Thunder on the River: The Civil War in Northeast Florida
Jacksonville’s Ordeal by Fire: A Civil War History was published in 1984 under the byline of Richard A. Martin and Daniel L. Schafer. To everyone’s surprise, the entire 5,000-copy print run sold out in less than a week. The book was never reprinted, however, and in the intervening years, Professor Schafer was asked by several academic presses if he might be interested in revising the book with a more scholarly focus. Schafer agreed and started his revision in 2005. The result is Thunder on the River: The Civil War in Northeast Florida, which draws on a trove of primary source material that was unknown 30-some years ago. While there is plenty of blue versus gray “soldiering” in Schafer’s work, his narrative is primarily one of social and political history. Schafer’s thesis is that Southerners living in Northeast Florida fervently believed that the Lincoln administration would strive to end slavery and therefore these Floridians went to war primarily to prevent that from happening. Through numerous primary source accounts, the author illustrates that blacks, whether freedmen or slaves, were considered by Jacksonville’s pro-Confederate residents to be a “hated and degraded race,” unfit for any role in society other than that of hard labor in bondage. The mere thought of blacks in any other role prompted simultaneous feelings of fear and anger within the Florida gentry. Yet such a view was far from universal. Jacksonville exhibited significant minority Unionist sentiment, as did much of Florida. Shortly after Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s Florida loyalists wrote of the “reign of terror” that was being brought down upon any who were suspected of Northern sympathies. The war destroyed much of Jacksonville and scattered most of its Confederate residents. Many of the Unionists stayed, initially at least, in the fervent hope that the Union army would take and hold the town. Northern forces did indeed occupy Jacksonville, not merely once but a total four times. Each of the first three occupations ended when Union forces abandoned the town. The fourth occupation was a prelude to the 1864 Florida Campaign, which culminated in a Union disaster at the Feb. 20 Battle of Olustee. Schafer’s work starts out discussing the sectional impact of slavery in the mid-1840s and ends with Reconstruction. Southern whites, though defeated on the battlefield, had no intention of making blacks their social or legal equal. As with the causes of the war, Schafer richly portrays how Florida’s postwar politicians, many of them ex-Confederates as well as racist Northerners, worked diligently to deprive blacks of any fruits of freedom. In addition to an excellent narrative, the book contains four period maps of Jacksonville and its environs. Forty-three Civil War-era photographs and drawings of key officers, civilians and places are also included. This is a fine effort that is highly recommended. Reviewer: Paul Taylor Paul Taylor is the author of five books on the Civil War, the most recent being Orlando M. Poe: Civil War General and Great Lakes Engineer (Kent State University Press, 2009).His website is www.paulrtaylor.com.
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Illustrated, photographs, maps, bibliography, index, 348 pp., 2010, University of Florida Press,