LIBERTY BILLINGS, 'S FORGOTTEN RADICAL REPUBLICAN

by

Rhonda V. Asarch

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

August 2012

Copyright by Rhonda V. Asarch 2012

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to express her sincere thanks and love to her husband, first and foremost, and other family members for their support and encouragement throughout the writing of this manuscript. My husband helped to keep me grounded and provided the emotional support when I needed it most. I am most grateful for his patient understanding of the time and energy expended in this project.

I also wish to convey my gratitude for the guidance of the faculty of the History

Department at Florida Atlantic University especially Drs. Derrick White, Evan Bennett,

Talitha LeFlouria and Benno Lowe. Their dedication to this project and my success inspired me to keep going when I felt like throwing in the towel. To my fellow

Graduate Teaching Assistants who discussed, disagreed, and laughed with me for the last two years, you helped me to see things I could not; I love you for all of it.

iv

ABSTRACT

Author: Rhonda V. Asarch

Title: Liberty Billings, Florida’s Forgotten Radical Republican

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Derrick White

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2012

Unitarian preacher and officer Liberty Billings arrived in Florida in

1863 with the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry. Billings settled in Fernandina and became active in Florida Reconstruction politics as a Radical Republican. Most of the rhetoric regarding Billings focuses on his participation in the 1868 Florida

Constitution Convention even though he went on to be State Senator and an influential citizen in Fernandina. This thesis examines the life of Liberty Billings focusing on events preceding and following the Convention. In doing so, it argues that Billings’ participation in Reconstruction politics derived from his experiences prior to the Civil

War as did his transition from emancipationist to reconciliationist. By examining the earlier years of Billings’ life as well as the evidence of his campaigns during 1867, his term as State Senator and cases, it will be demonstrated that Billings abandoned racial equality for class supremacy.

v

LIBERTY BILLINGS, FLORIDA'S FORGOTTEN RADICAL REPUBLICAN

I. Introduction ...... 1

II. From Preacher to Officer to Politician and Lawyer ...... 13

III. Land Controversies in Reconstruction Florida ...... 37

IV. Railroad Politics ...... 62

V. Conclusions ...... 82

Bibliography ...... 99

vi I. INTRODUCTION

Violence ripped through the rural of Columbia during Florida’s 1870 elections. Witnesses testified before the 1871 Florida Senate detailing the acts of intimidation and murder against black and white members of the Republican Party.

Veteran senator William B. Henderson (1840-1907), a Democrat from Tampa, discredited the reports labeling them as myths and fictions. Junior senator, Liberty

Billings (1823-1877), a Radical Republican from Fernandina, responded to Henderson by stating

As to the evidence brought before the committee, however insufficient or unconvincing it may appear to some senators, to others, like myself, it has all the weight of a horrible reality. We cannot divest ourselves of our personal history for the past few years.. . .We have memories, gentlemen, unfortunately, we have memories. These are ghosts which will not down at our bidding.1

Billings’ memories of the previous twenty-five years conflicted with the memories of

Southern Democrats. These memories provided the foundation for him promoting black suffrage and political equality during the period of Radical Reconstruction in Florida.

Very few of the individuals who participated in Florida’s economic recovery and social changes during Reconstruction are examined in the historiography of the period. Reconstruction historians focus on the top politicians of the period, such as

Governors Harrison Reed (1813-1899), Ossian B. Hart (1821-1874) and Marcellus L.

Stearns (1839-1891), or the black community. The purpose of this study is to analyze the life of Liberty Billings and his role in Reconstruction Florida. This thesis connects 1 the threads between Billings’ experiences before the Civil War to his participation in the struggle for racial equality. By examining the earlier years of Billings’ life, evidence of his campaigns during 1867, his term as State Senator and Supreme Court cases, this thesis will argue that while Billings supported black political rights his antebellum life experiences contributed to his abandonment of racial equality for class supremacy.

The record of Liberty Billings’ personal evolution parallels the early development of the state of Florida. These early years for both mark a period of transitions. Billings’ hometown of Saco, was one of the earliest of industrial towns with a nail factory established in 1811 and a cotton mill in 1825. Other factories followed bringing new opportunities to the residents; the explosion of opportunities attracted immigrants as well. Saco joined the transportation revolution in 1842 with its own railroad line connecting it to Portland and Portsmouth, Maine. Other changes wrought on the town due to technological advances included an emerging that melded theology into their work ethic. The resulting new ideas created tensions amongst the residents and created a division of the First Parish Congregational Church in 1827.2

The division of churches such as the one in Saco, Maine prevailed during

Billings’ youth. Congregationalists disagreed over theological interpretations ranging from manifestations of God to the church’s position on . Those liberal Christians who “encouraged philanthropy, humanitarianism, love of education and learning, and a strong sense of civic concern” over ritualistic rigidity formed the Unitarian congregations first in Boston then throughout the Northeast.3 Individuals such as

William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), Theodore Parker (1810-1860), Lydia Marie 2 Child (1802-1880), Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) and

(1803-1882) argued against slavery claiming

No man has a right to enslave or imbrue his brother - to hold him or acknowledge him, for one moment, as a piece of merchandise - to keep back hire by fraud - or to brutalize his mind by denying him the means of , social, and moral improvement. The right to enjoy liberty is unalienable.. . . Every man has a right to his own body - to the products of his own labor - to the protection of law - and to the common advantages of society. It is piracy to buy or steal a native African, and subject him to servitude.. . . every American citizen who retains a human being in involuntary bondage as his property, is, according to scripture, a man stealer.4

These charismatic individuals defined the characteristics of the Unitarian movement and its position on slavery. Billings’ manifested their influence by enrolling at the Western

Theological School in Meadville, Pennsylvania to be trained as a Unitarian preacher the same year Florida became a state.5

Members of Florida’s General Assembly gathered to form a new government the summer of 1845 while Billings prepared for seminary school and the rest of the nation mourned the death of President . The first governor of the newly formed state, William Moseley (1795-1863), addressed the legislators stressing the benefits of self government. His message also emphasized the importance of establishing laws, a revenue system, and the strengthening of the militia. Yet these advantages of statehood only applied to the free white population of Floridians. At this time, 66,600 individuals populated the state in an area of 58,560 square miles. From the

1845 census as calculated by historian Dorothy Dodd, slaves composed 46% of the population while whites made up 53% of the population; the remaining 1% consisted of free blacks.6

3 Three distinct regions formed in Florida by the early statehood period, East,

Middle and West, each with a long history of slavery. East Florida, containing the majority of the 26 counties of new state, stretched between the Atlantic Ocean and the

Suwannee River with a heritage based in Spanish traditions including a three- racial system. The interethnic patterns established under Spanish law in the 1500s faced bitter opposition during the British period (1763-84) and then under the flag and by the 1850‘s many of the free blacks from East Florida immigrated to Cuba.

The political power in the new State, however, centered in Middle Florida where settlers from South Carolina grew the bulk of Florida’s cotton crop. This region lay between the Suwannee and Apalachicola Rivers with rich soil. Middle and West

Florida, the latter situated west of the Apalachicola to the Perdido River, followed the

British slavery tradition of a two-caste racial system. All three regions, however, grew crops that required intensive slave labor. While cotton remained the main crop for the

State’s economy, plantations also grew rice, sugar and Cuban tobacco as alternative crops.7

The 1845 General Assembly maintained certain aspects of the laws regulating slavery established in Florida by both the Spanish and British. The laws defined the characteristics of a slave without the mention of skin color or race; established the terms and provisions for slave importation and sales; and forbade the manumission of slaves within the state. The 1846 General Assembly tightened legislation concerning mulattoes making it illegal for them to enter the state via Key West. Lawmakers further tightened control over slaves and free blacks in 1851. The new law repealed a slaves’ ability to trade and established the requirement of a $25 license for the ability to hire out slaves. 4 The law also declared that free blacks who failed to pay taxes could be arrested and sold into slavery until their debt was fulfilled setting the for debt peonage,.8

Floridians attempted to join the transportation and market revolution occurring in the Northern states between 1845 and 1860. Railroad, plank road, and canal companies competed for the state government’s attention. No other method of transportation, though, excelled in importance as railroads. The owners of the railroad companies took advantage of federal land grants and looked to the North for financial assistance in the development of new lines. The contributions of land and northern investments stimulated the companies to develop rail lines throughout northern Florida.

One such company, the Company, established an eastern terminus in

Fernandina. The Spanish settled the town located along the most northeastern border between Florida and Georgia on in 1632. The site provided the railroad company a deep water harbor where the Amelia and St. Mary’s Rivers converge into the Atlantic Ocean.9

Improved transportation led to a rapid increase in Florida’s population which more than doubled to 140,425 residents with 61,745 of those being slaves by 1860. It also improved communication between Florida and the northeastern region of the

United States. Floridians grew nervous with reports of the abolitionist movement in the

North. The murder of State Senator W.J. Keitt by his slaves added to the apprehension of a slave rebellion. In response to the election of President Abraham Lincoln, Florida representatives overwhelmingly voted to secede from the United States on January 10,

1861 as an act in defense of state’s rights.10

5 By the time Florida seceded from the Union, Liberty Billings established himself as a Unitarian minister. He graduated from seminary school in 1848 and preached in various congregations in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Illinois.

Opportunities to witness the national discussion of slavery arose for Billings while in

Illinois. Billings returned to the Northeast in the year of 1861 and eventually quit his ministry in Concord, New Hampshire to join the Union Army as chaplain. Within two months, he advanced from chaplain of the 4th New Hampshire Regiment to Lieutenant

Colonel of the 1st S.C. Volunteer Infantry that in turn became the 33rd United States

Colored Infantry, the first Union regiment to be composed of freed slaves.11

Floridians divided in much the same way the nation did during the Civil War.

