By Cole Davis
Riverbend News
It’s no secret that the Suwannee River has fostered plenty intriguing stories over its long history. For years, the tale of the piratical Lafitte Brothers of New Orleans and their treasure buried along the Suwannee River motivated scores of treasure hunters and fortune seekers to post up in the logging camps around this area in hopes of striking it rich (perhaps that’s a story for another day). There is another tale, however, that is not as shrouded in myth. You can travel to Lafayette County’s Troy Spring to see the evidence of it with your own eyes. This is the tale of the steamship Madison.
To understand the significance of the ship like Madison, one must first become familiar with a brief history of America’s rivers. Almost as soon as settlements were established in the area that would be the United States in the eighteenth century, there has been extensive, interconnected river travel. A large part of the motivation to push westward in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the desire to secure river systems that could be used for trade and travel. Of course, the most famous of these was the Mississippi, who, after the Louisiana Territory was acquired by Thomas Jefferson in 1803, became America’s highway.
It was much easier to transport goods on rivers than it was over land, and this fact was fully taken advantage of. So much so that river pirates like Mike Fink and the Cave-in-Rock gang made legendary names for themselves, raiding the passersby along what we would call today “interstates.”
Ostensibly, this was the situation on the ground whenever the War Between the States began in 1861. Ironically, Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ accomplished career as Secretary of War for the United States in the 1850s came back to bite him. He overhauled the military under U.S. President Franklin Pierce and made it a truly modern fighting force; complete with an exquisite navy. The problem for him was whenever the Southern states seceded the North retained most of the ships of that pre-1861 American naval fleet. In an improvisational attempt to build a Confederate navy from scratch, Davis selected Floridian Stephen Mallory to head up a project designed to create a navy of fast blockade runners and devastating commerce raiders. And, with Britain’s help, they did. Raphael Semmes’ commerce raiding ship Alabama, for example, took more prizes than any other in the war.
In regards to the brown water navy, though, Confederate ships were tasked with the transport of supplies and troops, and with harassing invading armies by launching amphibious water-to-land raids on Federal camps and supply trains. Madison was one of these vessels.
The ship was built for Captain James Tucker who named it after his hometown of Madison, Florida. Throughout the late 1840s and 1850s, Tucker and his ship served as a mail carrier. When the war broke out, Tucker was commissioned by the Confederate States of America and his ship was transformed into a jerry-rigged gunboat, privateer, and transport vessel that was used to haul Florida’s most valuable resource to the Confederacy: cattle. In 1863, when rumors of a possible Federal invasion of that part of Florida set in, Tucker had the ship scuttled (or sunk intentionally) to prevent it from falling into Union hands. Turns out, the invading Union forces from the east never made it past Olustee.
Tucker’s scuttled ship can still be seen today at the bottom of Troy Spring in Lafayette County. It’s a testament to Florida history, American river archeology and Tucker himself who acted in accord with what he thought to be right.