A War Correspondent\u27s View of St. Augustine and Fernandina: 1863

Noah Brooks, born in Castine, Maine, in 1830, was an experienced newspaper man by the age of twenty-five. He worked for newspapers in Massachusetts, Illinois, and California before going to Washington, D. C., in December, 1862, as special correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union. During the three years Brooks lived in the national capital he became a personal friend of President Lincoln whom he first met in Illinois in 1856. Before Lincoln died he asked Brooks to be his personal secretary. Brooks’s visit to Union Army stations along the coast of South Carolina and Florida in June, 1863, was one of his rare trips outside the national capital during the war years. His eye witness description of occupied St. Augustine and Fernandina appeared in the Sacramento Daily Union on July 21, 1863. In later years Brooks published his Civil War memoirs under the title of Washington in Lincoln’s Time, first published in 1896, but he failed to mention his visit to Florida