Middle Florida supported the rebellion whereas the majority of residents in East Florida remained faithful to the Union. No major battles occurred within boundaries of the

State. Skirmishes between pockets of Confederates and Union soldiers transpired near waterways, railroad lines and prominent cities such as Pensacola, Cedar Key,

Jacksonville, Fernandina and St. Augustine. Union troops occupied Fernandina as early as March 1862. In January 1863, the 1st S.C. Volunteer Infantry arrived in St.

Augustine. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) commanded the regiment along with several white officers including Lt. Col. Liberty Billings.12

Billings reported to Colonel Higginson, another Unitarian minister-turned- soldier, for less than a year. During the early months of his tenure, he recruited black soldiers for the regiment going as far south as St. Augustine via Fernandina. The regiment occupied Jacksonville, Florida in February 1863. Direct Tax Commissioner

Lyman Stickney accompanied the regiment and would play a part in Florida politics and 6 Billings’ life after the Civil War. The regiment established a base in Jacksonville from where they performed short expeditions along the waterways of east Florida. One such expedition to Palatka, Florida in late March 1863 resulted in Billings being injured.

Higginson granted Billings a two-month furlough after which the military board discharged him.13

Billings returned to Florida in 1867 settling in Fernandina joined by Daniel

Richards and Williams Saunders. The three worked together to create chapters of the

Union League. The League originated in the North to promote patriotic workingmen and migrated south during the war. The movement south attracted attention of

Republican leaders and southern Unionists. The League provided social services to freed slaves such as political education, legal services, and protection from the rising

Ku Klux Klan. The 1868 Constitution Conventional introduced Billings to the Florida political stage. Billings and other Radical Republican controlled much of the

Convention’s proceedings until being disqualified under the eligibility requirements set forth by the State laws. Even though he lost his bid for political power in 1868, Billings remained in Florida until his death in 1877.14

The historiography on Reconstruction Florida tends to ignore Liberty Billings after the 1868 Constitution Convention even though he went on to become a state

Senator during one of the most contentious periods in Florida history. The scholarship focuses on this period in Billings’ for the fact that it stands as the most documented period in Billings’ life. At first glance, Billings appears as a greedy, power hungry and corrupt Radical Republican who saw the South as a conquered territory primed for looting. James Ford Rhodes' History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, 7 Volume VII (1906) and William A. Dunning's 1907 publication Reconstruction,

Political and Economic depicted Radical Republicans in this image which resulted in creating a period of time when Southern whites were subjugated to black supremacy.

During the inter-war years, Progressives such as Howard K. Beale and Charles and

Mary Beard continued to ignore the one-sidedness of the Dunning School and focused instead on the economic motivations of the Radicals. W.E.B. Du Bois' Black

Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1935), however, predicated the coming revisionism of Reconstruction historiography by arguing that both Southern whites and

Northern whites battled for control over labor and capital. Du Bois, though, also reveals the contributions of freed blacks during the Reconstruction era.15

Reconstruction historiography underwent a true revisionism after the Second

World War beginning with Rayford Logan's The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford

B. Hays to Woodrow Wilson (1954, 1965, 1997) and Kenneth M. Stampp's The Era of

Reconstruction (1965). Logan's work argues that "the road to reunion was a story not of national reconciliation, but of betrayal."16 Whereas, Kenneth M. Stampp's work criticizes the Dunning School for perpetuating myths of Radical Republican cruelty and argues that the Radicals were responsible for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The emphasis of the white perspective remained prevalent through the revisionist period crediting the Republicans, both Conservative and Radicals, with bringing about change but not enough of it. Billings indeed appears as a friend-then-betrayer of the freedmen in his support of certain legislative acts during his term as state senator. Yet the evidence indicates that Billings based his belief of equality on class not race.17

8 The post-Civil Rights era of the United States promoted continued revisions of the Reconstruction historiography that broadened the general perspectives. Led by Eric

Foner's Reconstruction; America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988) which focuses on six themes of which two look at how "Southern society as a whole was remodeled" and "the emergence . . . of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and a new set of purposes."18 Foner's defining work set the tone for subsequent publications by allowing historians to look more specifically at race relations and civil rights during Reconstruction rather than the traditional political history of the period. Billings’ life exhibits how Radical Republicans worked to reshape

Southern society by establishing new laws as well as encouraging new trades and industries into the state.

Memory of the Civil War contributed to how post-war society worked to accomplish such a transition as demonstrated in David Blight’s Race and Reunion: the

Civil War in American Memory (2003). Blight identifies three differing visions of the

Reconstruction era, emancipationist, white supremacist and reconciliationist, that shaped public memory and the outcome of period. He argues that the reconciliationists’ goal of reuniting the warring sections combined with white supremacy obscured the true meaning of the Civil War and the goals of the Radical Republicans in the subsequent years. Billings’ life demonstrates this very fact in that he diligently works for constitutional rights for the black community but upon losing his bid for governorship turns his attention to economic growth and stability as a tool of reconciliation.19

The historiography of Reconstruction Florida closely follows the general historiography. Caroline Mays Brevard's A History of Florida (1904) argues along the 9 same line as the Dunning School that Radical Republicans disenfranchised native whites, enacted high taxes to keep the native whites poor while the Radicals paid no taxes themselves yet controlled the State. Similarly, Civil War and Reconstruction in

Florida (1913) by William Watson Davis cast Radical Republicans, Billings specifically, in the conqueror's role of subjugating Floridian Democrats. Not until the mid twentieth-century did a more subjective view of Northerners in Florida take place.

The author Maurice M. Vance in his 1959 article "Northerners in Late Nineteenth

Century Florida: Carpetbaggers or Settlers?" analyzes the census for ten Florida counties focusing on the vocations of Northern immigrants to argue against the traditional historiography.20

In the 1960s, historians pulled away from the traditional historiography to analyze topics in Florida history such as the Black Codes, the 1868 Constitution

Convention, and the politics of Reconstruction Florida. While historians discussed these topics previously, the difference lay in the fact that Jerrell Shofner, Joe Richardson,

Ralph L. Peek and Merlin G. Cox de-emphasized the victimization of Southern whites and argued for the many benefits Radical Republicans brought to the State such as education, economic revival and enfranchisement for the freed slaves. This argument for the Radical Republicans continued through the 1970s as evidenced by Charlton W.

Tebeau's A History of Florida (1971), Richard L. Hume's 1972 article "Membership in the Florida Constitutional Convention of 1868: A Case Study of Republican

Factionalism in the Reconstruction South," and Jerrell Shofner's work Nor is it Over

Yet; Florida in the Era of Reconstruction, 1863-1877 (1974).21

10 Florida historiography in the 1990s focused on the role of freed blacks and the relationships between them and the Radicals providing a more balanced perspective on the efforts and failures of the Radical Republicans. Canter Brown, Jr.'s 1994 article criticizes Richard Current's conclusion of Governor Harrison Reed as "basically honest and consistently well-intentioned" and instead argues that the alienation felt by freed blacks during Governor Reed's tenure was due to the policies of Reed, which were endorsed by other Northern immigrants.22 While Jerrell Shofner’s contribution to

Michael Gannon’s The New History of Florida (1996) looks at how the Radical

Republicans worked to increase Florida’s population, improve the transportation system and remove power from the plantation owners.23

The following chapter follows the life of Liberty Billings from his theological training and the antebellum abolitionist movement to his legislative activities in the

1870s. By examining the early years of Billings’ life this thesis attempts to trace the threads between the antebellum and Reconstruction periods. Historians such as Stampp,

Foner and Shofner acknowledge that many of the Radical Republicans evolved from the earlier liberal Christians who promoted the destruction of slavery. Yet, when discussing the post-Civil War activities of these individuals, the threads between the two periods are ignored. The actions of Radical Republicans may be seen and understood in a different light when the foundations of their beliefs are brought to light.

Chapters Three and Four look at two separate issues of recovery during

Reconstruction. After establishing a home in Fernandina, Liberty Billings practiced law specializing in real estate issues. Chapter Three will examine the issue of land reform during the post-Civil War period and demonstrate that Billings played a significant part 11 in formulating the real estate laws that played a role then as they do now. As a state senator, Billings represented the interests of railroad developers. Chapter Four discusses the industrialization of Florida, the development of the State’s railroads and the issues that ensued as well as the politics surrounding them.

Examining the complexity of Billings’ life causes historians to pause and reconsider how middle-class citizens influenced and experienced Reconstruction. The historiography of this period focuses on the political , of which Billings tried to be a member only to be pushed aside and forgotten by historians. The historiography also focuses on the marginalized group of free and freed blacks. Most historians such as

Foner, William L. Barney and Alan Trachtenberg agree that during this period in the

South the middle class emerged and replaced the planter yet few works provide examples of how this process coalesced. This thesis is an attempt to begin a discussion on this influential group.24

12

II. FROM PREACHER TO OFFICER TO POLITICIAN AND LAWYER

The silence of battle echoed throughout the nation with the surrender of the

Confederate Army on April 9, 1865. The two warring sections turned to the immediate tasks at hand - reunion and reconciliation. While Congress wrestled with President

Johnson on how to reconstruct the nation, Southerners attempted to meld their own tradition of white supremacy with the Northern ideology of free labor. Presidential

Reconstruction resulted in the passing of Black Codes in many of the southern states,

Florida included, prompting Congress to respond with Military Reconstruction which lasted a brief 15 months (March 15, 1867 through July 4, 1868) with Colonel John

Sprague as the commanding officer for Florida. Radical Reconstruction spanned from

July 1868 through February 1877 in Florida and was characterized by the dominant themes of black suffrage and conflicts over land and labor reform. Southern whites responded to the mandated changes with violence and intimidation. Florida State

Senator Liberty Billings in 1871 recalled those early days in a speech before the Florida

Senate stating

At the time of the collapse of the rebellion and the surrender of the Southern armies, the Southern whites did not . . . give an earnest, sincere recognition to the newly acquired rights of the freedmen. On the contrary, they proceeded to legislate in conflict with the declaration of the national government . . . to deprive them of their essential, political rights, and reduce them to a condition but little removed from that of slavery.. . . To this degradation and maltreatment of the blacks was also added the persecution of the loyal whites, who, under the ribald titles of “carpetbagger” and “scallawags,” were constantly threatened with the bullet of the assassin or rope of the mob.25 13

Florida’s government officials wrestled with the tasks of stabilizing the economy and recreating the necessary infrastructure while educating and protecting the rights of the state’s newly freed citizens.26

Liberty Billings’ role in Reconstruction Florida extended into the 1870s even though most historians only note of his performance in the 1868 Florida Constitution

Convention. Billings witnessed several important historical events which laid the foundation for his activism for racial equality and reconciliation during Reconstruction.

