"The Yankees Are Landing!"

The Confederacy's Last—and Lasting—Victory at the Gates of Tallahassee

by Jim Noles
photography by Kay Meyers

“Go there,” Dale Cox had told me. “It’s the real Florida. You’ll see what I mean.”  And Cox, who penned The Battle of Natural Bridge, Florida (Cox, 2007), the definitive account of the Civil War battle, was absolutely right.

Today, at the scene of the violent clash, County Road 2192 (a.k.a. Natural Bridge Road) runs east from the Tallahassee suburb of Woodville toward the verdant marshland of the Natural Bridge. Spanish moss-clad oaks, pines, and the occasional palmetto crowd the blacktop as it winds carefully around a collection of water-filled sinkholes and springs, their dark waters shaded by the trees and fringed with algae. Somewhere below those ponds flows a quarter-mile stretch of the St. Marks River, which re-emerges into daylight downstream to continue its languid journey to Apalachee Bay.

Just before the road crosses the subterranean river, it passes a marble monument topped by an eagle. “In Loving Memory—Defenders of Natural Bridge—Lest We Forget,” the monument proclaims. A wood-and-earth breastwork stands nearby.

“This is where the Confederate cadets stood,” I told my son James. I pointed to the west. “The Union soldiers came charging up that road, right at them.”

“Were they the good guys?” James asked. James is 5, and so every fight has to have “good guys” and “bad guys.”

“This was the Civil War,” I told James. “In their own way, they were all good guys, fighting each other.”

James pondered that for a moment. “Then that’s the worst kind of war,” he said finally.

Wars and Rumors of War

One hundred and forty-four years ago, the battle lines—and the sides of right and wrong—were more easily drawn. That was particularly true in the Florida capital of Tallahassee. In his book, Cox describes the dramatic events of March 4, 1865. A shrill train whistle broke the cool stillness of that Saturday evening. Within minutes, horses’ hooves echoed through Florida’s capital, answered by the excited shouts of men. Intrigued, Sue Archer, a student at West Florida Seminary—today’s Florida State University—stepped outside.

“The Yankees are landing at East River!” a passerby warned. The river flowed into Apalachee Bay. The implications of his words were clear. Tallahassee, a scant 25 miles from the bay, could be under Union guns within days.

Unknown to Archer and her fellow Floridians, the unfolding martial drama had begun some two weeks earlier, when Brigadier General John Newton departed Key West at the head of a Union expedition. Newton had graduated second in his class at West Point in 1842 and had seen extensive military service. But now the ambitious general was poised to bite off more than he could chew with a raid into Florida’s northern interior.

Newton’s first ships arrived near the St. Marks Lighthouse on February 28, 1865. Over the next two days, the Union flotilla assembled while a dense fog shrouded the area. On the morning of Friday, March 3, the fog suddenly lifted. The Union ships slipped back over the horizon, only to return that same evening. That night, however, a storm forced the Union ships to wait for daybreak to land. In the meantime, surprise night raids had failed to capture the Confederate lookouts at the lighthouse or the pickets on the nearby East River Bridge. By that evening, Tallahassee knew that Yankee raiders were on the way—even as those same raiders wasted a precious day landing on the beaches near the St. Marks Lighthouse.

Today, a slightly newer lighthouse crowns the southern tip of the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge. Standing by that lighthouse fourteen decades later, it is hard, but not impossible, to imagine the scene that unfolded on March 4, 1865. After all, beaches in the area were used by the U.S. Army during World War II in preparation for D-Day’s Normandy landings. But in 1865, the Union troops’ flagging pace gave Confederate defenders time to gather on the northwestern side of the East River Bridge. Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George W. Scott and supported by a single cannon, the Confederates awaited the inevitable Yankee assault.

The next morning, on Sunday, March 5, the Union raiders began marching across the marshland that separated the lighthouse from the East River Bridge. Two regiments of African American soldiers, the troops of the Second and Ninety-ninth United States Colored Troops Regiments, led the way. The officers were white men such as Major Benjamin C. Lincoln, an ardent abolitionist. A half-dozen sailors from the USS Hendrick Hudson marched alongside them. They had been sent ashore to man the pair of 760-pound cannons that were now being dragged along the sandy road by an unfortunate company of the Ninety-ninth.

