Natural Bridge: The Last Confederate Capital
Near Tallahassee, Florida
About fifteen miles south of Tallahassee, the Saint Marks River disappears underground and flows for roughly a quarter mile beneath a natural limestone bridge before re-emerging on the other side. On March sixth, eighteen sixty-five, six weeks before the end of the Civil War, that geological curiosity saved Tallahassee from Union capture and secured its strange distinction in history.
By the spring of eighteen sixty-five, the Confederacy was in terminal collapse. General Sherman had marched through Georgia. Richmond was days from falling. But Union naval commanders still wanted Tallahassee, the last Confederate state capital east of the Mississippi that had not been taken. A Union flotilla landed troops at Apalachee Bay and began marching north.
The Confederate force at Natural Bridge was remarkable for its desperation. Roughly a thousand soldiers were scraped together to face a Union column of seven hundred to a thousand men, depending on the account. The Confederate ranks included not just regular soldiers but old men pulled from rear-echelon duty and, most notably, cadets as young as fourteen from the West Florida Seminary, the institution that would later become Florida State University. Boys who should have been in classrooms were carrying rifles.
The Union force tried to cross the natural bridge three times. Each time they were pushed back. Unable to flank the position through the surrounding swamps and unable to force the bridge, the Union troops retreated to their ships. Tallahassee had held.
The Confederate victory has been commemorated with an annual reenactment at the battlefield since the nineteen seventies. That reenactment is a complicated ritual in a complicated state. For the formerly enslaved people of Leon County, the Union force included the Second and Ninety-Ninth Regiments of United States Colored Infantry, Black soldiers who came as liberators. Their defeat at Natural Bridge meant that official emancipation for Florida's enslaved population was delayed. The city that was never captured remained, for two more months, a capital of the Confederacy.