Recognizing that personal ideologies grow from influences such as theology, politics and expectations, a look at Billings’ life and those significant historical events prior to

Reconstruction is important in understanding his fight against slavery and for political freedom for the black community. The Unitarian and Abolitionist movements of the early 1800s are two such important influences. The threads between Billings‘ exposure to these movements and his activism in Reconstruction is the focus of this chapter.

The Unitarian Church proved influential in Billings’ life by providing a religious foundation for his anti-slavery position. According to Unitarian documents, the tenets for this religious denomination emerged during the Reformation which colonial Puritans brought with them in their migration to America. During the Second Great Awakening beginning in the 1790s, questions such as the place of rational thought in spiritual life divided the Congregationalists. By the early decades of the 1800s, individuals such as

Henry Ware, Sr. (1764-1845) and William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) resolved questions of exclusionary practices in the church, the doctrine of both the Trinity and humanity and defined the parameters of liberal Christianity. The congregation in Saco,

14 Maine, where Liberty Billings lived at the time, fell victim to the dissension in 1827 and fractured into five smaller congregations.27

During the 1830s and 1840s, the newly formed liberal Christians of New

England continued to struggle with religious tenants. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-

1882) exposed the impact of German thought in his speech at Harvard Divinity School in the summer of 1838. This particular controversy sparked by Emerson’s speech and continued by Theodore Parker (1810-1860) into the 1840s questioned the place of miracles in the Christian faith. Parker continued to question what actions determined a person to be considered a Christian. Unitarian ministers like Parker became more active in social issues asserting that women’s rights, education, prisons and hospitals were their main purpose. By 1846, Unitarians proposed that “all life, private and public, all human powers and relations, all thought, feeling, and activity, should be brought under the control of religious principle, and be pervaded by Christian sentiment.”28

As a result of the changes made by liberal Christians, Reverend Rufus Stebbins

(1810-1885) recognized a need for an educational institution for Unitarians and supported the establishment of Meadville Theological School in Meadville,

Pennsylvania the same year Florida became a state (1845). Meadville proposed to attract students from liberal Christian backgrounds and propounded the “rights of conscience and individual freedom” to its students.29 The school charged very little from the students to whom they provided theological training and discipline as well as opportunities to preach in the states west of Pennsylvania. The first class consisted of 9 men, including Liberty Billings. The class grew to 13 the following year and each student read a paper at the annual exhibition. Billings’ paper, “Unity of God Manifested 15 in Nature,” is non-extant now but comments from observers recorded in the Christian

Examiner demonstrate that he exhibited the fundamentals of liberal Christianity.

Billings and his 31 classmates, as members of the senior class, delivered sermons each week thereby improving their oratorical and persuasive rhetoric skills.30

Billings embarked on a thirteen-year career as a Unitarian preacher after graduating from Meadville Theological School; the locations in which Billings served forced him to take a stand on the social and political question concerning. Meadville placed him first as a colleague in Peterborough, New Hampshire to Reverend Abiel

Abbott (1765-?). Abbott’s history included an accusation of heresy in 1811 when he offended his congregation by preaching liberal tenants of Christianity. His defense of the allegation resulted in absolution and his placement in Peterborough. While at

Peterborough, Abbott stressed education and worked towards improving educational opportunities throughout the state. After serving two years with Abbott, Billings then preached for a period of three years in Ware, Massachusetts. He then responded to the call of evangelism in the west in 1855 and Meadville placed him in a congregation in

Quincy, Illinois. At the Fourth Annual Conference of Western Unitarian Churches in

1855, a female delegate from Billings’ congregation categorized him as a “theological

Ishmaelite,” but then stated that his approach worked for this small group of liberal

Christians.31 She also claimed that the other congregations feared Billings because of his ability to motivate the younger parishioners.32

The city of Quincy where Billings settled was an important anti-slavery center in

1855 due to its location along the Mississippi River on the Missouri-Illinois border. The city and county, Adams, fell into an area of land known as the Military Tract designated 16 for veterans of the War of 1812. This particular area bounded by the Mississippi, Rock and Illinois Rivers became one of the most active areas for the Underground Railroad with Quincy acting as a primary station for the railroad’s passengers. Fugitive slaves that crossed the treacherous waters of the Mississippi arrived in Quincy to be conducted from one place to another making their way Galesburg then to Princeton. The advent of tangible railroad track lines in the 1850s made movement of fugitive slaves quicker. By

1856, enslaved African Americans seeking freedom gained passage on the Chicago,

Burlington and Quincy Railroad either through deception or rail-jumping.33

Billings’ relocation to Quincy, Illinois during this period is important in understanding his activism during the Reconstruction period. Since Illinois’ statehood in 1818, the issue of slavery remained complicated since Illinois residents supported slavery in restricted areas while being admitted to the Union as a free state. The anti- slavery movement subtlety existed along with slavery until 1836 when Presbyterian abolitionist, Elijah Lovejoy (1802-1837), relocated to Alton from St. Louis. Lovejoy’s press, the Alton Observer, raised the awareness of the anti-slavery movement in Illinois and as a consequence fell victim to pro-slavery violence along with two other presses belonging to Lovejoy. In the summer of 1837, Lovejoy printed his call for an anti- slavery society in Illinois, which state law prohibited. Despite the challenges to forming the organization, Lovejoy co-founded the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society in August. Two months later, Lovejoy’s murder by a pro-slavery mob incited abolitionists throughout the nation.34

Unitarians such as Billings openly opposed slavery as an affront to Christian principles since the early 1800s. Historian Douglas C. Stange analyzes two important 17 aspects of Unitarian antislavery in his book Patterns of Antislavery among American

Unitarians, 1831-1860 (1977). Stange notes the religious element of the antislavery movement began with Garrisonian Unitarians Samuel J. May (1797-1871), David Lee

Child (1794-1874) and wife Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880). Not until the 1840s, according to Stange, did Unitarians consider the anti-slavery issue as a political matter.

One instance of this occurred in 1846, when 173 Unitarian clergymen signed a protest against slavery which the American Unitarian Association published. It is more than probable that Billings was well informed of the debates occurring during this period and the importance of his choice to continue his career in Illinois.35

Billings and other Unitarians preached against slavery and engaged in forms of protest or reform in the 1850s while the administration collided over disparate issues concerning the route of the transcontinental railroad and the admission of northwestern territories as slave or free states. United States Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois held a personal economic interest for the proposed railroad passing through these territories and terminating in Chicago. For this to be possible, Douglas drafted and sponsored the - Act that contained two contentious propositions. The first called for the repeal of the northern 36º30’ parallel dividing line established by the

Missouri Compromise of 1820. The second proposed that popular sovereignty replace the parallel in determining whether a territory became a free or slave state. Immediately upon the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in May 1854, both pro-slavery and anti- slavery immigrants flocked to the newly formed Kansas territory. Unitarian abolitionist

Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) co-organized the New England Emigrant Aid

Company to assist anti-slavery settlers in Kansas. The government of Kansas called for 18 a vote on whether to be a slave or free state in late 1854 and residents of Missouri on the Kansas border poured into Kansas to cast their vote for slave labor in Kansas.

Violence escalated in the area and abolitionists formed a new political party based on an anti-slavery platform. This northwestern grass roots movement came to be known as the

Republican Party.36

The Civil War commenced April 1861 transforming the nation; Reverend

Billings proved to be no exception to its effects. The minutes of the American Unitarian

Association business meeting held May 1861 indicate Billings requested a leave of absence from his congregation. Instead of joining the military with other Unitarian ministers, he proposed a trip to England during the leave; records though indicate he relocated to Concord, New Hampshire and preached for the congregation located in that city. Sixteen months after Fort Sumter, Billings finally joined the Union Army as

Chaplain for the 4th New Hampshire Regiment. The regiment, at the time of Billings’ enlistment, garrisoned the fort in St. Augustine, Florida. It is unclear if Billings joined the 4th regiment in St. Augustine before the 7th New Hampshire Regiment relieved it in

September. More than possible, Billings was sent to Beaufort, South Carolina where the

4th regiment was re-assigned when relieved in Florida. Two months later, Billings found himself promoted to Lieutenant Colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer

Infantry which in turn became the 33rd United States Colored Infantry. Regardless of whether he arrived in the Sea Islands with the posting to the 4th New Hampshire

Regiment or upon his commission, he arrived in South Carolina ahead of his commanding officer, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911).37

19 When Higginson arrived at Camp Saxton he already possessed a reputation as a radical abolitionist who promoted violence against slavery. Higginson, an ordained

Unitarian minister, attended Harvard and graduated in 1841 at the top of his class. After

Harvard, Higginson taught school, joined the abolition movement and accepted a nomination for Congress by the Free Soil Party in 1848. The abolitionist Higginson, in

1854, conspired with Boston abolitionists to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns from the city jail. The attempt failed and Higginson found himself being arrested for inciting a riot; soon after the charge changed to treason. Four years after the Burns incident, Higginson met with John Brown (1800-1859) to discuss a secret action now recognized as the raid on Harper’s Ferry. Higginson assisted his friend and fellow

Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson and four other prominent Bostonians in raising funds for the raid. After the capture of John Brown during the raid, Higginson worked relentlessly for Brown’s defense. He also endeavored to raise funds for the wife of John

Brown and pursued avenues of rescue for the jailed Brown.38

With war looming on the horizon in 1861, Higginson began to recruit troops only to be stopped by the governor of Massachusetts. As Higginson repeatedly attempted to raise troops to have the governor thwart his efforts, the Union Army seized and occupied the Sea Islands of South Carolina. In 1862, after spending nine months raising troops and ordered to remain in the barracks, Higginson received a letter from

Brigadier General Rufus Saxton (1824-1908). The War Department stationed Saxton in the Sea Islands in June 1862 and instructed him to educate and utilize the thousands of freed slaves remaining in the area since the initial seizure. The letter to Higginson offered him command of a black regiment being raised at Camp Saxton in the Sea 20 Islands. Higginson remained doubtful of Saxton’s offer and proceeded to the Sea

Islands before deciding to resign his commission in the Massachusetts division. Once satisfied that the endeavor fit into his ideology, Higginson returned to Massachusetts briefly and then travelled back to the Sea Islands to take command of the freed slaves who volunteered to serve in the Union Army.39

Documentary evidence of Billings is fairly silent during his period as a Unitarian minister; his service in the Union Army, though, is documented through the eyes of his commanding officer. Higginson’s journals fail to portray Billings as a radical abolitionist on the same level as Higginson. On November 24, 1862, Higginson recorded his first impression of Lieutenant Colonel Billings and another officer stating,

“the Lieut. Col. and Major I like least as military men.”40 Later, he described his second in command as “a large, soft amiable man, with long curly black hair and blue spectacles, thoroughly well meaning, and unmilitary to the last degree.”41 Even so,

Higginson recognized Billings’ oratorical abilities and utilized him for recruiting which increased the number of soldiers to 830 before the end of January 1863. These oratorical skills followed Billings throughout his life.42

Journal entries from Higginson for Emancipation Day point out other persons of interest who either visited Camp Saxton for the day or resided on the Sea Islands during this period. Two such individuals noted by the Colonel were Lyman D. Stickney and

Charlotte Forten (1837-1914). Stickney, who would later play a part in Billings’ life, was a Treasury Agent for the Union and had an economic interest in the success of the freed slaves gaining property rights. Miss Forten, however, held a personal interest in the success of the freed slaves in the South Carolina islands. Forten came from a well- 21 known black abolitionist family in Philadelphia. After graduating from a normal school in Salem, Massachusetts, Forten educated both white and black students but her health forced her to resign from teaching and return to Philadelphia in 1858. John Greenleaf

Whittier encouraged Forten to go to the Sea Islands, after the Union Army seized Port

Royal, and use her educational skills for the benefit of the freed slaves. Miss Forten pursued not only the education of the freed slaves in South Carolina, both children and adults, but demonstrated a keen interest in the black regiment and their success.43

Forten, like Higginson, kept a journal of the days’ events while in South

Carolina revealing yet another perspective on Billings. Her first mention of Billings stated that on Christmas Day 1862 he addressed the children gathered at the schoolhouse where Forten taught. She described Billings as “a N[ew] E[ngland] man of very gentlemanly and pleasing manners. -- A good man, and much interested in the people, I sh'ld think. I liked him.”44 Her next encounter with him, however, did not strike her as impressive. On New Year’s Day 1863, the residents in the area gathered at

Camp Saxton for the days’ festivities which included a reading of President Lincoln’s

Emancipation Proclamation. Forten noted Higginson inviting her and those with her to join him in his tent. It is here that she again interacted with Billings who invited her to his tent as well. Forten commented on his persistence in this resulting in her changing her previous assessment of him to considering him vain. Forten’s observation demonstrates that Billings wanted to associate with prominent abolitionists no matter what their skin color. Her characterization of him though indicates that his motives may not have been altogether altruistic.45

22 The regiment conducted raids along the rivers of southeast Georgia and northeast Florida as far south as Fernandina during the months of January and February

1863 attracting attention of slaves and Confederate intelligence. Billings’ participation in the raids is evident from Higginson’s journal entry of January 19, “I am going on a trip along shore to pick up recruits and lumber. The Lieutenant Colonel and Major have had all that fun before.”46 On one such expedition, Higginson commanded the steamer

Ben de Ford while Billings and 250 men sailed on the steamer the John Adams.

Higginson reported that during this expedition the regiment accomplished his goal by confiscating 40 thousand bricks from a brickyard along the St. Mary’s. Additionally, the

1st South Carolina Volunteers participated in the evacuation of Confederate women from St. Augustine. Several of the women became offended when Lt. Col. Billings ordered them to be guarded by the black soldiers and, as a resulted, protested against the guards which Billings ignored. In March, Higginson’s regiment along with the 34th

United States Colored Infantry under the command of Colonel James Montgomery, recaptured Jacksonville and made their headquarters in a spacious home in the city.47

Higginson and Montgomery commanded approximately 1500 men in

Jacksonville pursuant to reports from Confederate Brigadier-General . In the frequent skirmishes around the city, the black troops held their own when confronted by Confederate soldiers. From Jacksonville, Billings accompanied

Montgomery’s regiment on an expedition up river to Palatka. As they traversed the St.

John’s River, Confederate soldiers marked their movements. Once the steamer landed at Reid’s Wharf, Montgomery sent a scout out who returned promptly. According to the report of Confederate Captain J.J. Dickison, who observed the movements of the Union 23 troops, the steamer carried between 600-700 Union soldiers of which 40 disembarked from the ship before Dickison ordered the command to fire. Quickly the Union soldiers returned to the steamer taking with them their wounded comrades. Higginson wrote in his journal regarding the return of Montgomery’s troops, “Col. Montgomery has just returned from up river, as far as Pilatka [sic], he landed cautiously and was fired upon.

Lt.Col. Billings who was with him was wounded in both hands a bullet passing through each and in the hip.”48

Journal entries by Higginson after Billings’ wounding sharpen Higginson’s distaste for his Lieutenant Colonel. Higginson found it implausible that Billings’ wounding was honorable commenting that, “I suppose Lt. col. [sic] Billings will be a hero at the North. A wound is a wound no matter if one stumbles into it, as was undeniably the case with him.”49 Higginson, in a letter to his wife Mary, recites how

Billings wanted to return to Concord to parade his wounds before the Northern women and how the soldiers joked about the location of Billings’ wounds. Whether Billings actually wanted to display his wounds is undeterminable and the report by Higginson is clouded by his own contempt for his officer. The day before Billings’ return to duty,

Higginson lamented to his mother Louisa Storrow Higginson how he wished “some parish or heiress would fall in love with [Billings’] mild beauties and induce him to resign.”50 Higginson’s assessment of Billings as an ineffective soldier culminated in

Higginson requiring Billings to appear before a military board for examination. Billings could not respond to the first question regarding the “position of a soldier without arms” and the board summarily discharged him in August 1863. Higginson wrote a letter to

24 his mother warning her that Billings may write to her seeking comfort from her yet in the same breath doubted that he would do so.51

Little is known about Billings after his discharge. From the letters of his commanding officer, it appears Billings spent some time in the Sea Islands community visiting Higginson’s mother and daughter. In one such letter, Higginson alludes to the idea that Billings, now referred to as Reverend, took up residence with Higginson’s mother for a time after his discharge. Higginson also mentioned that Billings received an appointment with a Colonel Hunter yet no documentation verifying this appointment is extant. In December, Higginson responded to a letter from his mother and daughter ridiculing the report of Billings’ retelling of the Palatka wounding. Higginson’s statement in this letter evidences the regiment’s overall reaction to Billings, “What doth

Liberty with a gold banded cap, that is navy not army; perhaps it alludes to the combined maritime character of his capture of Pilatka [sic] ‘by himself entirely’ - how our men did enjoy the story of Louisa’s. I let them laugh at him now he is out of the army.”52 From the letters written by Col. Higginson, Billings remained with the

Higginson family until early 1864. In between Billings’ departure from the Higginson household and the end of the Civil War, he travelled between Florida and New England.

One trip resulted in a marriage to Lucinda Campbell Dinsmore of Francestown, New

Hampshire in April 1865.53

The Radical Reconstruction period stands as Billings’ most active period when the influences from his previous experiences came to full fruition. Billings returned to

Florida with Daniel Richards, another Northern white, and William A. Saunders, a

Northern black, to re-establish the Republican Party in Florida. In an attempt to 25 promote the Republican party and with the national Republican Party's approval, the three formed chapters of the Union or Loyal League, a secret society. According to historian Michael W. Fitzgerald, this political organization formed in 1862 and included Unionist, yeoman farmers, freedmen, radicals and moderates. Like the rival secret society, the Lincoln Brotherhood, the Loyal League promoted political participation of the freedmen and agrarian reform. According to author John Wallace

(1842-1902), the leaders of the Loyal League promised freedmen land from their former masters and threatened that voting for a Southern white man would bring about the return of slavery.54

Billings and his two activist partners, known as the Mule Team, stumped throughout northern Florida professing the voting rights of the black community. Their rhetoric alienated Southern whites and fellow Republicans including future governors

Ossian B. Hart (1821-1874), a native Floridian Unionist, and Marcellus L. Stearns

(1839-1891), a Northern white and agent for the Bureau of , Freedmen and

Abandoned Lands. One such rally occurred in Tallahassee and included speeches by

Billings, Saunders, Richards and J.W. Toer. A reporter from the Semi-Weekly Floridian characterized Billings’ speech as "a tirade of abuse, invective, assertious and calumnious charges against Southern whites."55 The reporter further challenged the reading of laws enacted in 1865. According to the reporter, Billings informed his black audience that the provisions in the 1866 Constitution placed the freedmen politically lower than whites. This incident provides an example of how Billings’ emancipationist views conflicted with those of the white supremacist that dominated the political landscape of the period. The Mule Team’s efforts to inform blacks of their rights derived 26 from the antebellum concept of Yankee and clashed with conservative

Republicans and Southern whites.56

The division in the Florida Republican Party appeared earlier than the 1868

Constitution Convention, however. The October 26, 1867 edition of the Florida Union confirmed a rift between Ossian B. Hart and Billings when it denounced a rumor of a bargain between the two of them to support one another. Hart headed a Conservative

Republican ticket which included F.W. Bardwell, P.K. Foster and John Gordon. Even so, Billings continued to campaign on behalf of the radical ticket and in a mass

Republican meeting on October 25 called for an open vote denouncing the secret ballot stating the “people had a right to know how the delegates voted and for whom.”57

Unfortunately, Conservative Republicans defeated Billings’ proposal for transparency and Billings’ lost the nomination as delegate from Nassau County by only six votes.

