The Battle of Fort Myers: Black Soldiers at the End of the War
Near Fort Myers, Florida
By February of eighteen sixty-five, the Civil War was almost over. Lee's army was starving in the trenches around Petersburg. Sherman was marching through the Carolinas. But in south Florida, a small, largely forgotten battle was still being fought, and its outcome would matter more than its size suggests.
Fort Myers had served throughout the war not just as a military post but as a refuge. Enslaved people who escaped from plantations in the interior of Florida made their way here. So did white Union sympathizers from the cattle country to the north. The garrison protecting them was small, made up mainly of the Second Florida Cavalry, Union loyalist refugees from the surrounding cattle country, along with a company of New York infantry and a company of the Second United States Colored Infantry. Black soldiers, many of them formerly enslaved men, holding a fort in a Confederate state.
Confederate commanders in south Florida had organized what they called the Cow Cavalry, formally the First Battalion of Special Cavalry. Its mission was not to fight soldiers but to protect cattle. Florida's herds were feeding Confederate armies in Georgia and the Carolinas, and Union raiding parties had been confiscating livestock for months. The Cow Cavalry's commander received new orders in February: stop the Union raids, and burn Fort Myers to the ground.
On February twentieth, eighteen sixty-five, Captain Francis Hendry, a prominent cattleman who would later become the most powerful man in Lee County, led the Confederate attack. The Union soldiers at Fort Myers, white and Black together, opened artillery fire and held their ground through a full day of skirmishing. One Union soldier was killed. The Confederates withdrew at dark. They never returned.
It was the southernmost land battle of the Civil War, and it was won by a mixed garrison that included Black soldiers in Union blue, the very men the Confederacy had organized itself to deny the rights of citizenship. The war ended less than two months later. The soldiers of Fort Myers, Black and white alike, had held their position to the last shot.
