Lincoln and Florida
Although there is no evidence that Abraham Lincoln ever visited Florida, his election to the presidency in 1860 and his leadership of the Union during the Civil War had a tremendous influence on Florida just as it did on the rest of the South.
It was due to Lincoln’s election that Florida seceded from the United States on January 10, 1861, joined the Confederate States of America, and went to war against the Union. During the secession crisis, Florida militia and troops from other seceding states confronted a Union garrison at Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island off of Pensacola. War might have broken out at Fort Pickens before it did at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861.
Cloudy and quite cold. Lincoln’s murderer is supposed to be one Booth. Johnson took his seat yesterday at 2 o’clock. Seward considered dangerous. The assassin not apprehended yet." -Wilber Wightman Gramling’s diary
A week later, on April 19, President Lincoln ordered the U.S. Navy to institute a blockade of the Confederacy. This order led the Union to use Key West as its primary base for blockading missions in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, where Union vessels watched for Confederate blockade runners and launched raids to interfere with the production of salt works along the coast.
The need for bases to supply the blockading squadrons also led to the Union’s occupation of St. Augustine and New Smyrna on Florida’s Atlantic coast and the periodic occupation of Jacksonville, which Federal troops used as base for raids into the interior of east Florida.
Wilbur Wightman Gramling's Diary
While the North’s naval and amphibious operations along the Florida coast were part of the overall Union campaign against the coastal South, Lincoln took a direct interest in Florida affairs in 1864 when the state became a pawn in northern presidential politics. Lincoln faced a potential challenge for the presidential nomination within his own party.
Some Republican politicos believed that it might be possible to create a Unionist government within northeast Florida, where a large portion of the population sympathized with the North, and bring Florida (at least a section of it) back into the United States. Florida could then elect delegates to the Republican presidential nominating convention, where their presence might be decisive in a close race between Lincoln and other candidates. These political factors and the Union’s desire to interrupt the flow of supplies from Florida to the rest of the Confederacy led to the Federal expedition to northeast Florida in February 1864. That campaign resulted in the Battle of Olustee, a Union defeat and the largest battle of the war in Florida.
During the final weeks of the war, Floridians were just as shocked as the rest of the American people to learn of Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865.
The resulting manhunt for the assassins revealed that one of John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators, Louis Powell, had attempted to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward on the same night as the attack on Lincoln. A former Confederate soldier in the Second Florida Infantry, Powell enlisted in the Confederate Army in Suwannee County, Florida, during the first summer of the war. Powell and three other conspirators in the assassination plot were hanged in Washington, D.C., on July 7, 1865.
