"A Wilderness of Destruction": Confederate Guerrillas in East and South Florida, 1861–1865 by Zack C. Waters (review)

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Reviewed by:

• “A Wilderness of Destruction”: Confederate Guerrillas in East and South Florida, 1861–1865 by Zack C. Waters
• Mary A. DeCredico

“A Wilderness of Destruction”: Confederate Guerrillas in East and South Florida, 1861–1865. By Zack C. Waters. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 259. $39.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-881-6.)

Current Civil War scholarship has focused on the activities of guerrillas and partisan rangers in support of the Confederate war effort. Daniel E. Sutherland and Lorien Foote have argued that guerrillas played a significant role in the way the Union high command evolved its strategy from a soft [End Page 434] policy to “hard” war. Zack C. Waters’s “A Wilderness of Destruction”: Confederate Guerrillas in East and South Florida, 1861–1865 contributes to the historiography by examining guerrilla bands in a state too often overlooked: Florida.

In his introduction, Waters quotes Sutherland: “‘In proportion to the size of its population, Florida’s guerrilla war may have been the most intense in the Confederacy’” (p. 1). Yet save for Robert A. Taylor’s Rebel Storehouse: Florida in the Confederate Economy (Tuscaloosa, 1995), the state’s role in the Confederacy has been largely ignored. To be sure, Florida had only been a state for approximately twelve years when it seceded, and the state was sparsely settled. But Florida had an agricultural economy and, more specifically, large herds of cattle that would be critical to Confederate supply. Despite vociferous complaints from Governor John Milton, Florida was stripped of all Confederate units, forcing the governor to create militia units and to encourage towns and settlements to form guerrilla bands in order to protect white inhabitants.

Waters’s book is organized chronologically, and he analyzes specific towns and regions in eastern and southern Florida counties within each chapter. He discusses in detail the local guerrilla leaders and their operations. Two major themes become clear: one, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation led to Federal efforts in Florida to recruit African Americans into United States Colored Troops units; and two, the fall of Vicksburg meant Florida beef was crucial to Confederate commissaries in Tennessee and Virginia. Florida’s guerrillas ensured that the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee were supplied with beef until the very end of the conflict.

Waters suggests that Floridians easily accepted guerrillas and partisans as a result of the Seminole Wars, 1816–1858. He also contends that Florida was a deeply divided state, but that Federal commanders often overestimated how many Unionists resided there. To Waters, the Confederacy basically abandoned Florida from 1862 on, forcing state officials to rely on guerrilla bands to defend the sparsely settled region from the South East Blockading Squadron and Federal units sent to seize Jacksonville, St. Augustine, and Tampa.

“A Wilderness of Destruction” could have benefited from better copyediting. There are a number of careless errors. Furthermore, some of the sources are curious. For example, Waters includes the dated and error-laden A Diary from Dixie, edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary (New York, 1905) instead of C. Vann Woodward’s seminal Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981). Some abbreviations for military titles are incorrect, as are the citations for the Official Records. The book would have benefited from more maps that clearly delineate where the guerrillas were most actively involved. Finally, Waters needs to establish where his work fits into the broader historiography. He mentions Sutherland and Stephen V. Ash’s When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill, 1995) but fails to demonstrate how his work complements such monographs.

To be sure, Waters examines a region that has been neglected by historians. It remains unclear what key contribution the book makes to historiography on the Confederacy. [End Page 435]

Mary A. DeCredico U.S. Naval Academy Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...