III Another type of situation occurred in Florida, where reconstruction efforts were of a small type. Military achievements, so evident in Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas, were lacking in this separate area, which was outside the main line of strategy and was promising as a field of action where a considerable number of troops could be committed. In addition to keeping a few coastal points and maintaining the blockade, the United States paid little attention to the St. John, St. Mary and Suwannee areas. The only major engagement in the state during the war was the moody “Battle of Olustee” in the northeast corner, a short distance from Jacksonville, where a smaller Union force under General Truman Seymour, U.S.A., under General Joseph Finegan, C.S.A. was defeated by a slightly higher figure with defensive advantage. This engagement, on February 20, 1864, was the unsuccessful culmination of a naval military expedition by Seymour, a subordinate of General Quincy A. Gillmore, who headed the Southern Department with headquarters at Hilton Head, S.C. Phase Two: Shepley and Durant Against the Banks. In the next phase, while Banks in Louisiana had supreme command with Shepley as military governor – that is, governor of civilian matters under military authority – some groups in the state worked there, albeit cross-cuttingly, to take control of the state`s transformation process. It turned out to be a period of quarrels and futile things, a period of bitter disappointment for the President. Governor Shepley took over the reconstruction and tried to do it his own way, and made an electoral register and appointed T.
J. Durant, a radical like him, registration commissioner. An oath of allegiance was required (this was before the presidential oath of December 8, 1863) and the registration of whites who would take the oath was ordered. Durant`s idea was that ten faithful men in a parish, if they could no longer be registered, would provide a sufficient basis for an election. It was a time when Banks worked with military commandos in the Port Hudson and Texas areas, while Shepley was also absent in Louisiana and served much of the summer of 1863 in Washington. Lincoln authorized The Recording of Shepley Durant and wanted it to be advanced. Lincoln and the radicals, including Davis himself, voted in favor of amending the federal constitution as the ultimate measure to eliminate slavery in the Southern states. Until such an amendment was passed, there were strong differences of opinion on the powers of the President and Congress to abolish it. Indeed, the president was already obliged to amend the Constitution against slavery (and within a year he was pressing it in Congress). Wade and Davis only confused the problems when they tried to make it appear that their bill was an anti-slavery alternative to the president`s slavery policy.
It is too easy to call reconstruction a failure. Reconstruction was reversed, infiltrated and betrayed, and then repeated, because many of the same concerns in Derass about cost, internal politics and xenophobia after world War I and after the two Gulf Wars led to dark repetitions of these mistakes.
