The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post–Civil War Florida

The Jackson County War

Reconstruction and Resistance in Post-Civil War Florida

Daniel R. Weinfeld

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2012

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Bembo

Cover designer: Todd Lape

Front cover photographs, left to right: Charles Memorial Hamilton; courtesy of the Brady-Handy Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-cwpbh-00383. William James Purman; courtesy of the Brady-Handy Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-cwpbh-03733. Emanuel Fortune; courtesy of the State Archives of Florida. Dr. John L. Finlayson; courtesy of the State Archives of Florida. John Quincy Dickinson; courtesy of the College Archives, Special Collections, Middlebury College, Middle-bury, Vermont.

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39. 48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weinfeld, Daniel R. (Daniel Robert), 1967–

   The Jackson County War : Reconstruction and resistance in post-Civil War Florida / Daniel R. Weinfeld.

       p. cm.

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-0-8173-1745-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8598-9 (electronic) 1. Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877)—Florida—Jackson County.

2. Jackson County (Fla.)—History—19th century. 3. Jackson County (Fla.)—Politics and government—19th century. I. Title.

    F317.J2W45 2012

    975.9′9304—dc23

                                                                                                                 2011034831

To the memory of Dr. Marvin S. Weinfeld

Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell upon Thy holy mountain? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh truth in his heart.

—Psalm 15:1-2

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Abbreviations

1. Like So Many Children, 1865

2. Those Pests That Remind Us Daily of Our Degradation, 1866

3. You Can't Come Here with Any Such Equality, 1867

4. Depression Is Almost Universal Here, 1868

5. They Believe There in Gunpowder Entirely, 1869

6. A Small Hell on Earth, 1869

7. I Have No Ambition to Fill a More Honorable Grave, 1870-1871

8. Whatever It Was, It Has Passed Away

Appendix 1: Biographical Index of Major Figures in the Jackson County War

Appendix 2: Government Officials

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

A number of individuals provided invaluable support during my research and writing of The Jackson County War. Prof. Mark Bauman and Rachel Heimovics at Southern Jewish Historical Society patiently edited the very rough draft I submitted about the murder of Samuel Fleishman and encouraged me to continue with my new interest. Prof. Canter Brown Jr. responded in detail to many e-mailed questions, suggested sources, and nudged me toward T. Thomas Fortune. Staff members at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the Florida State Library and Archives in Tallahassee, the University of Florida, and New York Public Library answered many research requests, making many discoveries possible. Arnold Kaplan was kind to provide copies of the manuscripts of the Dickinson Diary and Fleishman Affidavits, and Mrs. Trutor of the Benson Vermont Historical Society and Jeff Marshall at the University of Vermont supplied numerous Dickinson letters that had eluded previous researchers. I particularly appreciated the indulgence of Robert Earl Standland and Sue Tindel from the Jackson County offices, who allowed this Yankee stranger to rummage through the courthouse basement and never questioned the dust stirred up. At the last moment, Dexter King appeared with his trove of Dickinson material. I thank Dexter for welcoming me to his home to study his remarkable collection.

I am indebted to my mother, Beverly Weinfeld, and aunt, Nancy Bunnin, for their proofreading and editing. Their encouragement and genuine sympathy for the subject inspired me to turn a research hobby into this book. Finally, I'm grateful to my wife, Mira, and daughters, Alexa and Abby, who have patiently tolerated my preoccupation with this project over the last few years.

Introduction

On the evening of October 1, 1869, eighteen-year-old Maggie McClellan sat on the porch of Catherine Attaway's hotel in Marianna, Florida. Beside her stood her father, James F. McClellan, a prominent attorney who had argued many cases before Florida's Supreme Court. The McClellans were joined by James P. Coker, a successful merchant. The two men were close associates in business and politics.

At some point the conversation surely turned to the uproar in Jackson County's black community following the murder of an adult man and a little boy at a picnic a few days before. Many believed that the assailants were white Regulators targeting the county's African American constable, Calvin Rogers. Coker and McClellan's talk ended abruptly, stopped short by the crack of a shotgun. James McClellan felt a shot pass through his shoulder. Maggie was killed instantly. The darkness concealed the shooter, but the men agreed they had recognized the voice of Calvin Rogers commanding, Fire.

