Booknotes: Florida's Civil War

New Arrival:
• Florida's Civil War: Terrible Sacrifices
by Tracy J. Revels (Mercer UP, 2016).

This is the second volume in Mercer's new State Narratives of Civil War series, which apparently looks to provide relatively brief but comprehensive home front histories on a state level. One of the earliest states to secede, Florida was almost immediately stripped of its defenses very early on in the ensuing conflict, which must have made even the most ardent Confederate supporters question the propriety of the whole enterprise. There was a significant Unionist population and the state's internal divisions only widened as the war's privations, combined with coastal invasion and widespread guerrilla violence, took their toll. As has been examined at length in other studies, the state was a very important supplier of beef and salt to the Confederacy. In Florida's Civil War, author Tracy Revels "highlights the diverse experiences of Florida's population. Whether Confederate or Unionist, free or slave, male or female, no Floridian could escape the war's impact. A concise narrative of life on the home front, this book explores how Floridians endured the war. Women, slaves, and Unionists are considered in detail, as well as how various areas of the state reacted to Federal incursions."