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
Seymour recommended in one sentence both occupying Jacksonville “alone” and
“also” Palatka to the south, more than sixty miles up the St. John’s River from
Jacksonville. Gillmore had told Seymour the day before to “push forward as far as
you can toward the Suwanee River,” nearly one hundred miles west of Jacksonville
and more than halfway to Tallahassee. In reply to Seymour’s telegram, Gillmore
told him to advance no farther than Sanderson, a station some twenty miles west of
Jacksonville on the Florida Atlantic and Gulf Central Railroad. 11
Seymour’s message was a symptom of behavior that puzzled people besides
Gillmore. Lincoln’s personal secretary John Hay was in Florida that winter helping
to organize the state’s Unionists. “Seymour has seemed very unsteady and queer
since the beginning of the campaign,” Hay wrote. “He has been subject to violent
alternations of timidity & rashness now declaring Florida loyalty was all bosh—
now lauding it as the purest article extant, now insisting that [General Pierre G.
T.] Beauregard was in his front with the whole Confederacy & now asserting that
he could whip all the rebels in Florida with a good Brigade.” Indeed, a few days
after Gillmore returned to South Carolina, Seymour reversed his earlier opinion of
Florida Unionists’ temper and abilities and decided to move toward the Suwanee.
Gillmore expressed himself “surprised at the tone” of Seymour’s letter and “very
much confused” by Seymour’s views. He told Seymour to hold the line of the St.
Mary’s River, which ran from Jacksonville through Baldwin to Palatka, but the
message arrived too late. 12
Seymour had under his command fifteen regiments of infantry (one of them
mounted) with a sixteenth still in transit; one battalion of cavalry; and several batteries
of light artillery. Nearly all of the infantry regiments were veterans of the
siege of Charleston the year before, and three of them had come south with the Port
Royal Expedition in the fall of 1861. Seymour’s black regiments included the 54th
and 55th Massachusetts, 1st North Carolina, 2d and 3d South Carolina, and the 3d
and 8th USCIs. All together, the federal force included some nine thousand men. 13
The soldiers skirmished forward, built defensive works, and repaired the telegraph
line, which Confederate guerrillas attacked continually. They also seized
$75,000 worth of cotton and foraged liberally on livestock and poultry. When one
farmer asked for military aid in recovering a flock of turkeys, the soldiers learned
that he kept his slaves locked in the smokehouse lest they hear of the Emancipation
Proclamation. “Your men have brought back my turkeys but have taken all my
servants,” the farmer complained to Major Appleton of the 54th Massachusetts.
“The men beg me to allow them to scout for slaves to free,” Appleton wrote in his
diary. Most of the people the soldiers freed headed for Jacksonville. On 15 February,
Appleton saw a railroad flatcar moving in that direction “with a lot of our
wounded cavalry on cotton bales & three rebel prisoners of note, and filled in all
around them negro children and their mammas, while a long train of freed slaves
11 OR, ser. 1, vol. 35, pt. 1, pp. 281–83 (Seymour), 473 (Gillmore).
12 Ibid., pp. 284–86 (quotations, pp. 285, 286); Michael Burlingame and John R. T. Ettlinger,
eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 169.
13 Estimate of total strength derived from averaging the strength of four regiments and
multiplying by ten. OR, ser. 1, vol. 35, pt. 1, pp. 303, 315. Seymour estimated the strength of his
advance as “near 5,500” (p. 288).