $27.95.) On January 10, 1861, Florida became the third Southern state to leave the Union. While Floridians disagreed about when and how to take this action, once accomplished it had enthusiastic general support. Nonetheless , for all of its eagerness to further the cause of the South, Florida played little part in the Civil War. Moreover, during most of the war, Florida's most important coastal towns and cities were in the hands of Union forces and its shores were effectively blockaded. Only in the last stages of the war did Florida warrant additional interest from the Federal government. While William Nulty, a retired marine officer, briefly sketches the early war years in a chapter entitled "The Jilted Bride," his book really centers on Olustee, the reasons for the Federal invasion, the Confederate response, the battle itself, and the consequences for both North and South. The Battle of Olustee was Florida's only major military engagement of the war. The value of Nulty's work is in its detailed narrative description of the actual battle and its thoughtful interpretation of the battle's meaning in the overall picture of the war. Nulty says that once the North ensured the retension of Fort Pickens and control in the Keys and had gained Fernandina and St. Augustine, its only interest in Florida during the early years of the war was in strengthening and maintaining the blockade. Towards the end of 1863 he found that Union leaders realized control of the interior could also serve Northern military aims. By this time, Florida had become a major source of commissary supplies for the Confederate army; one estimate claimed it shipped two thousand head of cattle a week to Southern forces. By 1864 the South also rushed to completion a connection between the Florida Atlantic and Gulf Railroad and the Savannah Albany and Gulf Railroad, which would give Florida its first rail connection with the rest of the Confederacy. During 1863 the North also used black troops in several raids up the St. Marys River. These raids proved so successful that the Union army wanted more black recruits. The principle reasons for mounting the expedition into the interior were then to stop the flow of supplies, to prevent the completion of the railroad connection, and to recruit blacks for the Union Army. Added to these, both partisans of President Lincoln and Secretary of the Treasury Chase urged action that might return Florida to the Union before the 1864 Republican Convention. Both sides looked to the state to support their candidate's nomination. The invasion began on February 7, 1864, when Union troops under the command of General Truman Seymour landed at Jacksonville. The march inland started the next day and was to disrupt Confederate 178CIVIL WAR HISTORY communications while seizing anything of value to the Southern army. It was to stop at the St. Marys River, about thirty miles west of Jacksonville. As the Union forces marched west, General Joseph Finegan, commander of the Southern troops in the state, concentrated his force on the rail line near Lake City. Seymour's initial successes encouraged him to continue westward beyond the St. Marys. Nulty says that he may have been tempted by the desire to ensure the rail separation between Georgia and Florida and to divide east and west Florida. He also suggests that General Seymour might have decided to continue his advance for a career boost, having fallen behind his fellow West Point graduates in promotions. General Finegan selected the Olustee location to make his stand because a combination of swamps and ponds narrowed the front, giving him a good defensive position. General Seymour expected to find the Confederate forces at Lake City. When the two sides met on February 20, neither anticipated the scope of the battle. Although the two forces were nearly equal in manpower, the Southern troops won decisive victory. Nulty suggests it came when the Union forces, already committed to a "defensive posture," failed to take advantage of the Confederate ammunition shortage that temporarily halted the Southern advance. The engagement...