The Day of Jubilee!
The Day of Jubilee!
1864 Battle had lasting impact on African American
Community
By Dale Cox
African American Troops in the Union Army
Most writers who have focused any attention at all on the
1864 Battle of Marianna have concentrated on the strategy and tactics of the
engagement, the “Yankee” versus “Rebel” nature of the fight and the damage and
losses inflicted. Often forgotten, however, is the dramatic impact this long ago
battle had for Jackson County’s African American residents.
At the time of the War Between the States, there were very few free African
Americans living in Jackson County. Most were held in slavery, their forced
labor used to keep the large plantations of the county operating. It should be
understood that only a small percentage of the white residents of the county
actually held slaves at the time of the war. Most were small farmers, craftsmen
or merchants who made their livings through the work of their own hands. They
had never owned slaves and for the most part had no interest in doing so. A
small number of people, however, did hold hundreds of African Americans in
slavery.
Although it is seldom remembered for that reason, September 27, 1864, the day of
the Battle of Marianna, was also the day that freedom came to more than 600
enslaved residents in Jackson County.
President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, a wartime measure
designed to bring thousands of black soldiers into the Union army, granted
freedom to slaves in areas still controlled by Confederate forces. The
proclamation had little meaning, however, until Union forces actually took
control of those areas. And the only way to do that was by fighting.
When Brigadier General Alexander Asboth, a former Hungarian freedom fighter then
serving in the Union army, decided to attack Marianna in September of 1864, one
of his stated objectives was to secure black recruits. As a demonstration of
what this meant, he included two companies of men from the 82nd and 86th U.S.
Colored Infantries in his force. These men had been liberated from slavery in
Mississippi and Louisiana by the Union army.
The Union troops left Pensacola on September 18, 1864, arriving in Jackson
County eight days later. As they advanced, first to Campbellton and then to
Marianna, they stopped at the plantations and farms, confiscating livestock,
destroying supplies and informing the laborers living in slavery that they were
free to leave with them if they so desired.
As the soldiers pushed forward, hundreds of African American men, women and
children fell in behind them. Carrying their possessions in small bundles, they
walked along behind the Union troops. General Asboth later wrote that they were
filled with “utmost jubilation.”
Few individual stories have been handed down, but more than 600 people were
liberated from slavery by the Union soldiers as they advanced through Jackson
County. Their lives and all that they knew changed in a single day.
One remarkable story has survived. Armstrong Purdee was the eight year old son
of slaves who lived and worked on the John R. Waddell plantation near Waddell’s
Mill Pond between Campbellton and Marianna. As the word spread that soldiers
were coming, he joined dozens of others who gathered at the Waddell gate to see
them. He later recorded his memories of that day in a letter to William H.
Milton of Marianna. “During the time that they halted,” he wrote, “a Yankee
white soldier said to me, ‘Boy, does you want to go?’ I said to him, ‘Yes, sir.’
He moved one of his feet out of the stirrup and said, ‘Put your feet in there,’
which I did. At the same time he reached for my hand and pulled me up on the
horse.”
Armstrong Purdee rode away from slavery on the back of the Union soldier’s
horse.
His letter tells a captivating story of how spent the rest of the day on
horseback, clinging to the Northern soldier as the two literally rode through
the Battle of Marianna. He remembered how the fighting started at Hopkins’
Branch, a small stream about three miles northwest of Marianna. Gunfire erupted
and the Union troops charged. “The Yankee that I was riding behind left the road
and said to me: ‘Hold fast; do not fall!’ They did not go around anything; they
jumped their horses over fallen trees and logs, or anything.”
Purdee was still on the back of his liberator’s horse when the fighting around
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church took place. He watched from about forty steps away
as the Union soldiers set fire to the church, “Something like twisted paper was
lighted and placed to whatever was put on the church and it blazed up. Men were
shot down as they came out of the building.”
Purdee went back to Pensacola with the soldier after the battle. He remembered
how hundreds of other freed people went along as well, the women riding in
wagons and the men walking the entire distance. After the war, his father came
and got him and took him back home to Jackson County.
Purdee eventually attracted the attention of Major William H. Milton, a former
Southern officer and the son of John Milton, Florida’s Confederate Governor.
Milton resumed his practice as an attorney in Marianna after the war. Despite
the bitter racial tensions of the Reconstruction era, he took interest in Purdee
and mentored the young man. With his help, Purdee became Jackson County’s first
African American attorney. Ironically he later made much of his living preparing
pension applications for former Confederate soldiers.
Armstrong Purdee was but one of the 600 individuals liberated from slavery
because of the Battle of Marianna, but his story exemplifies the opportunities
created for Jackson County’s African American community that day.
The black soldiers serving with General Asboth became some of the first African
Americans to serve in a combat role in Northwest Florida for the U.S. Army.
Private Nicholas Francis from Company E, 82nd U.S. Colored Infantry, was killed
in the fighting and five other black soldiers were wounded. By shedding their
blood, they helped to bring freedom to hundreds of Jackson County families.
Editor’s Note: Writer and historian Dale Cox is a native of
the Jackson County community of Two Egg. The son of Clinton and Pearl Cox, he
attended Malone High School and Chipola College before beginning a twenty-five
year career as a journalist and newsroom manager. He recently retired from The
New York Times Company and now divides his time between the Ozark Mountains of
Arkansas and the piney woods of Jackson County. He is the author of the new
book, The Battle of Marianna, Florida.