John Quincy Dickinson, the Vermont-born county clerk, recorded in his diary the terrible events that ensued. Coker sprang into action instantly, for once not bothering to conceal his control over the county's young white men as chief of the Regulators. Riders galloped into the night to spread the alarm and summon white men from the countryside. Early the next morning, Dickinson found Marianna's streets full of armed men staggering about drunk, clamoring for Calvin Rogers.

Jackson County became a battlefield, its citizens terrorizing each other until federal troops arrived to impose order at the end of the month. This pattern of outbursts of brutal violence, followed by quiet lulls, began early in 1869 and continued through 1871. Contemporary estimates of the number of murders ranged from close to one hundred to twice that total, far exceeding the number of murders in the rest of Florida during the same period. The victims were mostly black but included some whites affiliated with the Republican Party and a few white conservatives.

The three years of bloodshed, later known as the Jackson County War, brought immediate and unwelcome national attention to the region. Its notoriety was spread in reports of the violence in the nation's newspapers and congressional investigations. President Ulysses S. Grant became fully conversant with the details of the carnage in this small Florida Panhandle district. Federal troops were repeatedly dispatched to keep the peace. Within Florida, newspaper editors, divided along the lines of their political allegiance, debated the cause of the murders. Jackson County became known, in the memorable expression of one contemporary observer, as the place where Satan has his seat.¹

For decades after the end of the Jackson County War, area residents showed little interest in discussing or revisiting the horrors perpetrated there. Instead, investigation into the story of the Jackson County War was relegated to the few historians of the Reconstruction era in Florida. The first attempt at retelling the major events of the Jackson County War and analyzing its causes came in a short chapter in John Wallace's 1888 political history of Florida during Reconstruction, Carpetbag Rule in Florida. His depiction of Jack 1 on County violence and the individuals involved repeated the arguments carried in the Democratic press. Wallace offered little new information other than scathing portraits of the carpetbaggers whom Wallace, like white Democrats of the time, blamed almost exclusively for provoking the murders.²

A more scholarly account came twenty-five years later in William Watson Davis's The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida. Davis, a student of William Dunning at Columbia University, echoed his mentor's cynicism about the intentions of the carpetbaggers—the young men from the North who came to the post-Civil War South to administer and govern. African Americans, in this account, were not independent actors but were, at best, merely dupes of their Republican manipulators or, at worst, insolent and villainous collaborators. For his sources, Davis relied exclusively on the staunchly Democratic Weekly Floridian, conversations with an anonymous old Jackson County Regulator, and the testimony of Jackson County Republicans before the congressional investigative committee that came to the South in November 1871. Davis emphasized the killings of whites by blacks, thereby giving the misleading impression of a white community under siege. Compounding the difficulties with his narrative, many of Davis's facts were wrong and the language he chose was sometimes pejorative. Furthermore, Davis could not resist inventing details and dramatizing the events he described. Davis did not completely absolve white conservatives, conceding that they had acted ruthlessly. Nevertheless, he suggested that their actions, if not entirely warranting sympathy, were certainly understandable in light of the threats they faced. Davis's study remained the authoritative text on Florida during Reconstruction for more than fifty years.³

In 1950, J. Randall Stanley wrote the first book-length history of Jackson County. Stanley demonstrated greater familiarity with the locality and its personalities but added little new information to Davis's account of the Jackson County War, having relied heavily on Davis's earlier narrative and on the same primary sources. Stanley's perspective also differed little from that of his predecessor. Unlike Davis, however, Stanley emphasized the impact of the depressed economy of the postwar period in precipitating the desperate measures resorted to by Jackson County whites during Reconstruction. Stanley's narrative was more reliable because he wrote with less literary license than Davis. Nevertheless, Stanley's version of events also included significant errors.⁴

The advent in the 1960s of revisionist academics who challenged the prevailing assumptions of the Dunning school brought a dramatic transformation in scholarship to the Jackson County War. Delving into the long-neglected reports of the Freedmen's Bureau agents and conflicting contemporaneous newspaper accounts, this generation of graduate students brought a new perspective. Among the first to read through the Freedmen's Bureau Florida records stored in the National Archives, Joe M. Richardson was stunned to find that everything he had been taught about Reconstruction was in error. The carpetbaggers and their southern white, scalawag allies, previously dismissed as rapacious exploiters, were reconsidered. Contrary to the Dunning school narrative, Richardson found African Americans to be independent, competent, and courageous participants in the events of the time. Ralph Peek, in a 1961 article in the Florida Historical Quarterly, applied this new scholarship to events in Jackson County.⁵

