Booknotes: A Wilderness of Destruction

New Arrival:
• A Wilderness of Destruction: Confederate Guerrillas in East and South Florida, 1861-1865 by Zack C. Waters (Mercer UP, 2023).

From John S. Mosby in Virginia to William C. Quantrill in Missouri, certain individuals have become synonymous with the guerrilla conflict within their home state. For Confederate Florida, it was J.J. Dickison, who helped his own case by authoring the Florida volume of the Confederate Military History series. While Dickison does receive the volume's most extensive index entry, Zack Waters's A Wilderness of Destruction: Confederate Guerrillas in East and South Florida, 1861-1865 offers Civil War readers an expansive regional history of the character and impact of the irregular war within the state.

From the description: "After the "abandonment" of Florida by the Confederate government [the preponderance of the state's military manpower pool was ordered out of Florida to bolster Confederate armies defending primary theaters], in early 1862, Gov. John Milton organized guerrilla units to protect the state's citizens. These irregular companies kept Union forces largely confined to a few coastal outposts (St. Augustine, Fernandina, and Ft. Myers), though the state's citizens suffered greatly from the depredations of Unionist units. After the Federal capture of Vicksburg, the South's only significant source of beef were the vast herds in Florida. It fell to the state's Rebel partisans to protect the state's interior, thereby keeping open routes for the delivery of longhorns to the South's major armies. Skirmishes and battles raged throughout Florida, but the flow of beef cattle halted only after Appomattox."

The book addresses the widespread impact of the guerrilla conflict, and "local historians studying cities such as Tampa, Jacksonville, or more rural areas, will find a wealth of information in this volume."