Olustee: Florida's Largest Civil War Battle and the Men Who Won It

On February twentieth, eighteen sixty-four, Union and Confederate forces met in the largest Civil War battle fought on Florida soil, in a pine flatwoods near the town of Olustee, in what is now Osceola National Forest. The battle lasted approximately four hours. The Union forces, roughly five thousand five hundred men, were routed. Approximately eighteen hundred Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured. The Confederate forces, roughly five thousand men defending the interior of Florida against a Union campaign to disrupt Confederate supply lines, held the field.

Among the Union regiments engaged was the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, one of the first Black regiments raised in the North after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation authorized African American military service. The Fifty-Fourth had fought at Fort Wagner in South Carolina the previous July, the assault that made them nationally known. At Olustee, the regiment held the rear of the Union retreat under heavy fire, covering the withdrawal of other units. Their losses were severe.

Also engaged were the First and Third United States Colored Troops, both Black regiments. The presence of Black soldiers at Olustee was not lost on the Confederates. Confederate units reportedly killed some wounded Black soldiers on the field rather than taking them prisoner. The accusation appeared in Union after-action reports and has been repeated by historians, though the documentation is confined to Union sources.

The Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park, adjacent to Osceola National Forest, marks the site. A reenactment has been held annually there since nineteen seventy-seven, drawing thousands of visitors. Osceola National Forest itself connects to the Pinhook Swamp, a wildlife corridor that links to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in Georgia, one of the largest intact freshwater wetland systems in North America.