Although battles were not fought around the Manatee settlement, the Civil War brought severe hardship. Men went away to war, Union blockades left women and children with flour only when it was smuggled in, and coffee had to be made from parched corn or beans. When blockading troops came up the river, they arrested men of military age, confiscated livestock, destroyed property that might supply the Confederacy, burned or sank boats, and prevented settlers from making the salt needed to preserve food and cure leather. Captain John Curry, who had purchased the Spring property in 1859, had a son, John W. Curry, in the Confederate Florida Home Guard, and the younger Curry helped supply cattle and provisions to the Confederate Army, with 2000 cattle a week driven north from south Florida to army posts. Experienced local seamen also tried to run the Union blockade, and Captain Curry sold his schooner Ariel to the Confederacy for that purpose; after several successful trips to Cuba carrying cotton out and bringing back lead, tin, medicine, wine, coffee, and other needed goods, the vessel was captured in 1862 by the Union steamer Huntsville and put into Union service as a blockader. In late summer 1864, Union soldiers came ashore, Joseph Francis Bartholf, captain of Company I, 2nd Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry, established himself in one of the Curry houses, and the regiment occupied the town. Troops destroyed the Gamble sugar mill on the north side of the river and blew up the saw mill and first mill on the south side owned by Josiah Gates, John Curry, and Ezekiel Glazer. When the war ended, men returned home, and Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of war, came there while fleeing Union trial. He first hid at the Gamble plantation, then south of the river with Captain Frederic Tresca, and finally escaped from Sarasota Bay with Tresca and Hiram McLeod in an open sixteen foot boat that Captain John Curry had hidden in the woods throughout the war.