This re-evaluation culminated in Jerrell H. Shofner's major work, Nor Is It Over Yet: Florida in the Era of Reconstruction. This detailed, thoroughly researched history, published in 1974, supplanted Davis's account as the authoritative text on Florida during Reconstruction. Shofner followed this accomplishment by similarly updating and replacing Stanley's Jackson County history with Jackson County, Florida—A History. Adding more detail to previous accounts of Jackson County during the Reconstruction era, Shofner explored the Freedmen's Bureau records and examined scattered primary sources. Building on Peek's articles, Shofner characterized Jackson County's violence as arising from organized white resistance determined to drive out black and white Republican leadership.⁶

Existing accounts leave room for closer consideration of Reconstruction in Jackson County. The Jackson County War, the first book-length account of the subject, utilizes both overlooked and newly discovered sources to present the period beginning with emancipation and ending with the cessation of bloodshed in 1872 as a continuous narrative. This book explores the impact on Jackson County of political decisions emanating from Washington and Tallahassee and social and economic developments sweeping the postwar south. In addition, to explain the outbreak of violence, The Jackson County War shows how the people of Jackson County, Florida, reacted to the unfolding events of Reconstruction and chose a path that led inexorably to catastrophe.

Abbreviations

BRF&AL: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned lands

FHQ: Florida Historical Quarterly

FSA: Florida State Archives, Tallahassee

JFU: Jacksonville Florida Union

LC: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

MC: Marianna Courier

NA: National Archives, Washington, D.C.

NJG: Norfolk Journal and Guide

PKY: P. K. Yonge library of Florida History, University of Florida, Gainesville

PSWC: Pensacola Semi-Weekly Commercial

SHC: Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

TS: Tallahassee Sentinel

TSWF: Tallahassee Semi-Weekly Floridian

TWF: Tallahassee Weekly Floridian

1

Like So Many Children, 1865

Twas when the Proclamation came,—

Far in the Sixties back,—

He left his lord, and changed his name

To Mister Bartow Black.

     —T. Thomas Fortune, Bartow Black

The mayhem that engulfed Jackson County during the Reconstruction era surprised all who were familiar with its history and people. Before the war, when murder was rampant throughout Florida, Jackson County was known for its stability and prosperity. From 1851 through 1868, Jackson County, with a population of ten thousand, had averaged almost two murders a year. This rate, while unacceptable by modern standards, compared so favorably with other Florida counties that one historian, with little exaggeration, described Jackson County as the most peaceful and conservative county in Florida at the time of the Civil War.¹

In 1860, Jackson was Florida's second most populous county. Its residents were divided nearly evenly between whites and blacks, of whom all but forty-three were enslaved. Situated in Florida's Panhandle where Georgia, Alabama, and Florida converge, Jackson County formed the western edge of the traditional cotton belt; and its rich farmland was well suited for the money crop, short staple cotton. The engine that drove the region's prosperity, cotton was cultivated on plantations manned by gangs of slave laborers and, in the pursuit of profits, was grown almost to the exclusion of all other crops.²

Thirty-eight percent of Jackson County households owned slaves and 16 percent held as many as ten. While these rates of slaveholding placed Jackson County at the bottom of Florida's seven largest counties, the percentages were comparable to adjacent Gadsden County, Florida, immediately to the east, and Georgia's Decatur County to Jackson's northeast. Many of Jackson County's non-slaveholders were farmers recently arrived from South Carolina and Georgia, who worked small plots of land barely sufficient to feed their families. The hardscrabble existence of these poor white families contrasted starkly with the lives of the prosperous plantation owners whose stately homes lined the main street of Marianna and nearby Greenwood.³

The village of Marianna, the business and political center of this wealthy county, grew from about four hundred to nearly eight hundred residents between 1860 and 1870. Despite its tiny population, Marianna's vibrant community contained schools, hotels, elegant homes, many stores, and several churches. Marianna was also the entertainment capital of the region, hosting traveling circuses, horse races, political rallies, and large public holiday celebrations. Elite society consisted of wealthy planters, successful merchants with stores in the town's center, and a number of professionals. The county was particularly renowned for producing esteemed attorneys and judges. Many of the lawyers, doctors, and merchants operated farms in addition to their in-town practices and businesses. The nearby hamlets of Greenwood and Campbellton served as smaller regional centers for their neighboring plantations.⁴

