September 27, 1864
Marianna’s Urban Battlefield
Traffic flows across site of Civil War
battle
By: Dale Cox
Aerial View of the Battle of Marianna Site
Photo by Dale Cox
Thousands of cars pass
each day over the ground where more than one hundred years ago,
hundreds of men fought and bled. Much of the scene of the 1864
Battle of Marianna is now covered by the pavement of a four-lane
highway.
The battle was fought on September 27, 1864, when hundreds of
Union soldiers rode overland on horseback from Pensacola and
attacked the city at high noon. The raid was the deepest
penetration of Florida by Union troops during the entire Civil
War. Several participants, who had fought in a number of other
battles, described the fight at Marianna as the “most intense”
for its size of any they experienced during the war.
The Battle of Marianna actually began about three miles
northwest of town at the place where the old Campbellton Road
crossed Hopkins’ Branch, a narrow sluggish stream. Colonel
Alexander B. Montgomery and two companies of Confederate cavalry
tried to hold off the advancing Union soldiers here, hoping to
stop them from reaching town.
The effort failed and Montgomery and his outnumbered soldiers
were driven back from their positions along the branch. Fighting
as they went, they fell back to Marianna. When they reached the
edge of the city, most of the Confederates rode back into town
via an old road that followed the route of today’s Kelson Avenue
before turning onto North Caledonia Street and coming back up to
the center of town.
The Union commander, Brigadier General Alexander Asboth, thought
he might be able to cut them off by dividing his force and
sending some of his men along the old road after them, while he
and the rest of the Northern soldiers charged up LaFayette
Street. When he reached what is now the intersection of
LaFayette and Russ Streets, however, he found Colonel Montgomery
and his cavalry waiting for him.
The first group of Union soldiers, men from the 2nd Maine
Cavalry, charged, but the Confederate horsemen opened fire and
drove them back. Infuriated, Asboth called out “For Shame! For
Shame!” to his men as they retreated. He then ordered a second
group of soldiers, also from the 2nd Maine Cavalry, to charge
and led them himself. The scene of all this fighting was in
LaFayette Street directly in front of today’s Jackson County
Chamber of Commerce offices. Over the years the street has been
widened and pavement now covers the entire area where the two
forces battled.
Asboth’s second charge came on so fast that the Confederates did
not have time to reload their muzzle-loading weapons. Unable to
fight back, Montgomery and his men retreated up LaFayette Street
with the Union soldiers hot on their heels.
About half way between the Russ Street intersection and St.
Luke’s Episcopal Church, however, the local residents had placed
a wall of wagons, logs and other debris across the street. The
Confederate cavalrymen rode over and around this barricade and
continued to retreat, the Union soldiers following right behind
them. What Asboth and his men did not know, however, was that
scores of local men and boys were hiding behind fences, shrubs
and trees along both sides of the street, ready to open fire as
soon as he and his soldiers passed between them.
No sooner had the head of the Union force made it past the
barricade than did the local residents open fire on them. A
Northern soldier later remembered that the ambush mowed down
“every officer and man at the head of the column.” General
Asboth was shot twice, once in the jaw and once in the arm and
knocked from his horse. Other officers and men were severely
wounded as well, some receiving as many as eight gunshot wounds.
The Southern forces were too outnumbered, though, and their
success did not last long. Part of the Union force continued to
pursue Colonel Montgomery and his cavalry down the street,
around the courthouse and down Jackson Street to the old bridge.
The colonel was captured at the southeast corner of courthouse
square (then actually a circle) when he was thrown from his
horse. Quite a few of his men made it to the river, however,
where they tore up the floorboards of the wooden bridge to keep
the Union troops from crossing after them. A sharp fight took
place at the bridge, but Asboth’s men were unable to force their
way across.
Back on West LaFayette Street, however, things quickly
deteriorated. The local volunteers were cornered in the cemetery
and yard surrounding St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, but refused to
surrender. For a time it appeared they might actually be able to
hold out, but the Union second in command, Colonel L.L. Zulavsky
ordered a bayonet charge through the cemetery and finally forced
them to surrender. Several were killed and wounded when some of
the Union troops fired on them after they had given up, but
officers quickly brought the scene under control.
Despite the surrender in the cemetery, a few of the Confederates
barricaded themselves inside the church and two nearby homes and
refused to come out. When they kept shooting at his soldiers,
Colonel Zulavsky ordered the buildings burned to drive them out.
Four men died in the fire that swept through St. Luke’s
Episcopal Church.
Eighteen men lost their lives in the Battle of Marianna, either
killed outright or mortally wounded. Another thirty-five were
wounded. Forty-four of the Confederates were also captured and
carried away to Northern prisons, while eight of the Union
soldiers were captured and eventually sent to Andersonville
prison in Georgia.
Ironically, much of the scene where this bloody fighting took
place is now buried under asphalt pavement. Over the years
LaFayette Street has been widened to the point that the
four-lane highway now covers virtually the entire scene of the
Battle of Marianna, with the exception of the grounds of St.
Luke’s Episcopal Church. The quiet cemetery behind the church
still appears much as it did on the afternoon of September 27,
1864, when local men and boys fought atop the graves of their
ancestors in a failed effort to protect their town. The memory
of their courage echoes down through the years, however, even as
cars and trucks rumble past across the site where much of the
fighting took place.
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 going on to work for more than twenty-five years as a
journalist and newsroom manager. He recently retired from The
New York Times Company. The author of the new book, The Battle
of Marianna, Florida, he divides his time between the Ozark
Mountains of Arkansas and the piney woods of Jackson County.
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