Several companies of the Second Florida Cavalry Regiment brought up the rear. The dismounted cavalry troopers were loyal to the Stars & Stripes rather than the Stars & Bars. Major Edmund C. Weeks, an adventurous Massachusetts clipper ship captain and Navy officer, commanded the Florida Unionists.          

As the Union soldiers approached the bridge, a single blast from the Confederate cannon felled two of the Ninety-ninth’s soldiers. The rest, rushing across the bridge, scattered the Confederates and captured their cannon. One defender remembered fleeing so quickly that he literally ran out of one of his shoes. Flushed with success, more Union soldiers followed close behind.

Clash at Newport

Today, Newport is little more than where State Highway 267 crosses the St. Marks River. An oyster bar, Ouzts’ Too, sits on the west side of the river; an RV park occupies the eastern shore. It is a far cry from Newport’s heyday in the nineteenth century, when it was the county seat of Wakulla County and a busy little river port with a bridge across the St. Marks River. If the Union’s Newton could cross the river, the road to Tallahassee would be open.

But the Confederates won the race to Newport. Confederate Lieutenant Colonel Scott tore up the bridge and burned down several houses. Seeing the smoke from the burning village, the Union troops realized that Newport would be defended. Undaunted, they charged, and a crashing volley greeted them from the opposite bank.  Scattering, they returned fire as best they could. 

By mid-afternoon, more Union troops arrived. With his guns in place, Newton began shelling the Confederate defenders. His fire was not accurate enough to dislodge them, but, ironically, it killed five slaves sheltering on the western side of the river.

“Good Soldiers Do Not Cry”

Meanwhile, the Confederate commander in Tallahassee was assembling troops from the surrounding countryside. The teenagers of the West Florida Seminary’s Corps of Cadets mustered with particular enthusiasm. Confronted with the reality of sending them into combat, the corps’ commander, Captain Valentine M. Johnson, began to cull the youngest boys from his ranks.

“One little barefoot boy stood apart from the others and was crying,” remembered Archer, according to Cox’s book, “because Captain Johnson told him that good soldiers did not cry and that when he grew older he should go into war.”

Trainloads of Confederate troops bound to reinforce Newport came under hostile fire for the first time.  Meanwhile, across the river, Newton realized that he would have to find another way across. Local scouts told him that the Natural Bridge was the best option. As darkness fell, Newton pulled two regiments back from the river and dispatched them north to Natural Bridge. He left other Union troops behind at Newport to guard against the Confederates cutting him off from the coast.

By now, the Confederate commander from Tallahassee had arrived in Newport and recognized that the Union troops were bound for Natural Bridge. He ordered troops to move north. Taking advantage of a well-maintained plank road, his troops reached Natural Bridge before the Union troops did. In the pre-dawn darkness on Monday, March 6, the Confederate troops deployed for battle at Natural Bridge.

These Confederates, and the reinforcements who soon joined them, were familiar with the terrain at Natural Bridge. A gentle ridgeline overlooked the fields that fronted Natural Bridge to the west. It was on this ridge that the Confederates deployed, some 170 yards back from the actual bridge. Many of the Confederate soldiers had been awake for nearly thirty-six hours; several companies stacked arms and tried to catch a quick catnap, only to be rudely awakened. Dr. Charles Hentz, who had accompanied local reservists into battle as a field surgeon, recalled the scene.

“[A]ll of the sudden bang-bang-bang-bang-bang went off a scattering volley of musketry down on the bridge,” Hentz wrote. “I saw the flashing of the guns in the dark; immediately a canon that was in position began throwing shell into the advancing Yankees.”

A Bridge Too Far

Among the “advancing Yankees,” Major Benjamin Lincoln, the abolitionist leading the African American troops, realized that the Confederates had beaten him to the bridge. Volleys of musket fire unleashed sheets of fire in front of him. Lincoln’s men sallied forth twice without success. They withdrew, leaving marksmen behind to snipe at the Confederates while Newton contemplated his next move.

Meanwhile, more Confederate defenders arrived, including the West Florida Seminary cadets. So did several more artillery pieces, bringing the total number of Confederate cannons to six. The Confederates arranged their cannons in an arc around the bridge crossing, ready to catch the next Yankee assault in a deadly crossfire.