Marianna's main disadvantage, and a factor that grew increasingly problematic as the nineteenth century progressed, was its lack of access to efficient transportation. The town lay close by the Chipola River, which was essentially unnavigable for purposes of moving the great cotton bales to be sent to market. Instead, products had to be laboriously carted to landings on the Chattahoochee and Apalachicola Rivers on the county's eastern edge. There the freight was loaded on steamboats and barges headed to the port of Apalachicola on the Gulf of Mexico and then moved to ships sailing as far as Europe. To the continuous frustration of Jackson County residents before and after the Civil War, the closest railroad line terminated in adjacent Gadsden County. To West Florida's detriment, investors and the state failed to extend the railroad across the Apalachicola River until almost the end of the century.⁵

In contrast to the stereotype of radical states' righters eager for independence from the Yankee North, Jackson County residents embraced secession only reluctantly. At the time Florida gained statehood in 1845, Jackson County, like most of Florida, contained an active Whig Party. The Whig movement endorsed government support of economic development and compromise to preserve national unity. The Whig Party was dying out in most of Florida by the mid-1850s as the national party disintegrated in the wake of the internal divisions over slavery and was superseded across the South by the Democratic Party. In Jackson County, however, after a brief flirtation with the American Party, commonly referred to as the Know Nothings, the Whigs enjoyed a resurgence. Led by the county's wealthiest planter and merchant, Thomas M. White, Jackson County's Whigs delivered a narrow majority of the county's vote to their candidates for Congress and the state legislature over the Democratic challengers as late as 1858. The county earned a reputation as a Citadel of Whiggery.⁶

By the tumultuous 1860 election, the Whig Party had disappeared nationally and a solid minority of Jackson County citizens gravitated toward the anti-secession Constitutional Union Party. Not all residents, however, were so conservative. Jackson County also harbored a growing Democratic Party movement led by John Milton, John M. F. Erwin, and attorney James F. McClellan. Wealthy Jackson County planter John Milton had emerged as a leader of Florida's Democratic Party and, following the split between Democrats from the North and South, he received the party's nomination as candidate for governor for the October 1860 election. In Jackson County, however, old Whig voting habits died hard. Milton easily took the state but only narrowly won his native Jackson County over the Constitutional Union candidate. When secession fervor swept across the South, Jackson County sent four delegates to a special Florida convention held in early January 1861. On the final vote over whether to endorse secession, Jackson County's James L. G. Baker was one of only seven delegates out of sixty-nine present who opposed the proposal. Two other Jackson County delegates later explained that they had supported the secession ordinance only for the sake of unity in the state.⁷

Once the war broke out, Jackson County men enthusiastically joined the Confederate army in great numbers. These soldiers served in the celebrated armies of the Confederacy on the distant fronts of Virginia and the West. Jackson County, unaffected directly by the battles until late in the war, became a breadbasket for the Confederacy. Cotton lands were switched over to food, and commissary agents scoured this productive district for livestock and crops to send to the armies in the field. The depletion of manpower, combined with the Confederate government's sometimes ruthless requisition of chattel and produce, left many families in a precarious position, barely able to sustain themselves. Bitter letters of complaint about these confiscations were sent to Governor Milton, who forwarded them to Richmond.

Assigning Panhandle men to the Confederate armies in Virginia and the West, Jefferson Davis's government left the region's long coastline nearly undefended. The Union quickly clamped down a naval blockade, preventing the transport of cotton bales to lucrative foreign markets. Abandonment by the Confederate military also left Panhandle citizens at the mercy of bands of deserters and guerillas who ventured from their havens in the swamps, inlets, and bays to prey on the countryside at will. These marauders were a constant irritant, and hunting them down diverted crucial manpower from more useful activities.

