Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

The South Atlantic Coast, 1861–1863 43
St. John’s River and institute exactly the kind of program Finegan feared. But just
five days later, orders came from department headquarters to abandon the entire
project and evacuate Jacksonville again. General Hunter, commanding the Department
of the South, had begged the War Department for a greater force to move
against Charleston just after he initiated the Jacksonville expedition. When the
War Department failed to cooperate, Hunter found it necessary to withdraw troops
from Florida. 47
While the orders were in transit from South Carolina to Jacksonville, scouts
of the 8th Maine reported discovering a Confederate camp of twenty-two tents not
far from the town. Four companies of the 1st South Carolina set out to investigate.
“After going about four miles through the open pine woods and over fields carpeted
with an immense variety of wild flowers we found the ‘tents of the enemy’
were merely some clothes belonging to a ‘cracker’ hut, hung on a fence,” Captain
Rogers wrote. “Had our black men made such a fool report we should never hear
the last of it. We drove in a herd of poor scrawny cows, which was all we gained by
this adventure.” Colonel Higginson expressed no fears for his regiment’s reputation,
but he wrote in his journal that the only thing that saved the 8th Maine from
being the butt of unending mockery was the imminent breakup of the Jacksonville
expedition. 48
As federal troops boarded the transports, fires broke out in the town. Officers
of the 1st South Carolina blamed the white troops for setting them; the colonel of
the 8th Maine blamed Confederate arsonists. The evacuation of Jacksonville was
Higginson’s “first experience of the chagrin which officers feel from divided or
uncertain council in higher places.” The withdrawing federals took with them yet
more Florida Unionists. This time, the troops would be gone for more than ten
months. 49
General Hunter had resumed command of the Department of the South in
January 1863, after General Mitchel’s death from malaria the previous October.
Hunter was ready to move against Charleston, where Secessionists had first fired
on the United States flag. He thought that the city would fall within a fortnight.
To augment his force in South Carolina, he summoned north part of the garrisons
of Fernandina and St. Augustine and evacuated Jacksonville altogether. Since
racial animosity, mistrust, and contempt continued to dictate a subordinate role
for black soldiers, Higginson’s and Montgomery’s regiments would secure the islands
around Port Royal Sound while white troops operated against Charleston.
The black regiments could not, Hunter wrote, “consistently with the interests of
the service (in the present state of feeling) be advantageously employed to act in
concert with our other forces.” 50
The 1st and 2d South Carolina manned a picket line along the Coosaw River, a
part of the Coosawhatchie estuary that separated Port Royal Island from the mainland.
By mid-May, Montgomery had organized six companies of his regiment; at the begin-
47 Ibid., pp. 232–33, 424–25, 428–29.
48 J. S. Rogers typescript, p. 52 (quotation); Looby, Complete Civil War Journal, p. 118.
49 OR, ser. 1, 14: 233; Looby, Complete Civil War Journal, p. 120; “War-Time Letters from Seth
Rogers,” p. 82.
50 OR, ser. 1, 14: 388, 390, 411, 424 (“consistently”), 432; ser. 3, 2: 695. Charleston’s “symbolic
significance was greater than its strategic importance.” James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of