Fort Jefferson National Monument, Florida — Themes and Context

l keen memories of Jackson’s fight with the British at New Orleans, and Britain was currently developing her West Indies possessions. Trouble in Cuba was near. Texas, a new republic, seemed about to form an alliance with France or England, thus providing the Europeans with a foothold on the Gulf Coast.

_Thirty Years of Construction_

During the first half of the 1800’s the United States began a chain of seacoast defenses from Maine to Texas. The largest link was Fort Jefferson, half a mile in perimeter and covering most of 16-acre Garden Key. From foundation to crown its 8-foot-thick walls stand 50 feet high. It has 3 gun tiers, designed for 450 guns, and a garrison of 1,500 men.

The fort was started in 1846, and, although work went on for almost 30 years, it was never finished. The U. S. Engineer Corps planned and supervised the building. Artisans imported from the North and slaves from Key West made up most of the labor gang. After 1861 the slaves were partly replaced by military prisoners, but slave labor did not end until Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863.

_The War Between the States_

To prevent Florida’s seizure of the half-complete, unarmed defense, Federal troops hurriedly occupied Fort Jefferson (January 19, 1861), but aside from a few warning shots at Confederate privateers, there was no action. The average garrison numbered 500 men, and building quarters for them accounted for most of the wartime construction.

Little important work was done after 1866, for the new rifled cannon had already made the fort obsolete. Further, the engineers found that the foundations rested not upon a solid coral reef, but upon sand and coral boulders washed up by the sea. The huge structure settled, and the walls began to crack.

For almost 10 years after the war, Fort Jefferson remained a prison. Among the prisoners sent there in 1865 were the “Lincoln Conspirators”—Michael O’Loughlin, Samuel Arnold, Edward Spangler, and Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. Dr. Mudd, knowing nothing of President Lincoln’s assassination, had set the broken leg of the fugitive assassin, John Wilkes Booth. The innocent physician was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor.

Normally, Tortugas was a healthful post, but in 1867 yellow fever came. From August 18 to November 14 the epidemic raged, striking 270 of the 300 men at the fort. Among the first of the 38 fatalities was the post surgeon, Maj. Joseph Sim Smith. Dr. Mudd, together with Dr. Daniel Whitehurst, from Key West, worked day and night to fight the scourge. Two years later, Dr. Mudd was pardoned.

_The Spanish-American War_

Because of hurricane damage and another fever outbreak, Fort Jefferson was abandoned in 1874. During the 1880’s, however, the United States began a naval building program, and Navy men looked at this southern outpost as a possible naval base. From Tortugas Harbor the battleship _Maine_ weighed anchor for Cuba, and when she was blown up in Havana Harbor, on February 15, 1898, the Navy began a coaling station outside the fort walls, bringing the total cost of the fortification to some 3½ million dollars. The big sheds were hardly completed before a hurricane smashed the loading rigs.

One of the first naval wireless stations was built at the fort early in the 1900’s, and, during World War I, Tortugas was equipped for a seaplane base. But as the military moved out again, fire and storms and salvagers took their toll, leaving the “Gibraltar of the Gulf” the vast ruin that it is today.

One of our great national wildlife spectacles occurs each year between May and September, when the sooty terns assemble on Bush Key for their nesting season. The terns come from the Caribbean Sea and west-central Atlantic Ocean and land by the thousands on Bush Key. Their nests are no more than depressions in the warm sand. The parents take turns shading their single egg from the sun. When the young are strong enough for continuous flight, the colony again heads southeastward to tropical seas.

The presence of these tropical oceanic birds at Tortugas was recorded by Ponce de León (1513), Capt. John Hawkins (1565), John James Audubon (1832), and Louis Agassiz (1858). During the early 1900’s, commercial egg-raiding reduced the colony to only 4,000 birds, but careful protection restored the strength of the colony; 120,000 birds are now recorded at the rookery. Several hundred noddy terns, similar to the sooty in habit and size, nest in the low shrubbery of Bush Key.

The great man-o’-war, or frigate, bird congregates here during the tern season to enjoy an easy existence on minnows pirated from the terns. With a wingspread of about 7 feet, the frigate is one of the most graceful of the soaring birds. Though rarely seen elsewhere in any number, as many as 200 glide endlessly on the thermal updrafts above the fort.