Tension increased between Billings and Hart. Radical Republicans indicated their support of a ticket including Hart and Billings five days prior to the October 25 meeting. Billings lost the nomination, however, and subsequently accused Hart of double dealing. Billings’ status as voter in the State may have been one reason for Hart not supporting Billings on the Republican ticket. Oddly enough, within ten days of losing the nomination as convention delegate, Billings registered to vote. Hart, who held the office of Superintendent of Registration, received a letter from Duval County

Board of Registration on November 5 questioning the propriety of Billings’ registration.

Hart deferred the decision on Billings’ qualification to the Duval County Board. In the

November 9 edition of the Florida Union, the Board posted a public notice stating

Billings did not qualify as citizen of the State to register to vote. Billings claimed to 27 have resided in Florida for seven months. Even so, Billings continued to promote himself and three others on a Radical Republican ticket as candidates of the 14th

District for the Constitutional Convention.58

The rift between Billings and Hart produced two Republican tickets from which the voters of the Fourteenth District determined their delegates for the Constitution

Convention. The ticket advanced by the Conservative Republicans consisted of three white men and a black man whereas the Radical ticket included two men from both races. The polling office opened at 7 a.m. in Jacksonville on the appointed days. At around 9 a.m., 200 men lead by Radical Republican nominee Reverend William

Bradwell placed their votes. According to the Florida Union, blacks counted for 750 of the 1,100 registered voters in the district. At the close of the tally, Billings received 763 votes along with Reverend William Bradwell and Jonathan C. Gibbs, both of the

Radical ticket. The fourth member of the Radical ticket, N.C. Dennett, received 747 votes. Notably, all the votes for these four individuals came from Duval and Nassau counties only. Hart, on the other hand, received 395 votes from all three counties. The other members of his ticket received less than he did.59

Billings’ election to the Constitution Convention amplified not only the rift with his own party but issues within the Mule Team as well. Billings remained loyal to

Richards and the two of them continued touring throughout the state after the elections.

At one such stop in Jacksonville in early January 1868, Billings described himself as a

“friend of humanity . . . one of God’s prophets on earth, sent to help all humanity, as, for fifteen years he had been dinning into the ears of a faithless world this idea of a common humanity.”60 Billings went on to tell the audience at the African Methodist 28 Episcopal Church how freed slaves won the right to vote due to the work of Radical

Republicans while other parties denied them the right to be elected. Billings accused fellow Radical Republicans present at the impromptu meeting of betraying the radical cause and Richards. N.C. Dennett responded to Billings’ explaining that Richards proved himself unreliable in a previous meeting by recruiting other radicals to vote against Billings and voting with Conservative Republicans himself. Dennett, however, believed Billings to be a reputable person intent on helping the freedmen but his association with Richards and the hope of being governor distracted him from his self- expressed calling.61

This association with Daniel Richards not only affected Billings’ reputation but also impacted the outcome of the 1868 Florida Constitution Convention. Billings, along with Daniel Richards and William Saunders, dominated the Convention in late January

1868. Richards gained the appointment of president of the Convention with only 29 of the 46 elected representatives present, 13 of which were newly elected blacks to the

Convention. The Conservative Republicans complained of Billings pushing through rules and appointments in favor of himself, Richards and Saunders. Conservative

Republicans questioned whether the present members constituted a quorum and requested a delay until the other members arrived. Even so, the Mule Team and their supporters proceeded to draft a state constitution and nominated Billings for Governor and Saunders for Lieutenant Governor. Conservative William J. Purman raised the issue of eligibility for Billings, Richards and Saunders; Billings delayed discussion of the topic by a 21-20 vote. Billings' maneuvers deepened the fissures within the Convention leading to the withdrawal of 14 members to Monticello where they held a separate 29 Convention. The Mule Team and fellow Radicals continued in the drafting of a new state constitution which they submitted to Major General George Meade for approval.

To Billings' misfortune, the Monticello members returned with additional numbers, gained access to the Convention Hall and removed the Mule Team from their seats on the Convention based on their ineligibility. The Conservatives ignored Billings’ attempt to register to vote the previous fall and used an oath made by Billings on August 12,

1867, swearing to be a citizen of New Hampshire as evidence for Billings' ineligibility.

Additionally, the Conservatives accused Billings and the other members of the Mule

Team of scheming with Solon Robinson, a reporter of the Tribune, to gain control of the state government as a means of possessing the railroads. This accusation performed two functions. The first is that it alienated any supporters for Billings from the black community and it foreshadowed the struggle for control over the railroads.

The threat of violence between the two factions loomed over the Convention and

General George Mead took control of the Convention negotiating a compromise between the two Republican parties. Nevertheless, the delegates found Billings again to be ineligible and removed him from his seat for the 14th district.62

Billings remained in Florida after this defeat pursuing nomination as governor on an independent ticket. Additionally, he attempted to have the constitution he wrote in

January to be placed on the ballot; however, this plan appears to have failed. Letters written by Richards to Elihu B. Washburne reveal continued harassment of both he and

Billings by Conservative Republicans and Democrats as well as the abandonment by their colleague Saunders. He explained his estrangement from Billings was due to

Billings’ opposition to place a black candidate on the State ticket. This contradicts with 30 the fact that the original nominations for Governor and Lieutenant Governor included

Billings and Saunders, respectively. Additionally, Billings owed $900 to Saunders and two other Union League members, according to Saunders. The disaster of the

Constitution Convention and loss of the governorship marked a turning point for

Billings who appeared despondent for the remainder of the campaign. In one final push against conservative politics, Billings’ utilized his infamous oratorical skills on Election

Day and as a result was arrested for “incendiary conduct and bribery.”63

Billings’ returned to Fernandina within 30 days and waited with other Floridians on Congress’ vote to re-admit the State to the Union. With the transfer of government on July 1, 1868 between Governor David Walker and Governor Harrison Reed,

Floridians returned to attending to the normal affairs of their day. Billings worked towards mending the rifts created during his vigorous stumping sessions. By the

November Republican State Convention, faction rivalry within the party disappeared and Billings peacefully participated in the proceedings. Billings must have felt vindicated in late 1868 when Governor Reed turned to him for help. Reed, a participant in the allegations against Billings at the January convention, found himself on questionable terms with the legislative bodies and the handling of railroad bonds. This attempt to impeach Governor Reed failed but the Senate attempted three additional times one of which Billings played an important part.64

Billings acted as the Assistant Marshall for the 1870 census, which provides an interesting view into Billings‘ life. The records indicate he was living with another woman named Lizzie Billings who may have been his younger sister even though the age recorded is off by 8 years. Granted, this could be a miscalculation by the individual 31 providing the information; yet, even Liberty Billings' age is misreported as 39 which is odd considering the information was provided 6 days after Billings' 47th birthday.

Additionally, looking back at the 1860 census, Billings’ age is only eight years younger rather than the expected ten years. Understandably, many individuals during this period were unsure of their exact age but Billings was not an illiterate person. More telling is the fact that on the 1850 census his age was recorded correctly. Perhaps Miss Forten’s characterization of Billings as vain was more accurate than she realized. Other issues that arise from the 1870 census are the profession reported for Billings, that of lawyer, and the reported value of real and person property owned as $15,750.65 The two prior census records reported Billings as a penniless Unitarian clergyman. In ten years time,

Billings amassed enough wealth to set him apart from the majority of residents in

Fernandina; an examination of the means of his gaining such wealth will be discussed in the following chapter.66

Billings’ activism proved beneficial for him when in the 1870 election voters of the sixteenth district elected him as State Senator. After being sworn in on January 3,

1871, Billings and the Republicans removed two Democrat representatives from

Columbia County on the grounds of voter fraud and intimidation. Testimony from black voters stated attested to the intimidation and violence enacted upon two hundred

African Americans in Lake City to prevent them from voting in the November 1870 election. Yet Democrats called into question the testimony citing the lack of details as the reason to consider the allegations false. Senator Henderson of the twenty-second district scoffed at the testimony and its references to the spectre of the Ku Klux Klan.

