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It’s a quiet summer morning out near the East Pass of the Choctawhatchee Bay. The summer’s heat from the previous day continues to stifle the earth – save for the cool breeze coming off the water to the south. In the water just to the west of a spit of land with a tiny pair of homes on it – a United States Navy ship, the USS Water Witch, has dropped anchor for the night.
The Water Witch has a single explicit mission, which it has conducted since hostilities broke out just four months ago between the government and rebels fighting to preserve slavery and the southern way of life attached to it.
Leaflets quoting Florida Secession Convention President John McGeehee have circled the state. ““At the South, and with our People of course, slavery is the element of all value, and a destruction of that destroys all that is property,” he told his fellow convention members before their 62-7 vote to leave the Union.
Despite the tough talk on slavery from the plantation owners in Middle Florida several hundred miles away, most of the men who’ve joined the rebellion don’t have much to lose from the ending of slavery, should it happen. They are West Florida yeomen – few of them own slaves. Instead, their stated priorities are to keep the Yankees from telling them what to do and preserving their subsistence farmlands in the interior of Walton County – far away from the shores of the Gulf or their ‘fort’ on top of an indian mound they call “Fort Walton.”
As Union men from the ship row to shore early in the morning of July 12 to investigate the East Pass area, another group of men come out of the foliage. Instead of Union blues, they are wearing the butternut grey of the yet-to-be-organized rebels. They steady their aim – though the men in the rowboat are far beyond the range of the muskets at 150 yards. They fire and an eruption of noise destroy’s the chorus of palmetto bugs, crickets and the low bay of an alligator or two. Some of the rebels claim they got one or two of the men in the boat as they reload to fire again. Another crack of the musket signals the second round of lead hurled toward the rowboat as the sailors aboard beat a hasty retreat back to their ship.
As dawn breaks, the sides begin to recount in writing the results of the brief engagement. Lt. Henry Riddick of the Walton Guards notes with enthusiasm in a letter that the men’s shots fell true and anhilliated the Union sailors. The Water Witch’s duty log notes matter-of factly that no one was injured on their side in the exchange. The shooting, by the rebels assembled in what would be called Destin 100 years later, would earn the name The Battle of Destin.
Leonard Destin’s family would continue to hide out in the brush around the area of their homestead while the two forces continued to poke at one another with limited success. They had made it through multiple encounters, but the war’s grip on the Destin family would not end on this balmy morning in the Florida Panhandle.
When those Sailors came to shore at 4:50 in the morning on July 12, the militia released several volleys of rifle fire at the sailors, who beat a quick retreat back to the ship. By 6:30 in the morning, the Water Witch steamed in closer to the shore and fired off its cannon at the rebels. No one was hurt in either exchange – though you wouldn’t know it from the rebel militia’s account.
But the effects of the war wouldn’t end with the small exchange and the departure of the Water Witch on July 15. In the middle of August, 1861 a member of Walton Guards would write to a family member about an impending operation following orders from General Braxton Bragg. “Our Captain received orders from headquarters to move Captain [Leonard] Destin, who is supposed to have carried on trade with the enemy from East Pass. Contrary to our expectation, we saw no Yankees and consequent had no fight. [Leonard] started for the interior last week, he will land at Four Mile Landing.”
The rebels, believing Destin might have Unionist sympathies, rounded him and his family up and took them to what is today Freeport, where Destin and his wife had been married ten years prior. At this point, the 26-year-old Martha had given birth to four children they would have had to take on the journey with. The youngest, Leonard Junior, was 13 months old at the time of the trip.
By August 26, Captain McPherson would report to General Bragg that he had moved the sea captain and that one of his hired hands had made a getaway on a Union ship.
While the rebels may have had concerns about Destin’s loyalties, they ultimately decided that he shouldn’t be hanged for “trading with the enemy.” This would likely have had a negative effect on the militia unit’s morale and goodwill with their neighbors. After all, Destin had been their neighbor for more than a decade and was married into the local community.
