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.
The Seventh Florida Infantry (formed at Gainesville in April 1862) was commanded by ex-Florida governor Madison Starke Perry and later by Robert Bullock. Following its deployment to east Tennessee the same year, 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 fought in most of the major battles of the Atlanta Campaign (Hartman 1970, 681). Distinguished for their bravery, the surviving troops fought on until the Confederacy's surrender in North Carolina in 1865.
Sources: Hartman, D.W., Biographical Rosters of Florida's Confederate and Union Soldiers 1861-1865 Volume II (North Carolina: Broadfoot Publishing Company, 1970). Wayne, L.B., The Bailey House Site: The Urbanization of A Southern Plantation (M.A. thesis, University of Florida, 1981). Wynne, L.N., and R. Taylor, Florida in the Civil War (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2002).
From the guide to the Bailey Family Papers, 1841-1870, (Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida)
