1864 Florida Federal Expedition: Blundering Into Modern Warfare
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THE 1864 FLORIDA FEDERAL EXPEDITION: BLUNDERING INTO MODERN WARFARE By WILLIAM H. NULTY A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1985 Copyright 1985 by William H. Nulty ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my chairman, Dr. Samuel Proctor, for his guidance, encouragement, patience, tolerance, and generosity with his time. Without his enthusiasm, incisive criticism, and many suggestions, this project would have faltered. I would also like to thank my graduate committee members, Drs. Lyle McAlister, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Harry W. Paul of the History Department and Dr. J. W. Longstreth of the College of Education. Their professional accomplishments and attitudes have set standards I hope to emulate. I wish to express my gratitude to Elizabeth Alexander, Stephen Kerber, and the staff of the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History, University of Florida, the St. Augustine Historical Society, the Florida Historical Society in Tampa, the Florida State Library at Tallahassee, Charlotte Ray of the Georgia State Archives, and Franklin M. Garrett of the Atlanta Historical Society. All were of great assistance in my research and consistently courteous and helpful. I wish to thank the other graduate students for their professional comraderie and assistance in so many ways. I am indebted to Dr. Kermit Hall of the History Department who was particularly inspirational in his instruction and encouraging in his assistance. PREFACE There are numerous references within this work to persons of African descent. Within the context of events during the nineteenth century, the word "colored" appears in several references to certain military units or personages as was common usage during that period. Where the context is more modern times, the word "black" is used. For clarity and ease of reading, arabic numerals are used for all military units except within quotes where the numbers were spelled out. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii PREFACE iv LIST OF FIGURES vii ABSTRACT viii CHAPTERS I INTRODUCTION 1 Notes 13 II CIVIL WAR STRATEGY — GENERAL 15 Notes 51 III FLORIDA IN THE CONFEDERACY— POLITICAL 54 Notes 88 IV FLORIDA ON THE EVE OF WAR— DEMOGRAPHY AND ECONOMY 94 Notes 110 V FLORIDA IN THE CONFEDERACY —MILITARILY, THE EARLY YEARS 112 Notes 166 VI BLOCKADE AND RAID — THE MIDDLE YEARS IN FLORIDA 174 Notes 190 VII RENEWED INTEREST IN FLORIDA 192 Notes 223 Page VIII PRELIMINARIES, LANDING, AND EXPLOITATION . 227 Notes 286 IX THE BATTLE OF OLUSTEE 295 The First Stage 295 The Second Stage 314 The Third Stage 327 The Fourth Stage 340 Notes 361 X AFTERMATH 368 Notes 430 XI CONCLUSION 437 Notes 445 BIBLIOGRAPHY 447 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 470 LIST OF FIGURES Pages Figure 2-1 Railroad Map of the Confederacy 29 Figure 2-2 McClellan's Strategic Plan 49 Figure 3-1 Presidential Election 1860 70 Figure 4-1 Population 1860 97 Figure 4-2 Distribution of Population 1860 98 Figure 4-3 Whites vs. Colored 99 Figure 4-4 Railroad Map: Northeast Florida, Southeast Georgia 105 Figure 7-1 Progressive Delimitation of the Area Under Southern Control ,1861-1864 . 205 Figure 8-1 Grant's Sketch of the Ocean Pond Battlefield 282 Figure 9-1 Jones's Modification of Grant's Sketch. 307 Figure 9-2 The First Stage of the Battle 308 Figure 9-3 The Second Stage of the Battle 315 Figure 9-4 The Third Stage of the Battle 328 Figure 9-5 The Fourth Stage of the Battle 341 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE 1864 FEDERAL FLORIDA EXPEDITION: BLUNDERING INTO MODERN WARFARE BY William H. Nulty December, 1985 Chairman: Dr. Samuel Proctor Major Department: History The Civil War was the breakpoint in modern warfare. The advent of nationalism and the arrival of the Industrial Revolution changed warfare from being the exclusive province of a relative handful of professionals to one involving the total resources, human and material, of those engaged in the war. At the start of the war in the United States, few in leadership positions comprehended the nature of total war; fewer still understood the implications of a war fought for hearts and minds as well as for the military defeat of the enemy. Union General George B. McClellan realized that the new strategic targets were lines of communications. He envisioned utilizing the Federal naval advantage to project land units ashore by surprise to seize important "choke" points within the Confederacy. These points would then be fortified and the fragmented Confederate forces forced to attack these points at a disadvantage. Such tactics would soon bring defeat to the Confederacy with minimum disruption of the civilian environment. General McClellan's fall from grace postponed the use