Billings addressed the Senate in response to Henderson recalling the early days of 32 Reconstruction, which is recorded at the beginning of this chapter. The fact that

Henderson or other Democrats suffered no harm from the hands of vigilantes did not refute nor weaken the testimony of the Klan’s victims according to Billings. The violence and intimidation that prevented blacks citizens the opportunity to cast their votes conflicted with Billings’ vision of republicanism and equality.67

The remainder of Billings’ term as senator does little to evidence this feeling, however. In addition to addressing the issue of violence towards black voters, Governor

Reed charged the legislative bodies of 1871 to form a Board of Equalization for the purpose of equalizing the burden of taxation on Florida residents. Billings and seven other legislators proposed a bill in response to Reed’s request. According to the bill, the members of the Board, three senators and five assemblymen, would determine the value of all real property in the State and report such values to the Comptroller. The

Comptroller would then assess a “tax sufficient to cover the appropriation made by the

Legislature for the current year” in addition to one mill for schools, 2 mills for the interest on State debt and one mill for State bonds.68 The correspondent of the

Tallahassee Weekly Floridian railed against the bill as a Radical Republican attempt to rob Floridians. Yet upon reading the bill it is apparent that while the correspondent was biased against Radical Republicans, the bill fell short of equalizing the taxation burden on the State’s residents. The bill installed a flat tax rate on property whether it was productive or not. The bill also permitted the redemption of lands previously sold for non-payment of taxes.69

During the second year of Billings’ term, Senator and Bishop Charles H. Pearce introduced a bill entitled "Protection of all Classes of Persons Against Discrimination in 33 Public Conveyances in Pursuance of the Provisions of the Constitution of this State."

The senator must have felt a need for the exact wording of the title even though Chapter

CXXXII of the Florida Statutes (1870) made it a misdemeanor for a railroad, steamboat or other form of transportation to deny “equal privileges of accommodation and conveyance” to any paying customer.70 After Pearce’s introduction, the bill passed through the Committee only to have further readings indefinitely postponed by motions of Democratic Senators McCaskill and Henderson. The Assembly, however, raised the issue again when on February 3 it sent a message to Senate of the passage of a substitute bill with the same title and number. The Senate rules required the bill to be placed in the orders of the day yet the Senate failed to consider the bill for eleven days.

Before the Senate addressed this particular bill, the Assembly on February 10 announced its fourth and final attempt to impeach Governor Harrison Reed.71

Billings’ role in the Senate and his participation in the final attempt to unseat the governor, who was once his rival, does little to explain him or his intentions. With the announcement of the , the Senate needed to elect a President pro tempore since the governor’s duties fell on the Lieutenant Governor.72 Senator Purman nominated Billings who won the seat with 18 senators’ votes. Historian Richard Current considers Billings a failure as President pro tempore for the reason that the Senate failed to pass the civil rights bill. But a careful consideration of the proceedings and rules of the Senate do not support Current’s characterization. With Billings in the seat of

President pro tempore on February 14, the Senate read the Assembly’s bill for the second time. After being delayed till the afternoon session, the bill received attention by the Senate. The legislators considered several floor amendments that failed. One 34 amendment proposed from the floor, which did pass, included "that there shall be no discrimination on account of race, color or previous condition."73 Acting as President pro tempore, Billings could only observe and maintain order in the proceedings unless a vote resulted in a tie. Nevertheless, under Billings’ tenure as President pro tempore, the bill failed its third and final reading on February 17.74

To accurately judge Billings requires a look at the legislation considered and how he voted rather than what did or did not pass while he presided over the Senate.

Other than bills to incorporate railroad companies or establish mail routes, three specific bills that affected blacks are of particular interest. With regard to homesteading,

Billings voted, along with fourteen other senators, in favor of opening swamp and overflow lands. While the purpose for this bill was to provide lands to anticipated settlers, the Federal government categorized these particular lots of real estate as wetlands and uninhabitable. Billings also agreed to the establishment of a separate asylum for blacks indicating his agreement that the two races were to be kept apart. The final piece of legislation considered here is an amendment to the Act Protecting

Agricultural Laborers. On its recommendation of passage on January 26 by the

Judiciary Committee, Democratic Senator McCaskill recommended it not pass for three reasons: protection was already provided, the proposed law was unconstitutional and the

State Constitution prohibited "special legislation where a general law [could] be made."75 McCaskill’s recommendation failed and the bill came before the Senate again on February 1. Again McCaskill proposed an amendment changing the nature of the bill. The proposed amendment inserted language that provided priority to a landlord's lien thus making the bill more for the landlord's protection than the sharecroppers or 35 laborers. Billings voted in the affirmative for the amendment. The bill then moved through the Assembly and in the last days of the session became law.76

Liberty Billings’ antebellum education laid the foundation for his activism in

Reconstruction Florida. The evidence demonstrates that Unitarianism inspired Billings’ to fight against slavery. While it is true that there is no documentation evidencing

Billings’ participation in anti-slavery groups, his acceptance of an appointment to a black regiment indicates Billings’ belief in abolition. The reports of Billings’ stumping throughout north Florida during 1867 paints him as a self-serving Radical whose only goal was to punish Southerners. Yet further analysis of his techniques indicates he believed in the legal equality of all men. His participation in Florida politics and legislation demonstrate, however, that others could easily sway his actions. Billings abandoned his Unitarian background and instead exhibited the typical beliefs of the period by promoting legislation that kept the races separated and justified providing the white race advantages over the black race. He fought against slavery and violence towards blacks yet failed to understand the true meaning of equality. Relocating to

Florida provided Billings an opportunity to continue using his rhetoric skills learned at

Meadville. The thirty days he spent in jail marked a turning point in Billings as his temperament changed. Just as the Republican Party’s politics changed in 1870 so did

Billings’ personal politics transition from emancipationist to reconciliationist. The following chapters will demonstrate how Billings exhibited this change in politics through his personal business dealings and representation of the railroads.

36

III. LAND CONTROVERSIES IN RECONSTRUCTION FLORIDA

In the late months of 1864, Major General marched through Georgia. In his wake followed the slaves from the surrounding plantations hoping for a chance at freedom. In Savannah, Sherman faced the problem of how to feed and provide for the newly freed slaves. Sherman issued Special Field Order #15 on

January 16, 1865 as a means of resolving the question before him and the United States.

The order reserved the lands situated on the seaboard islands from Charleston, South

Carolina south to the St. Johns River in Florida for freed slaves. Sherman specifically stated that in Union occupied areas such as Fernandina and Jacksonville, Florida blacks could remain in their “chosen or accustomed vocations” but were free to choose other areas of work as well as their personal residence. Paragraph III of the Order provided,

Whenever three respectable negroes, heads of families, shall desire to settle on land, and shall have selected . . . a locality clearly defined, . . . the Inspector of Settlements and Plantations will . . . give them license to settle such [locality], and afford them such assistance as he can to enable them to establish a peaceable agricultural settlement.. . . each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground.77

The declaration from Sherman focused on two contentious issues created by the emancipation of millions of slaves: land and labor.

The cry for land as a means of economic independence echoed throughout the

South. Land represented self-sufficiency, independence and stood as the defining requirement for freedom just as it did prior to the market revolution. Liberty Billings and other Northerners, though, witnessed how the importance of land shifted between 37 the 1830s and 1850s. Farmland lost its importance as the emerging markets de- emphasized its merit and raised the value of investment land instead. Yet land still represented wealth and power in the post-Civil War years. Freed blacks yearned for political equality and the chance to own land to determine their own economic fate.

Radical Republicans, including Billings, immigrated to Florida for the purpose of protecting the rights of blacks. They failed in those efforts just as they failed to push for land reformation; instead, Florida’s Radical Republicans pursued other means of reuniting North and South while abandoning the freedmen and their dreams of equality.

This chapter, by using Liberty Billings as an example, examines how Radical

Republicans applied the concepts of land reform and Reconstruction to their own definition of reconciliation between the North and South.78

Civil War legislation gave great hope to blacks and Radical Republicans for land reformation in the South. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens initially proposed the confiscation of Confederate property in 1861 that President Lincoln rejected. A second confiscation act, introduced by Lyman Trumball, passed both legislative bodies and the

President’s signature in July 1862. This act allowed the seizure of lands that rebellious planters abandoned when the Union army seized the Sea Islands in South Carolina in

1861. The act also allowed the transfer of said lands to those blacks left behind as well as blacks from the surrounding plantations. Billings, as an officer of the First

South Carolina Volunteers, witnessed the benefits bestowed upon the black community as a result of this piece of legislation. Other examples of land confiscation included abandoned plantations in where General Benjamin Butler provided land to black wage laborers for personal use and to cultivate in support of the Union army. 38 Additionally, Union General Ulysses Grant captured the plantation owned by

Confederate President and turned it over to freed slaves to cultivate the land. President Lincoln noted, however, that the performance of confiscation and the subsequent transfer of lands to freed slaves created a potential problem with acquisition of clear title to the land. Even so, the act of confiscation by the Union Army and federal government provided a glimmer of hope for land reformation in the South.79

The Direct Tax Act of 1861 also contributed to the hope of Radical Republicans for land reform and provided another avenue for acquiring lands previously owned by rebellious Southerners, privately or commercially. Charles F. Dunbar in the 1889 article, “The Direct Tax of 1861,” explained that this direct tax followed four previous direct taxes on United States’ citizens since the early colonial periods. Section 8 of the

Act declared $20 million be apportioned to the States according to their respective population count for the payment of national expenses. The United States apportioned

$77,522.63 to be paid by the State of Florida for national expenses. Congress included the parameters on how properties were assessed and the process for collection of taxes as well as the procedures of establishing a two-year lien on properties for which owners failed to pay taxes. The owner’s right to redeem the subject land extended for two years from the date of sale provided that the previous owner paid the original tax amount plus

20% per annum interest, all expenses incurred plus 10-20% and two dollars for the deed or other form of conveyance in accordance with state law.80

Due to the complications of collecting property taxes created by the Civil War,

Congress, in 1862, enacted an amendment to the Direct Tax Act, which appeared as a means of punishing Southern states. This piece of legislation declared its purpose as for 39 penalizing areas where insurrectionists prevented the civil authorities from collecting taxes. The penalty for such obstruction included the assessed tax plus a 50% fee; if, after 60 days, the tax and fee remained unpaid the property could be sold, or if insufficient to pay the amount, forfeited to the United States. To redeem the subject property, the owner would be required to pay the tax, the 50% penalty, 15% interest and expenses in addition to taking an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

The terms of the 1862 act created a civil process for the punishment of Southerners’ participation in rebelling against the Union but more importantly it provided Radical

Republicans the basis to utilize land in the destruction and reconstruction of the South.81

This particular Act provided Billings’ the ability to acquire properties through his association with Direct Tax Commissioner Lyman D. Stickney. Under Section 5 of the 1862 statute, Congress authorized the President to appoint three tax commissioners for each State identified as rebellious and preventing the collection of taxes owed to the federal government. Pursuant to the authority granted him by President Lincoln,

Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase appointed Stickney, Harrison Reed and John S.

