Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
Corps d’Afrique Infantry) at Port Hudson; and the 86th (formerly the 14th Corps
d’Afrique) at New Orleans. Southern Florida had few black men to recruit.
Key West, with a population of 2,832, was Florida’s second-largest city. It
was the seat of Monroe County, which stretched from the tip of the peninsula to
Lake Okeechobee. Outside Key West, Monroe County’s population amounted to
eighty-one people. Dade County, immediately to the east, covered a similar area
and boasted eighty-three residents in all. In Manatee County, just north of Monroe,
cattle outnumbered the 854 humans by more than thirty-six to one. Free and slave,
black residents of the three counties numbered 867, most of whom (611, or 70.4
percent) lived in Key West. 35
Manatee and neighboring Hillsborough County, around Tampa Bay, grazed
more beef cattle than any counties in the Confederacy outside Texas. With shipments
from Texas cut off after Union armies gained control of the Mississippi
River in the summer of 1863, Confederate commissaries turned increasingly to
Florida as a source of beef. As early as January 1864, Brig. Gen. Daniel P. Woodbury,
commanding the Union District of Key West and Tortugas, entertained the
idea of occupying Tampa “with force sufficient to stop the cattle driving from
Middle Florida”; but his plan called for five thousand infantry and cavalry, an impossible
number of men for an out-of-the-way operation at a time when Grant and
Sherman were trying to gather strength for their spring campaigns. Woodbury had
to be content with maintaining a garrison at Fort Myers, a tiny post near the mouth
of the Caloosahatchee River in Manatee County. The fort was “too far south for
any very effective operations,” Woodbury thought, but it was the best site that he
could occupy with the few troops at his disposal. 36
Woodbury’s force was an odd assortment: the 2d USCI and some white Floridians
known at first as the Florida Rangers and later as the 2d Florida Cavalry.
Composed of backwoodsmen who saw the Union Army as the surest refuge from
the Confederate draft, the 2d Florida waged the kind of war that erupted whenever
white Southerners faced each other on opposing sides. “The colored troops . . .
behaved remarkably well,” General Woodbury reported after one expedition. “The
refugee troops having personal wrongs to redress were not so easily controlled.”
Conflict between neighbors imparted a special viciousness to the war wherever it
occurred. 37
The 2d USCI had sailed from Virginia to New Orleans in November 1863
and from there to Key West three months later. In the spring, three of its companies
took ship for Fort Myers and at once joined the 2d Florida Cavalry in cattle
raids. Before long, the white cavalrymen were using their local knowledge to guide
parties of black infantrymen who were strangers to the country in scouting the
region’s waterways—a reversal of the roles that usually obtained when escaped
slaves guided Union troops, as they did in South Carolina and northeastern Florida.
On one 210-mile foray in May, companies from the two regiments burned a Con-
35 Manatee County had 31,252 cattle apart from “milch cows” and “working oxen” and 854
human residents. Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860, p. 54, and Agriculture of
the United States in 1860, p. 18.
36 OR, ser. 1, vol. 35, pt. 1, p. 461 (quotations); Canter Brown Jr., Florida’s Peace River Frontier
(Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991), pp. 156–57.
37 OR, ser. 1, vol. 35, pt. 1, p. 388; Brown, Florida’s Peace River Frontier, p. 165.