of this strategy. In 1864, Florida was militarily weak, abandoned by the Confederacy because of her geography and lack of strategic importance. The Federal Florida expedition in 1864 envisioned the use of the navy to land troops by surprise in Florida. The objectives were to cut off Confederate commissary supplies from Florida, recruit blacks for the new colored regiments, disrupt Florida rail transportation and prevent unused rail from being used in strategically more important areas of the Confederacy, open a Florida port to trade, and, if possible, restore Florida to the Union. The military, economic, political, and psychological objectives, warfare in the modern sense, had a strong probability of achievement at the start. The full potential of the expedition was not realized because of the limited abilities of its leadership and the Union defeat at the battle of Olustee, proportionately the third bloodiest battle of the war for the Union. In spite of Olustee, the Federal expedition was not a total failure. It achieved a number of successes that have been overlooked because of Olustee. These can be appreciated by an examination of the expedition within the larger contexts of the war and modern warfare. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The Civil War marks the breakpoint between early modern and modern warfare. A number of developments had taken place within a relatively short space of time that affected the manner in which warfare was conducted. The beginning of the nineteenth century had seen the introduction of the citizen army and nationalistic spirit into what had once been the private province of a comparatively small handful of professionals. The major innovator was Napoleon, and the legacy of his generalship leading to the characteristic climatic, decisive battle provided the ideal model for students of warfare. The primary interpreter of Napoleon to English-speaking military students before the American Civil War, to include those at West Point, was the Frenchman, Antoine Henri, Baron de Jomini. Unfortunately for many of those students who were to become the leaders and participants in the first of the truly modern wars, the major work of the Prussian interpreter of Napoleon, Carl von Clausewitz, was not translated into English until 1873. 3 It was more relevant to modern war than the Jominian interpretation. The Jominian emphasis was on the offensive; the basic tenet of strategy under this concept was to bring the maximum possible force to bear against the decisive point in the theater of operations while the enemy could muster only an inferior part of his own strength at the same point. * Clausewitz, on the other hand, saw war in a wider context, one more in keeping with what we today characterize as modern war. Probably the most remembered of any of the Clausewitzian dictims is that "War is merely the continuation of policy by other means. "^ The pronouncement is simple but has been misinterpreted. In his own words, what he meant was, "the political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes."" Perhaps unconsciously, President Abraham Lincoln sensed this. President Lincoln also sensed another of Clausewitz's observations that, "even the ultimate outcome of a war is not to be regarded always as the final one."' President Lincoln was one of the few to realize that military defeat of the Confederacy would not be enough! In the American Civil War the task of the federal government was to restore the Union which meant, in Clausewitzian terms, imposing its will upon a powerless Confederacy to the point where those states that had seceded would return to the Union and voluntarily stay there . The implications of this task were that the primary goals would be political rather than military ones; policy would therefore permeate all military operations and have a continuous influence on them. Clausewitz had also pointed out that rather than sole reliance on a Napoleonic style climatic battle, there were "many roads to success, and . they do not all involve the opponent's outright defeat." 8 He gave as examples activities that covered the spectrum from "the destruction of the enemy's forces, the conquest of his territory, to a temporary occupation or invasion, to projects with an immediate political purpose, and finally to passively awaiting the enemy's attacks. "^ Clausewitz was referring to operations that had direct political reprecussions and were designed to disrupt or paralyze an opposing alliance. The Federal drive to gain control of the Mississippi with the objectives of splitting and separating the Confederacy as originally envisioned in General Winfield Scott's "Anaconda Policy" would be an example of this type of an operation. Clausewitz believed that in the absolute form of war, everything was related. In a total war, everybody was a cog in a national war effort.