Sammis as the agents for Florida’s Direct Tax Commission. Stickney and Reed both immigrated to Florida from northern states while Sammis was a Florida Unionist.

Before arriving in Florida, Direct Tax Commissioner Stickney, described as an opportunist by historian Jerrell H. Shofner, spoke before on audience at Port Royal

Island, South Carolina on January 1, 1863. The audience on this auspicious day included abandoned slaves, now free, educator and black abolitionist Charlotte Forten

(later known as Charlotte Forten Grimké), General Rufus Saxton, Colonel Thomas

40 Wentworth Higginson, Lieutenant Colonel Liberty Billings and the First South Carolina

Volunteers troops.82

The paths of Billings and Stickney crossed again two months later when

Stickney accompanied the First South Carolina Volunteers to Jacksonville, Florida. On the route to Jacksonville, the Union ships passed a small town named Fernandina located along the most northeastern border between Florida and Georgia on Amelia

Island that overlooked a deep-water harbor. The citizens provided little resistance to the occupation of Union forces in March 1862 due to their Unionist partisanship. Union forces occupied not only Fort Clinch situated about one mile north of Fernandina but also captured the rail lines and property of the Florida Railroad Company owned by

Florida’s first railroad magnate, David Levy Yulee. Fernandina’s population grew by

50% after the initial occupation growing from 831 residents to 1,244 by April 1863.

Freed slaves comprised the majority of the new residents. Stickney viewed the small town as an opportune place to install land reformation procedures. It is likely that

Stickney shared his plans for the town of Fernandina with Billings during this period of travel.83

Within a few days of Billings and Stickney arriving in Jacksonville, though, their two paths separated. Billings accompanied a military expedition downriver to

Palatka and during an attempted raid incurred injuries to both hands and a hip. He returned to Camp Saxton in Beaufort, South Carolina to recuperate from his injuries while Stickney returned north to propose Fernandina as the area where civil authority be restored through the Direct Tax Act. Historians who credit his employment by the

Florida Railroad Company as the cause duly note Stickney’s frequent absences from 41 Florida. Additionally, Stickney’s frequent absences and political loyalty to Treasury

Secretary Chase created a rift between him and the other two commissioners.84

While Billings recuperated from his injuries and Stickney attended to business in the north, Reed and Sammis continued their duties as Florida’s Tax Commissioners and held the first sale of properties confiscated under the provisions of the 1862 act.

Testimony in the legal matter of Billings v. Starke evidences that Billings purchased several lots at the urging of both Stickney and Jacksonville Unionist Calvin L.

Robinson. According to Robinson’s testimony in the same matter, the two men formed a partnership for business transactions such as the sales performed under the Direct Tax

Act. According to Billings, Attorney Robinson, who recently settled and established his office in Fernandina, acted as an agent for Billings in the first sale. Contradictorily,

Stickney objected to the sale of the properties and convinced Treasury Secretary Chase to set aside the sales. The concern for clear title expressed by President Lincoln concerning the Confiscation Act now became an issue for properties purchased under the Direct Tax Act.85

Testimony in the Billings v. Starke matter indicates that Billings persisted in his attempts to own property in Fernandina. Once Robinson learned of Treasury Secretary

Chase’s voidance of the June 1863 sales, he surrendered any certificates in his possession and received the funds paid for the lots. Robinson purchased additional certificates in the subsequent sale in his name alone then contacted Billings “to come and select” the lots he desired.86 Billings, in Beaufort, South Carolina according to his statement, declined traveling to Fernandina and instructed Robinson to make the selection himself. As a result, Robinson executed several deeds transferring property to 42 Billings yet instead of forwarding them to South Carolina he left the deeds with another business partner. Records indicate that Billings acquired eighteen lots situated in

Fernandina through the Direct Tax Act sales.87

The fact that Billings purchased a number of lots is interesting considering his profession prior to the Civil War. The 1860 United States census reported Billings as a

Unitarian minister with no assets of value, real or personal. Three years later, however,

Billings possessed the means to purchase more than one personal residential lot. This can be explained in two different ways. Billings earned an approximate $2,210 in base salary during his fourteen months of service to the Union Army as chaplain and then officer. Considering that Billings also received rations and provisions for a horse and had no spouse to support, it is more than probable that Billings saved a majority of his pay while in the army. Additionally, historians often note of how the black community purchased properties through the Direct Tax Act sales for much less than the actual value. Chloe Merrick’s purchase of Confederate officer Joseph Finnegan’s house for a pittance of its value is generally used as a reference for how Northerners benefitted from the sales as well. The purchases made by Billings are even more telling in that they demonstrate an evolution in Billings and the changing perspective on land ownership. For Northern whites, land became an avenue for investment rather than labor.88

Due to the confusion created by the voidance of sales and reissuing of certificates, clear title to investment properties became an issue as well as what constituted legal evidence of title for properties seized and sold. Two cases that Billings brought before the Florida Supreme Court evidence that this issue impacted white 43 purchasers as much as black purchasers. The first case, Billings v. McDermott, originated in 1874; Billings’ term as State Senator representing Nassau, Duval and St.

Johns counties ended this same year. Billings initiated an ejectment suit against an Irish carpenter, John McDermott, to remove him and his four minor children from property that Billings claimed under a certificate issued by the Direct Tax Commissioners in

January 1865. Billings claimed to hold title through an assignment of the original certificate by purchaser, Elsie Rivers, a mulatto woman who migrated from Georgia after the war. John McDermott, acting as guardian of his four minor children, claimed his certificate issued on November 9, 1865 after his taking the oath of loyalty and paying all monies due negated Billings’ claim of title. The jury of the lower court found in favor of McDermott and Billings appealed to the Florida Supreme Court. Billings requested the Court to determine if McDermott had a right to redeem the property under the Direct Tax Act provisions. The Court commented that while McDermott failed to produce evidence of having an interest in the subject property prior to its direct tax sale to Elsie Rivers, he produced a valid certificate for redemption. The Court pointed out that the basis for Billings’ appeal did not arise from the missing piece of evidence and this fact of law could not be used to Billings’ benefit at this time. Billings’ appeal, and confidence, rested in his possession of the certificate issued to Elsie Rivers in 1865.89

Case law supported Billings’ confidence. Similar to the situation in Florida with

Direct Tax Commissioner Stickney largely absent and unavailable to perform his duties, other Southern states experienced complications due to one member of the Direct Tax

Commissioners being absent during their term. In December 1870, the United States

Supreme Court ruled on this very same issue in a South Carolina case, Cooley v. 44 O’Connor. The defendant, Mrs. O’Connor, appealed her loss in the South Carolina circuit court based on the rejection of a certificate issued to her on March 13, 1865, as evidence of her title to property in Beaufort, South Carolina. The lower court refused to accept the certificate on two criteria one of which being that only two commissioners signed the certificate. The lower court ignored the fact that Congress enacted an amendment statute 10 days prior to the issue date of the certificate stating,

A majority of a board of tax commissioners shall have full authority to transact all business, and to perform all duties required by law to be performed by such board, and no proceeding of any board of tax commissioners shall be void or invalid in consequence of the absence of any one of said commissioners.90

The United States Supreme Court ruled that the lower court erred on the fundamental right of Mrs. O’Connor to present her evidence ruling it as prima facie evidence; meaning the certificate issued after the amendment stands in good stead on that basis alone. The United States Supreme Court ruling on a direct tax sale certificate acting as evidence provided the foundation for Billings’ appeal in his matter against

McDermott.91

Billings, though, did not consider Federal or state law when presenting all of his evidence to the Florida Supreme Court. Florida law, since 1828, required that all transfers of real property be conveyed “by deed in writing, sealed and delivered in the presence of at least two witnesses.”92 Billings presented an assignment of the certificate to the lower court as evidence of his title in the property. The Florida Supreme Court denied Billings’ title in the property on this point of fact alone: the assignment did not transfer Rivers’ interest in the certificate and, therefore, did not qualify as a proper instrument of transfer for the real property described in the certificate. The Court 45 distinguished a difference between an interest in the certificate itself and the real property. Elsie Rivers’ interest in the certificate, pursuant to the March 1865 amendment, could only be transferred after receiving a patent from the President of the

United States. At that point, title of ownership to the real property would have been conveyed to Rivers. Since no patent existed, the Court nullified Billings’ interest in the certificate, and subsequently the real property, and affirmed, or agreed, with the ruling of the lower court on behalf of McDermott.93

The second matter, Billings v. Starke, settled not only what constituted legal evidence of title but several other legal issues raised as a result of the tax sales. As discussed previously, Billings acquired several deeds from Robinson. One such deed described the lot previously owned by the defendant, Gustave W. Starke, a Swiss immigrant. Starke denied Billings’ claim of title by producing a chain of deeds evidencing title for a period of seven years prior to the commencement of the matter.

