JUBILEE 

The Day of Jubilee!

 1864 Battle had lasting impact on African American Community

 By: Dale Cox

 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 82^nd and 86^th 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, 82^nd 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.