America's Fortress: A History of Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas, Florida

The Florida History and Culture Series

by Thomas Reid

Known as the “American Gibraltar,” Fort Jefferson, located in the Dry Tortugas, Florida, was the most heavily armed coastal defense fort in United States history. Perceived as the nation’s leading maximum-security prison, the fort also held several of the accused conspirators in the Lincoln assassination. America’s Fortress is the first book-length, architectural, military, environmental, and political history of this strange and significant Florida landmark.             This volume also fills a significant gap in Civil War history with regard to coastal defense strategy, support of the Confederacy blockade, the use of convicted Union soldiers as forced labor, and the treatment of civilian prisoners sentenced by military tribunals. Reid argues that Fort Jefferson’s troops faced very different threats and challenges than soldiers who served elsewhere during the war. He chronicles threats of epidemic tropical disease, hurricanes, shipwrecks, prisoner escapes, and Confederate attack. Reid also reports on white northerners’ perceptions of slaves, slavery, and the emerging free black soldiers of the latter years of the war. Drawing on the writings of Emily Holder, wife of Fort Jefferson’s resident surgeon, Reid is the first to offer a female perspective on life at the fort between 1859 and 1865.             For history buffs and tourists, America's Fortress offers a fascinating account of this little-known outpost which has stood for over 150 years off the tip of the Florida Keys.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

176 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 2006

About the author

Thomas Reid is an author of books and articles about the military history of the American Civil War.

Thomas Reid retired from teaching American history at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, where he received his Master of Arts degree. Formerly an employee of the Department of the Army, he served six years on active duty and sixteen in the Army Reserve. He lives in Woodville, Texas.

Reviews

[Greg Hadaller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a 'history' book and not the 'story' of the Dry Tortugas. More concerned with dates and names than an explanation of what happened to the fort. Not really readable by a layman; history buffs only.

[Jennifer Chin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meticulously researched, brings to light a little-known slice of American history around a very beautiful National Park.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every detail you could possibly want to know about Ft. Jeff. I found the parts about living conditions and construction more engaging than the litany of troop postings, commanders, etc., but there are some names familiar to me from Key West history (Porter, Otto, etc.) and also Mudd's story and connections to yellow fever epidemics are interesting.

[Beth]

The best (and only) reference on the peculiar history of Fort Jefferson. I did wish it included a bit more detail on some niche topics that aren't common knowledge to those who aren't 19th century historians -- e.g. building techniques or how they got those huge cannons up to the top of the fort.

[Carol Cross · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book for history buffs.

[Jeff Jellets · Rating 3 out of 5]

”The only use, it seems to me, that is or can be made of the fort is that which it really serves at present – as a prison. But whether it was, in the first place, worth while to erect such a structure … entailing also the necessity of a battalion of soldiers, equally prisoners as those they guard … I leave to wiser heads to determine.”

Lying some seventy miles off Key West, Florida, on the islets of the Dry Tortugas lies the remains of the United States’s most heavily armed fortress, the so-called American Gibraltar: Fort Jefferson. The fort, laboriously built over the course of more than thirty years on the remote atoll, has weathered countless severe storms and major hurricanes, but never saw a single day of combat before it was abandoned in 1874 and later incorporated into the Dry Tortugas National Park in 1992.

As a devoted fan of weird Americana, Fort Jefferson (which I now really want to visit before the fortress’s red brick walls forever tumble into the turquoise Gulf waters after some future catastrophic hurricane) is one of those real-world oddities that maybe shouldn’t exist, but that it does, is peculiarly interesting. The fort was the brainchild of Army Engineering chief Brigadier General Joseph Gilbert Totten, who sold the idea to Congress, then (at least until he died) oversaw the lugging of enlisted men, slaves, hired workers, food, boats, bricks, cannons, ammunition, and much other material to what is literally a desert island in the middle of nowhere. It was audacious at least.

And author Thomas Reid’s American Fortress provides just about everything you’d want to know about the massive fortification from cost to construction to the pedigree of the base’s commanders and guardsmen. And while the battle resume for the fort is short – well blank! – its history as a military prison is intriguing, especially as it incarcerated a quartet of 1865’s ‘most wanted’ – the four still-living conspirators implicated in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. The letters and diaries of the most notorious of these prisoners, Dr. Samual Mudd, and other residents of the fort during its occupation provide a snapshot of what island life was like well before the tropics were any sort of paradise.

I suspect this book won’t be every reader’s cup of tea. There’s not a lot of action – though I liked the account of the (of all things) supposedly scientifically-motivated feeding of a cat the fort’s pet ‘Provost Marshall’ shark and Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell’s Alcatraz-esque escape – and there are a few points where Reid jumps around a little (such as when he writes of Mudd’s attempted escape), but all-in-all, I liked this one. It’s a great historical rescue of an obscure, but immensely interesting, piece of real estate that most Americans will never see (or never even otherwise know existed).

[Jim Poling · Rating 2 out of 5]

Impeccably researched, horribly written. A fascinating place/topic with tons of history. The author for sure did an unbelievable amount of research but it reads like a book of facts. A very slow dull read unfortunately. Almost half of the book is dates and names/military titles. Emily Holder’s journal entries were a nice touch and probably my favorite part of the book. Overall it was ok