Olustee: Florida's Bloodiest Civil War Battle

You are passing through Baker County, Florida, a few miles from the site of the bloodiest battle ever fought on Florida soil. On February twentieth, eighteen sixty-four, more than ten thousand Union and Confederate soldiers collided in a longleaf pine forest near a place called Ocean Pond, and the fighting lasted five brutal hours before Union forces broke and fled toward Jacksonville.

The Union expedition had been organized by General Quincy Gilmore with three goals: tighten the blockade on Confederate supply lines running through Florida's interior, recruit Black men into the Union Army, and restore Florida to the Union in time to affect the presidential election of eighteen sixty-four. Brigadier General Truman Seymour commanded the fifty-five hundred Union troops who marched west from Jacksonville, meeting little resistance until they walked directly into Confederate earthworks manned by roughly five thousand men under General Joseph Finegan.

When the Confederate line held and Finegan committed his last reserves, the Union center collapsed. Seymour's army retreated some forty miles of piney flatwoods back toward Jacksonville, leaving their dead and many of their wounded behind. Union casualties totaled more than eighteen hundred killed, wounded, or missing, nearly a third of the force that entered the fight. Confederate losses ran to about nine hundred.

Three regiments of United States Colored Troops fought at Olustee, and their performance drew notice even from Confederate officers. The Eighth United States Colored Infantry charged directly into the Confederate guns and suffered catastrophic losses. When the retreat began, it was the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, the regiment made famous at Fort Wagner seven months earlier, that formed the rearguard, repulsing Confederate pursuit and allowing thousands of wounded men to escape. A Georgia Confederate wrote afterward that the Black regiments, quote, fought well.

The Confederate victory kept Florida's interior in Southern hands for the remainder of the war. Florida continued supplying beef, salt, and other provisions to Confederate armies until Appomattox. The state park here preserves the battlefield virtually unchanged, and a small museum marks the place where three Black regiments proved, under the worst possible conditions, that they were the equals of any soldiers on the field.