Today aboard the USS Lizzie Davis Union Brigadier General Alexander Asboth begins transporting some 700 men and horses across Florida’s Pensacola Bay to Navy Cove, the beginnings of a two week long raid in Florida that is designed to inflict great military and economic harm upon portions of Florida controlled by the Confederacy. By the…
St. Augustine, Florida has been under Union control since March 1862. Along with Beaufort, South Carolina and environs, St. Augustine serves as a Northern-controlled freemen’s colony, providing opportunities for former slaves — or contrabands (the wartime term for slaves freed by the Union Army) — to receive basic education, learn trades and acquire farming skills. Leading…
Prior to the war St. Augustine, Florida, a heavily Catholic town named after the fourth century bishop, St. Augustine of Hippo, served as a slave trade center of the Southeast. Augustin Verot, Catholic vicar apostolic of Florida, was as passionate a defender of slavery as were Baptist leaders of the South. His January 4, 1861…