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Period illustration of Ft. Pickens, Pensacola Harbor, Florida |
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Lt. Adam Jacoby Slemmer, U.S. Army, photo taken by Mathew Brady appeared in Harper's Weekly. |
Two days later (Jan. 10), Florida
officially succeeded from the Union. It
was then Lt. Slemmer, a West Point graduate, made a unilateral decision that of
the Union forts surrounding the mouth of the harbor, Ft. Pickens on the Western
end of Santa Rosa Island was the largest and most defensible even though it had
not been occupied since the Mexican War of 1845. Nonetheless, he moved his 80 men (51
soldiers, 30 sailors) to Ft. Pickens, but not before he exploded 10,000 tons of
gunpowder at Ft. McRee and destroyed the cannons at Ft. Barrancas.
When Rebel emissaries
approached Pickens and announced, "We have been sent by the governors of
Florida and Alabama to demand a peaceable surrender of this fort," Slemmer
replied, "I am here by authority of the President of the United States,
and I do not recognize the authority of any governor to demand the surrender of
United States property--a governor is nobody here."
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Map of Pensacola Harbor and location of Ft. Pickens, Ft. McRee, Ft. Barrancas and U.S. Navy Shipyard, 1861 |
Despite repeated
Confederate saber rattling, Fort Pickens was one of the few Southern forts to
remain in federal control throughout the Civil War.
Lt. Slemmer’s, a native
Pennsylvanian, was soon promoted to Major and then became Brigadier General of
Volunteers and on November 29, 1862 he was severely wounded in the Battle of
Stones River, a Union victory. The wound and typhoid
fever ended his on field Civil War duty.
He continued his war effort in administrative posts. After the war he
was commissioned Lt. Col. of the 4th U.S. Infantry. He died in 1868 as commander of Ft. Laramie
from lingering effects of typhoid fever contracted during the Civil War.
SOURCES:
--Library of Congress.
Also:
--Edwin Cole Bearss, "Civil War
Operations," pp. 125-65; Parks, et. al., Pensacola. [Bearss, an
ex US Marine veteran of WWII, has served as chief historian for the National
Parks Service, 1981-94. He is an award
winning Civil War author/historian/tour guide and lecturer. He lives in Virginia.
Also:
-- War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union
and Confederate Armies (Washington, 1880-1901), series 1, vol. 1, 445.
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