Cradle to Grave: The Battle of Marianna
Florida
By September of eighteen sixty-four, the Confederacy was running out of men. Nowhere was that more visible than in the Florida Panhandle, where the defenders of the town of Marianna were organized into what the locals grimly nicknamed the Cradle to Grave company: a home guard unit that enrolled boys as young as thirteen and elderly men up to the age of seventy-two. Captain Jesse Norwood commanded them, a force that numbered under a hundred by some tallies, though other counts of the day's Confederate defenders, including cavalry in the area, run several times higher.
On September twenty-seventh, a Union raiding column under Brigadier General Alexander Asboth rode in from the west. Asboth had roughly seven hundred men and was after livestock, horses, and any Confederate supplies he could find in the Panhandle interior. He did not expect a fight.
He got one. The home guard dug in at the churchyard of Saint Luke's Episcopal Church and refused to yield even as Asboth's force flanked them from the north. The fighting in the churchyard was close and brutal. About ten Confederate defenders were killed, sixteen wounded, and dozens more captured. Union losses were roughly eight killed and nineteen wounded, severe casualties for a raid against old men and boys.
When the shooting ended, Union Colonel Ladislas Zulavsky ordered Saint Luke's Episcopal Church burned to the ground. A twenty-year-old Union officer named Major Nathan Cutler of the Second Maine Cavalry objected, tried to have the orders reversed, and failed. The church went up in flames, and the bodies of five Confederate dead burned almost beyond recognition inside.
The destruction of a church in a town defended by teenagers and men past military age left a mark. Saint Luke's was rebuilt, and a Bible survived the fire by being carried out before the flames took hold. It is still kept at the church today.
Marianna's battle is small by Civil War scale. But it captures something essential about the war's final year: the Confederacy putting its oldest men and youngest boys into the line, and the Union burning what they left standing.