The war came closer to Marianna in 1863 when a military hospital was established in the village. In response, Jackson County women organized a committee to attend around-the-clock to the wounded soldiers brought to their town. In 1864, the Confederacy established a military post at Marianna, including training grounds, storehouses, and stables. The burdens of these demands on the community's resources, however, were merely a prelude to the disaster soon to occur.⁸

In the autumn of 1864, the war in all its fury descended upon Jackson County. A column of seven hundred Union soldiers set out from Pensacola to march the length of the Panhandle and devastate the region, with the goal of putting an end to its usefulness as a source of supply for the Confederacy. In Marianna, old men and young boys of the home guard quickly assembled to confront the invaders. On September 27, 1864, the contending forces formed lines, and barricades blocked the town's streets. Against hopeless odds, the local men, supported by fragments of various Confederate units, acquitted themselves bravely but were quickly overwhelmed. By day's end, the defenders counted ten men killed and sixteen wounded. The Union army losses were eight men killed, nineteen wounded, and ten captured.⁹

Although the Union troops controlled the town, the defenders had succeeded in checking the invader's advance. The unexpected number of casualties, including serious wounds suffered by their commander, convinced the Union officers to withdraw to their haven in Pensacola. Before they departed, however, the troops laid waste to the town, looting stores and setting fires that burned St. Luke's Episcopal Church with several defenders trapped inside. Unsubstantiated rumors spread of black soldiers from U.S. Colored Troops units committing atrocities on Confederates found in the churchyard.¹⁰

The Union forces had largely accomplished their goal of devastating the region. Vast quantities of commissary and quartermaster stores were carried off along with many hundred cattle. The raid liberated as many as four hundred enslaved African Americans, who accompanied the Union troops on their march west. The Union army also seized ninety-six prisoners, including at least forty-seven men and boys from Jackson County, to take back to its Pensacola base. These captives, ranging in age from teenagers to men in their sixties, were dispatched north, where they endured the brutal winter in a series of locations, with most ending up in the infamous Elmira, New York, prison camp. Fourteen men died in captivity. The devastation was so catastrophic that the county did not fully recover from the battle of Marianna for decades.¹¹

Among the wounded soldiers left behind in Marianna by the withdrawing Union column was Major Nathan Cutler, a young Harvard graduate from Maine. Cutler and three of his comrades were taken to the home of Mayor Thomas M. White to recuperate. At some point, Martha Finlayson, the widow of planter Angus Finlayson, assumed responsibility for these Yankee soldiers. After they recovered their health, the four men were sent off to Andersonville. Despite the bitterness Marianna citizens held toward the invaders, these four young men succeeded in charming their hosts and nurses and were remembered fondly in the town for years.¹²

The following spring, the exhausted people of Jackson County hardly needed any dramatic announcement to convince them the war had ended. Nevertheless, on April 1, 1865, a theatrical denouement came with the single blast that echoed in Sylvania, John Milton's Jackson County estate, when the governor pulled the trigger of a shotgun he had aimed toward his own skull. The formal surrender of Confederate forces in Florida and the declaration of emancipation of all slaves followed in May. Gradually, the soldiers and captives returned to their damaged homes, ruined stores, and fallow fields.

In the months after the end of the war, Union troops scattered about the South were concentrated at strategic points. Fifty soldiers from the 161st New York Volunteers occupied Marianna in early July. Like Major Cutler before him, the New Yorkers' captain, John F. Little, made a favorable impression on Marianna residents. He socialized with the townspeople, among whom he found so many union men that he wondered aloud how Florida had ever seceded. The New Yorkers established the first school for African American children in Jackson County. Rumors that the garrison was to be replaced by U.S. Colored Troops caused great apprehension, but black soldiers never arrived.¹³

The most dramatic result of the end of war was, of course, the fact that one-half of the county's residents were no longer the property of the other half. While the legal meaning of emancipation was clearly understood by all, each race grasped the practical effect of this new reality only gradually. A number of Jackson County slaves had fled early in the war, and some of them joined the Union army, particularly the Eighty-Second and Eighty-Sixth U.S. Colored Troops regiments. Many slaves, perhaps 10 percent, had been freed by the invading Union troops the previous September, and some departed with the withdrawing column. Shortly before the surrender, Sarah Jane Fortune, the mother of journalist T. Thomas Fortune, took a different approach to gaining freedom, effectively emancipating herself when she fled to the countryside after striking her owner, Eli P. Moore, in an effort to stop him from beating her son.

The majority of Jackson County's African Americans stayed right where they had lived and worked for their entire lives, uncertain where to go or what to do. In the words of T. Thomas Fortune, who was eight years old at the time of emancipation, the freedpeople suddenly found themselves with new and untried responsibilities thrust upon, with no previous preparation to meet them; with no homes and no names except such as they inherited from their owners. They had long dreamed of freedom, but when the slaves found themselves released from bondage, many were unsure "whether to rejoice and be glad because they were free at last or to be sorrowful and