The path to mid-September 1862 was paved with hardship for the First and Third Florida Regiments. Led by New York-born mathematician William Miller and the recently paroled Tennessean John Calvin Brown, the Floridians endured an arduous journey marked by thirst and crippling supply shortages.
Hunger and thirst mark the battlefield
Men were often reduced to a single meal of beef and bread per day, and sometimes forced to subsist on saltless ground corn. This physical toll was exacerbated by strategic confusion; the Army of Tennessee’s commanding generals, Braxton Bragg and Kirby Smith, failed to coordinate their movements and lacked a clearly defined objective, leaving their troops mired in uncertainty as they marched through a drought-stricken landscape.
The campaign reached a high-water mark on September 17th at Munfordville. In a significant show of force, approximately 16,000 Confederate troops surrounded a garrison of 4,000 Union soldiers commanded by Col. John T. Wilder. After a three-day siege, the Union forces were compelled to surrender.
At the time, this stood as the largest-ever force of Americans under arms to surrender. Word would come that the Federal Garrison 450 miles away at Harper’s Ferry, around 14,000 men total, had also surrendered. yet the victory was fundamentally hollow. Despite the tactical success, the strategic mud of the campaign remained, and the rebels gained little long-term advantage from the capitulation.
The Aftermath
The victory marked one of the first times Floridians saw combat on the western theater – and was the first time combatants from Walton County would see action and death.
This victory at Munfordville merely presaged the eventual decline of the campaign. By early October, the struggle shifted to Perryville, where the high casualty rates and the toll of disease finally broke the offensive.
Every member of the regiment’s color guard became a casualty in the fray, and the First and Third Florida saw their numbers decimated. Ultimately, the strategic failures and overwhelming losses forced Generals Bragg and Smith to abandon Kentucky, retreating back to Tennessee as the first snows began to fall on the defeated Floridians.
