Fort Pickens and the Civil War's Nearly First Shot
Near Pensacola, Florida
Fort Pickens sits at the western tip of Santa Rosa Island, across the water from where you are now. And in the first weeks of eighteen sixty-one, it came as close as any place in the country to being the site where the Civil War opened.
When Florida seceded from the Union on January tenth, eighteen sixty-one, Lieutenant Adam Slemmer commanded fifty-one United States Army regulars spread across several forts guarding Pensacola Bay. In the middle of the night two days before secession, local Florida militia had already tried to seize Fort Barrancas by surprise attack. Slemmer repelled them. He then made a calculated decision: spike the guns at Fort Barrancas, abandon the mainland position, and move his tiny force across the water to Fort Pickens on the island.
Fort Pickens was built to face seaward attacks, not inland ones. Slemmer correctly judged that Confederate forces, no matter how numerous, could not take a fortified brick position by frontal assault across open water.
Confederate General Braxton Bragg arrived in Pensacola in March, amassed five thousand troops on the mainland and at two harbor forts, and issued demands for Fort Pickens to surrender. Slemmer refused. For weeks the two sides stared across the water while Washington and Richmond decided whether the next shot would be fired here or at Charleston. President Lincoln chose to resupply Fort Pickens in secret in early April. Word reached Fort Sumter first, and history went that way instead.
The standoff at Pensacola lasted fifteen months. The Confederates shelled Fort Pickens twice. The Union shelled the Confederate positions twice. The Navy Yard on the mainland changed hands multiple times. When Confederate forces finally abandoned the Pensacola defenses in May of eighteen sixty-two, after the fall of New Orleans, the Union quietly reoccupied the city. Fort Pickens remains one of only four Southern forts that never fell to Confederate hands in the entire war.
