Decade after the Civil War was tense, painful for Florida

By Jim Robison | Sentinel Staff Writer
June 30, 2002

This is the first of two columns on significant events in the history of Seminole County with ties to the year 1877. Today: Sanford and the end of the federal occupation of Florida.

The year 1877 brought an end to the federal occupation of Florida that began with the end of the Civil War.

That, too, was the year the town named for Henry Shelton Sanford, who had been Abe Lincoln's voice in Europe during the bitter war, was incorporated. The new city of Sanford would soon absorb the pioneer town of Mellonville, once the county seat for Mosquito County, and become the region's railroad, steamboat and agricultural hub.

A dozen years earlier John Milton, Florida's governor during the Civil War, killed himself as Union troops prepared to take Tallahassee at the war's end.

Shortly after that, Confederate Gen. Joseph Finegan, who in the closing campaigns of the war defeated the Union advance at the Battle of Olustee and denied Lincoln the Florida victory he wanted to rally pro-Union Floridians, lost his home in a federal tax sale. Nine years after Republicans in control of Congress and the White House allowed Florida to "conditionally" rejoin the Union, federal troops still occupied the state.

During those troubled years, Florida's economy was at a standstill, writes historian Jerrell H. Shofner in his chapter of The New History of Florida.

In the first years after the fighting ended, the state had no civilian government. Florida was bankrupt. The tracks of the few railroads built before the war were in ruins. The Freedmen's Bureau organized contracts for freed black field workers to sharecrop the former slave-labor cotton plantations of North Florida. The U.S. Army kept watch.

Finegan's 1864 "victory" at Olustee had been short-lived. The war had ended a year later, and the federal government had seized hundreds of Confederate-owned plantations through tax sales and turned them over to freedmen and white Union loyalists. President Andrew Johnson eventually restored property ownership to Finegan and other former Confederates, "but the matter exacerbated the struggle over Reconstruction in Florida," Shofner writes.

"The problem that rose is illustrated by the case of Confederate General Joseph Finegan's home at Fernandina," writes Shofner. "It was auctioned to Chloe Merrick of Syracuse, New York, for twenty-five dollars. Miss Merrick, who later married Republican Governor Harrison Reed, made the house into an orphanage for black children. When General Finegan marched home with President Johnson's amnesty proclamation in hand and found little black children playing on his veranda and the U.S. Army guarding them, the tenuous peace of Fernandina was sorely tested."

Finegan and other Confederates later won back their property, but many "native white Floridians" would take up arms against black suffrage.

"Vigilantes such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Young Men's Democratic Clubs used violence and intimidation to discourage or prevent newly enfranchised blacks from exercising their voting privileges," Shofner writes.

Threats, beating and lynchings followed.

"Polling places were disrupted by gunfire and threats," Shofner writes. "Former Confederate cavalry commander J.J. Dickison even led bands of mounted men in cavalry charges through crowds of potential voters."

Some white Floridians left to live in Brazil. Others moved to the still unsettled lands west of the Mississippi River.

"A large number simply abandoned Middle Florida [the plantation counties along the Georgia border and south to Gainesville] and moved southward to Brevard, Orange, Hillsborough and other sparsely populated central Florida counties," Shofner writes.

Finegan, an Irishman who had gone to Jacksonville in his early 20s and paid $40 for five miles of Lake Monroe shoreline at a courthouse auction in 1849, had been a cotton planter, lawyer and state senator before the war.

By 1870, the hero of the Battle of Olustee had resumed his business as a Savannah cotton broker. Finegan sold most of his land south of Lake Monroe to a Henry Sanford for $18,200. Finegan kept the house he built on Silver Lake.

Next Sunday: Milestones in Seminole County history.

·  Cracker Western writer Lee Gramling's Ghosts of the Green Swamp is a novel set in 1877 Florida. Gramling uses fictional cattleman Tate Barkley to express his views of post-Civil War, pre-civilized Central Florida.

·  Shofner's "Reconstruction and Renewal, 1865-1877, is a chapter in a collection of writings by Florida historians, The New History of Florida. (1996 University Press of Florida.)

Jim Robison can be reached at jrobison@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5137.