The cadets fell in near the center of the Confederate line. Joined by the men of the Georgia Siege Artillery from Fort Ward and a collection of sailors from the gunboat Spray, the Confederate forces numbered more than 1,000.

“It is an enduring myth of the battle,” explains Cox, “that a rag-tag collection of old men and young teenage cadets beat off a superior force of Union troopers at Natural Bridge. In reality, the militia and reservists were tough, middle-aged men; the cadets were well-trained and ready to fight. And they outnumbered Newton’s men by two-to one. Newton had hoped that the Confederate forces were scattered throughout Florida that spring. He had hoped that. He never expected that they would be able to react to his raid so quickly.”

Unaware of the odds stacked against him, Newton divided Union troops into two assault columns and, at noon, ordered them forward. For a moment, the Union soldiers seemed poised on the brink of success. Disheartened by the approaching phalanx of bayonets, the Confederate soldiers had begun to break and run. But then the Union troops reached an unseen sinkhole at the foot of the enemy defenses. Unable to cross, they lost momentum. Battered by increasingly heavy fire, they struggled to maintain their position.

Despite their losses, the outnumbered Union soldiers remained locked in a death-grip with their Confederate opponents. But the arrival of a battalion of 375 Confederate reinforcements convinced even the most stalwart Union soldiers that victory had slipped out of their grasp. Disheartened, Newton pulled his men back across the bridge.

Tallahassee Preserved

Sensing an opportunity to finish off their Yankee foes, the now reinforced Confederates counterattacked, advancing across the bridge in pursuit of the retreating Union soldiers. But the wily Newton had ordered a second line of entrenchments constructed during a lull in the earlier fighting. Now his retreating men quickly occupied their new position.

The attacking Confederates emerged from the woods that covered Natural Bridge and ran headlong into the unexpected Union defenses. Blasts of gunfire buffeted their ranks as they struggled to advance. Finally, running low on ammunition and motivation, the Confederates fell back across the bridge.

Having bought precious time for their retreat, the Union forces headed for the coast. They marched all through that afternoon, evening, and night, burdened with the stretchers of dozens of wounded comrades. Thirteen were mortally wounded. Another thirty-eight were missing and now en route to Confederate prisoner-of-war camps. On the Confederate side of the ledger, figures varied. In his book, Cox tallies four killed, two mortally wounded, and thirty-nine wounded.

On the field of battle, the Union soldiers left the bodies of twenty-one comrades to be buried by the Confederates—or, according to one legend, dumped into one of the battlefield’s sinkholes. “Dark and dismal is this hole; here we plunge you, damn your soul,” was, according to that same legend, the only epitaph offered.

Newton’s bedraggled column reached the St. Marks Lighthouse at 4:00 the morning of March 7. They re-embarked upon their Navy transports and sailed back down the coast. Back in Tallahassee, the citizens of the state capital rejoiced at their deliverance. Southern belles welcomed back the cadets by placing garlands of wild olives atop their caps; older soldiers received glasses of wine.

“This battle was important because it was the last significant Confederate victory of the Civil War,” Cox reflects. “It ensured that Tallahassee would be the only Confederate state capital east of the Mississippi not captured during the war. But Newton was luckier than he realized. Had he forced his way past Natural Bridge, he would have just been drawn further into Florida. He would have been lucky to escape at all.”

“Because Men Died There”

Today, a small state park, crowned by the white marble monument erected in 1922, commemorates a portion of the original battlefield. But the impact of the battle resonates beyond the park. Thanks to the West Florida Seminary cadets’ role at Natural Bridge, FSU’s Army ROTC detachment is one of only a handful in the country authorized to fly a battle streamer with its flag.

“FSU’s cadets take pride in the fact that they are part of a program where cadets of the past were called to combat prior to completing training,” says Lieutenant Colonel John DeVillez, professor of military science at FSU.

A growing number of Civil War re-enactors gather at the park every March and share the cadets’ pride.

“Why do we do it?” Bob Trapp muses. He is not only a re-enactor but the secretary-treasurer of the Natural Bridge Historical Society Citizen Support Organization. “Because men died there, from both the North and the South, for causes they believed in. And that’s worth remembering even today.”