The Battle of Fort Brooke was a minor engagement fought October 16–18, 1863 in and around Tampa, Florida during the American Civil War. The most important outcome of the action was the destruction of two Confederate blockade runners which had been hidden upstream on the Hillsborough River.
An important facet of the Union's long-term strategy during the American Civil War was the Anaconda Plan, which established a blockade along much of the coast of the Confederate States. Though only a small town at the time, Tampa had been an important port for exporting cattle and crops from ranches and farms in the interior of central Florida before the war. By 1862, most local shipping had been stymied by Union Navy ships patrolling near the mouth of Tampa Bay. However, several fast blockade runners based in Tampa had consistently slipped out to deliver cattle and cotton to Spanish Cuba in exchange for needed goods and gold.
The Battle of Tampa took place in June 1862, after the Union gunboat USS Sagamore steamed into Tampa Bay and demanded the surrender of the small Confederate garrison at Fort Brooke. When the demand was rebuffed, the gunboat fired several volleys at the town, which were answered with return fire from the fort. Neither side suffered damage or casualties, and the Sagamore returned to its station blockading the mouth of Tampa Bay after about 24 hours. While the brief exchange had no effect on the fort, the town, or the blockade runners based there, it did have the effect of allowing Union forces to determine the maximum range of the Confederate artillery in the area.
In the autumn of 1862, Captain A.A. Semmes, the commander of Union naval forces off Florida's west coast, decided to mount an operation to end the blockade running that had continued from Tampa. Two Union gunships, USS Tahoma and USS Adela, sailed into Tampa Bay on October 16, 1863, and began a slow bombardment of Fort Brooke while staying just out of the range of the fort's batteries. Two days later on October 18, a Union raiding party under Acting Master T.R. Harris secretly disembarked at Ballast Point, landing near the current intersection of Bayshore Boulevard and Gandy Boulevard. While the Union gunships continued a diversionary bombardment of the fort, about 100 Union troops marched 14 miles (23 km) north through a heavily wooded area that was later developed into the neighborhoods of Palma Ceia, West Tampa, and Seminole Heights. Their target was the Jean Street Shipyard on the Hillsborough River near today's Sligh Avenue, and upon reaching their destination, they quickly seized and burned several ships moored at the dock including two notorious blockade runners, the steamship Scottish Chief and the sloop Kate Dale.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
This page covers Battle of Tampa. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Wikipedia source.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.