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Why Did Florida Secede from the Union? Alexander J )ORULGD6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\/LEUDULHV 2019 Why Did Florida Secede from the Union? Alexander J. Bowen Follow this and additional works at DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES WHY DID FLORIDA SECEDE FROM THE UNION? By ALEXANDER J. BOWEN A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in the Major Degree Awarded: Spring, 2019 Introduction On January 11th, 1861, Governor Madison S. Perry met with the state’s secession commissioners on the east portico of the state capitol building to witness and confer Florida’s official Ordinance of Secession that had been passed the previous day in the Convention of the People of Florida. This public ceremony officially began the process of separating Florida from the federal union of the United States and established the state as an independent republic. In the coming weeks, what was the secession convention would transform into the Constitutional Convention of 1861 to establish a reformed government in Florida similar to the U.S. Constitution. The following month, delegates would be sent to the Montgomery Congress to commit Florida to a union between the Southern slaveholding states and draft a constitution for the Confederate States of America. Through the course of these events, the delegates of the state convention married Florida to the rest of the South and to a bloody war with a massive loss of life, defeat at the hands of the very government they sought to separate from, and a Reconstruction government protecting the rights of newly emancipated slaves. The histories of other Southern states like South Carolina and Virginia prior to the Civil War are well known. South Carolina was the home of John C. Calhoun and the Nullification Crisis and therefore has a rich history with secession. Virginia was crucial to forming the Confederacy and was home to revered general Robert E. Lee. Today, these states are seen as the epitome of the Old South while Florida has become forgotten as one of the first, seceding slaveholding states. Is this new image due to the influx of Latinx people and northern Americans in the 20th century who brought their culture with them? Did Florida join with its fellow Southern states to defend its way of life from Northern aggression? Or maybe Florida has been forgotten as a “Southern” state because it was a reluctant member of the Confederacy and had no other choice politically due to the state’s geographic location? Regardless of whether Florida is seen as Southern by the rest of the country, the state still has a unique connection to its antebellum period and the Confederacy that is present in Florida public history. At the same time, it is the state’s connection to the Confederacy and antebellum history that is cited by victims of racial tensions today. This thesis is designed to answer the question: why did Florida secede from the Union? Why Did Florida Secede from the Union? Early Florida’s Society and Foundation In the same way that Southern slaveholders would eventually look towards Cuba in the mid-1800s, territorial Florida was seen as a Promised Land. Due to its subtropical climate, the land had potential to be a paradise for cash crops. Additionally, the territory’s location below the Missouri Compromise demarcation of 36°30" made it an opposition-free home for slavery. In 1821, following Andrew Jackson’s military campaign to quell conflicts between natives, settlers, and escaped slaves in the First Seminole War, Florida was admitted to the United States under the Adams-Onis Treaty. Once open to American migration, the allure of the southernmost territory increased with rumors from early pioneers’ claiming that the clay soil was conducive to sea-island cotton and sugar production leading to dreams of Florida as a super-plantation on par with the West Indies. The rumors would eventually lose their strength as the concept of a mainland sugar power was realized as farfetched and sea-island cotton would not become a significant crop until the 1850s.1 Nevertheless, settlers of all kinds began the migration to Florida with common hopes of honor, wealth, and political power. But similar to the rest of the South, these hopes were the only thing that many settlers had in common. To the superfamily planters of the "Old South," Florida was the land of second chances. Virginians and North Carolinians who had once thrived in the Middle Atlantic faced multiple hardships in the 1810s and 1820s. In 1818, the Bank of the United States reversed its policy of expanding credit and began the immediate collection of debts from borrowers, throwing the U.S. into the Panic of 1819 as debtors defaulted on loans.2 At the same time, the soil of the Atlantic coastal states from Virginia to Georgia had grown worn out and unable to grow crops aside from tobacco. Intensive cotton production following the advent of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793 combined with global temperature decline in the 1820s lead to planter migration to the newly acquired southwestern territories.3 This migration was gradual as many families would send a few members first with a company of slaves to begin clearing the land of trees and building farming structures. In many cases, these land improvements were initiated before the land was put up for public sale. In the new frontier that lacked the economic establishments of the settled "Old South," planters relied on obtaining cash and credit 1 Edward E. Baptist, Creating An Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 18-21. 2 Hezekiah Niles, "Congressional Report," Niles’ Weekly Review 26, no. 669 (1824): 290, https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=cow&handle=hein.journals/nilesreg27&id=298&me n_tab=srchresults. 3 Baptist, Creating An Old South, 23. from family and business ties from home. Kinsmen invested money into one another to fund travel and business expenses in addition to accepting mortgages for slaves and farm equipment. In turn, these planter elites would use the credit obtained to increase their labor force and machinery.4 A majority of the resources available to these elite planter superfamilies of the Middle Atlantic were nowhere near obtainable for their migrant cohorts, the common settler. While Florida may not have been a part of the United States before 1821, that did not stop American settlers from entering into foreign territory. The lack of pre-modern technology and manpower in the Spanish-controlled Florida left the boundary with Georgia unprotected and porous. With the inclusion of new territory after the First Seminole War, non-elite planter whites moved southward. Many of these common planters were veteran migrators, previously coming from southern Georgia and North Carolina where they left behind pine-covered lands that were harder to farm on.5 Arriving with dreams of obtaining wealth from the cotton industry, early Florida settlers faced a harsh reality. As migrants settled, they would take up a section of land and begin improving it before the land came up for sale at public auction. Lacking the slave labor of the elite planters, squatters would take an immensely longer amount of time to clear the land of trees and prepare the soil for farming. As was the case with migrants to surrounding Alabama and southwestern Georgia, when the time came to purchase the land that squatter-settlers had spent years living on, many had the land bought from 4 Baptist, Creating An Old South, 29-32. 5 Baptist, Creating An Old South, 40. under them by speculators.6 The only protection common white settlers had against being outbid by their elite planter cohorts was a political loophole known as "preemption." But this option was difficult to utilize as it required occupants to register their cultivated land by proving, prior to the land auction, they had settled in Florida before Jan. 25, 1825 and purchase at least 80 acres of a specific 640-acre plot.7 Additionally, this federal legislation was enacted in 1826 and did little to aid those who lost their land in auctions conducted in the previous year. Land ownership was only one issue that separated the elite and non-elite planters; slave ownership was a compounding method of attaining wealth and power in the cotton economy. The institution of slavery existed long before the Florida territory was brought into the United States. In the "Old South" states of the Atlantic coast, slavery existed before the United States was a country when each of these states were colonies in the British empire. Whether rice, tobacco, or sugar, slave labor was utilized to increase the amount of crops put in the ground in one season to therefore maximize the amount of yield that a plantation owner could send to market. In short, a higher slave force equals a higher planted crop, equaling a higher profit. The same held true when cotton became king as the invention of the cotton gin combined with the global demand for textiles. But slavery as merely a profit multiplier was not all there was to it. Enslaved labor, like any other commodity, had a clear supply and demand that an entrepreneur took notice of and 6 Daniel S. Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 1800-1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 11-13, https://books.google.com/books?id=ArQjT0d99aoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_su mmary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=speculator&f=false. 7 An Act giving the right of pre-emption, in the purchase of lands, to certain settlers in the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and territory of Florida, 4 U.S.C.
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