Cosmo (Casermo) Bailey Letters (Confederate soldier)

Casermo O. Bailey was born in 1842 to the prominent Bailey family of Gainesville. Cosmo, as he was most commonly called, was the eldest son of James B. Bailey and Mary E. Bailey. In 1863, at the age of 20, Cosmo enlisted in the Alachua Rebels, Company D, Seventh Florida Infantry Regiment to fight for the Confederacy. Following its deployment to east Tennessee, the Seventh Regiment assisted Edmund Kirby Smith's 1862 invasion of Kentucky. After losing fifteen men at Chickamauga in September 1863 and fighting skirmishes at Chattanooga in November, the regiment was consolidated under the Florida Brigade. It was engaged in most of the major battles of the Atlanta Campaign. Distinguished for their bravery, the surviving troops fought on until the Confederacy's surrender in North Carolina in 1865. About half of Bailey’s letters date to the end of the war when he was writing from  a camp outside Petersburg, Virginia. Other locations are Camp Beauregard, Chattanooga, and Knoxville, Tennessee, Charleston, South Carolina, and Folley Island. (For additional information consult the Bailey Family Papers Finding Guide).  Text by Gene Goldmintz and James Cusick.