Further evidence provided by Starke included a certificate of sale dated June 22, 1863, and signed by commissioners Sammis and Reed; Internal Revenue opinion dated

September 3, 1863, ruling the June sale void; a notice for sale to be conducted in

November 1864; a December 1864 certificate of sale issued to Leah Mooney; a redemption certificate dated April 1865 issued to T.N. Acosta accompanied by a receipt issued to John H. Mooney for the redemption money. Interestingly enough, though,

Billings presented the tax sales certificate issued July 1863 as evidence of his title rather than a deed. The lower court ruled that Billings’ certificate could not be admitted as evidence since Treasury Secretary Chase voided the sales of June 1863.94

46 The rejection of the lower court of Billings’ certificate created the basis for the appeal. The Supreme Court ruled that the lower court erred in not admitting the certificate on behalf of one of the parties. The Court went on to explain that either party to make their case could use all of the evidence, no matter who presented it. The Court upheld that a certificate issued on a sale due to a tax sale met the prima facie evidence for the purchaser’s interest in the property based on the Cooley v. O’Connor matter discussed previously. The Court also held the Internal Revenue opinion issued by the

Treasury Department and presented by Starke as evidence as only an opinion for setting aside the sale, not an order, which Cooley v. O’Connor superseded. Further, the documentation of the chain of title prior to the assessment and sale of the property provided by Starke failed to support his claim of title. Unfortunately for Billings, the

Court additionally ruled that the 1863 certificate did not comply with the parameters of the Direct Tax Act in that a clerk of the tax commission signed it rather than two or three commissioners.95

Starke also objected to one point of law that the Supreme Court considered.

Billings admitted in his testimony that the recording of the deed evidencing his ownership of the property did not occur until 1873. Billings’ testimony offered no reason for this delay and Starke held that the non-recordation of the deed failed to provide notice of Billings’ interest in the property. The jury in the lower court held that this failure to record the deed nullified Billings’ title. The Court’s ruling on this objection established two . Florida real estate laws required the recording of deeds for the purpose of preventing fraudulent sales. The Court provided an example to explain: if Robinson, the grantor, signed a deed to Billings then before its recordation 47 turned around and sold the property again to Starke, only then would Billings late recording of the document be voidable. The Court stated that since Robinson was not the grantor in both deeds, the one to Billings and the one to Starke, this portion of

Florida laws did not apply. The second precedent from the ruling established that once a grantee receives a deed it is considered delivered as prescribed by statute. The recording of a deed did not impact delivery. Since the jury of the lower court made their ruling based on the evidence permitted by Starke only and the lower Court erred in giving inaccurate instructions on the non-recordation of deeds, the Supreme Court ordered a new trial be held on the matter. Four months later, Billings recorded a document reserving his interest in the property for his life and upon his death the subject property became Starke’s property free and clear.96

Billings gained title to various lots in Fernandina between 1863 and 1866 yet did not immediately pursue any action to enforce his property rights. This fact alone suggests how Billings believed in equality before the law as the primary goal of Radical

Reconstruction and reconciliation, through the reformation of land laws and ownership, would be handled through governmental avenues. During the period between 1863 and

1866, Federal policies gave the impression that blacks would acquire confiscated lands.

The creation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands in March

1865, in addition to the transfer of confiscated lands from the Treasury to the Bureau, further strengthened the idea of land reformation in the South. Even so, returning

Confederate soldiers, supported by President Johnson’s lenient policies, attempted to remove those individuals who purchased properties through direct tax sales. Billings, like other Radical Republicans, jumped to the aid of blacks who became the primary 48 targets for removal by encouraging them to defend their rights. His involvement in such incidences indicates Billings’ middle class value of private land. Conservatives disagreed with this position especially when it blurred racial lines. As a result, they accused him of inciting the black community to riot. Radical Republicans pursued securing the political rights for African Americans and waited for the government to accommodate the changes required by a class of people who believed land reform to be important for the success of reuniting the North and South.97

The Homestead Act of 1866 did not assist Radical Republicans in their attempts for land reform. The 1866 Act amended the original 1862 Act of the same title wherein

Congress opened public lands in the West to loyal citizens, aged 21 or older and head of household. The 1862 Act provided that each head of household, after paying $2.50 per acre plus a $10 filing fee, held a certificate on 160 acres for a period of five years and subsequently proved residence and cultivation within a two year grace period. This provided the settlers a period of 7 years to protect their interests in their claim. The original act also provided that all 160 acres were exempt from debts. The 1866 Act opened the lands in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida.98

The differences between the 1862 and 1866 acts, however, indicated Congress intended to resolve the problem of land reform in a different manner than Radical

Republicans and the black community expected. Changes in the 1866 version included a restriction of claimed land to 80 acres, an anti-discrimination clause stating application could not refused based on color, and if a settler abandoned the land for six continuous months, the land reverted back to the federal government, not the state. The limiting of acreage permitted per claim indicated that the government wanted more 49 settlers in the opened lands. On the other hand, the limit reduced the cost of a claim to

$200. This element combined with the anti-discrimination clause gave the impression that both races would populate the lands; yet, few of the black community possessed the means to purchase the subject lands. Reversion of abandoned lands to the federal government also indicated that the state would derive no benefit of a re-sale of the land.

Similar to the 1862 act, the requirement of verifying residency and cultivation after five years with a two-year expiration date remained.99

The Homestead Act differed from the Direct Tax Act contributing to the confusion of ownership under the latter. Two main disparities between the two included the fact that under the Direct Tax Act many of the properties were developed and the previous residents remained in their homes. The Direct Tax Act provided neither direction on how to remove the dwellers of the property nor any limitations on when such could be removed from the land. Purchasers, such as Liberty Billings, had no time limit within which to seek legal remedies for squatters until January 1872 when the

Florida Supreme Court ruled on a matter brought to them by future governor Ossian B.

Hart. The ruling in this matter impacted the actions of Liberty Billings in regard to the properties he purchased under the Direct Tax Act between 1863 and 1866.

The Plaintiff and Appellant in this matter, Ossian B. Hart, filed suit against

W.M. Bostwick and Mrs. Bostwick to regain possession of 640 acres near Jacksonville.

Hart, a native Floridian and Republican who sided with Billings in 1867 only to turn against him prior to the 1868 Constitution Convention proceedings, claimed ownership of the property as heir of Isaiah D. Hart and provided proof of title dating back to 1829.

The Plaintiffs claimed that Isaiah D. Hart, deceased, and William Saunders initiated a 50 contract but never executed it due to the death of Hart and as Hart’s heirs were entitled to full possession of the subject property. Saunders, however, took possession of the property within three months of the contract initiation and the Defendants produced evidence of their own chain of title extending back to Saunders. When the time came for the jury to decide, one specific instruction by the lower court judge specifically asked the jury to determine if the time expired for the Plaintiffs to file such a matter. In the instructions, the judge explained that the period between January 10, 1861 and

October 25, 1865 was exempt from the consideration of time. The jury found in favor of the Defendants and Hart appealed on several points of law one of which influenced

Billings‘ actions.100

The main question to be determined by the Florida Supreme Court in this matter was whether or not a statute of limitation was in effect during this period of Florida law.

Three years after Florida became a state, the state legislators changed the time for initiating an action to recover title to real property from 20 years to seven. After seceding from the United States on January 10, 1861, Florida’s policy makers passed a law to suspend all limitations of time for commencing legal matters since secession.

The Plaintiffs claimed that Article XV of the Constitution of 1868 maintained the suspension of the time limitation for issues originating prior to secession by stating,

All laws of the State passed by the so-called General Assembly since the 10th day of January. [sic] A.D. 1861, not conflicting with the word or spirit of the Constitution and laws of the United States, or with this Constitution, shall be valid.101

The Court upheld the Plaintiff’s claim on this point due to the fact that the Constitution did not specifically repeal the suspension of December 1861. In response to the Court’s

51 decision, the Florida legislators passed a bill in February 1872 re-instituting the seven- year limitation for commencing civil actions regarding real property. In addition, the act provided a limited window of six months for matters that could have expired between

1865 and January 1872 within which to be commenced.102

When Billings lost his bid for Florida’s governorship in 1868, he and other

Radical Republicans recognized that the federal government would provide no assistance in land reformation in the southern states. The Freedmen’s Bureau received the remaining properties seized under the Direct Tax Act; labor, however, stood as the main focus of the Bureau leaving the Homestead Act of 1866 the only tool for land reconciliation. As a result, Radical Republicans convinced fellow Northerners to immigrate to Florida. Similar to the 1850s, Northerners created aid societies to assist families in relocating. The New England Emigrant Aid Company became the most well known group to perform such functions for white Northerners.

Billings would have been well aware of the New England Emigrant Aid

Company’s history and main players. Eli Thayer and Edward Everett Hale, a fellow

Unitarian abolitionist, co-created the New England Emigrant Aid Company in response to the Nebraska-Kansas crisis in 1854. The organization worked against the rising pro- slavery sentiment in the newly organized territory. Groups of New Englanders migrated to Kansas establishing anti-slavery communities with the assistance of individuals like

Thomas Wentworth Higginson and James Montgomery whom Liberty Billings served with during the Civil War. The Company supported both the Confiscation and Direct

Tax Acts as a means of confiscating lands during the War and reallocating said lands to

52 freed slaves and loyal Unionists. Before the end of the Civil War, the Company considered Florida as a prime target for relocating Northerners.103

Between December 1866 and March 1867, James F.B. Marshall as agent for the

Company travelled to Florida to inquire into the opportunities afforded immigrants.

Marshall toured north and central Florida for three months reporting his findings to

John Murray Forbes, President of the Company, and Hale, the Vice President of the

Company, through letters. The first correspondence to Forbush in December 1866 detailed such items at the climate, condition of the soil, transportation costs and the need for laborers. Marshall reported that the wages offered to farm laborers stood one- half to one-third higher than other states at $15 to $25 per month with rations. Florida

Rail Road Company magnate David Yulee acted as Marshall’s guide for this portion of his tour declaring Fernandina to be the city with the greatest potential in Florida. Yulee projected this possibility with the hope that a route to New Orleans and California to the west and Cuba to the south could be established with Fernandina being a stop on the route.104

During the tour, Marshall met with State officials and other leading businessmen such as Governor David S. Walker and William H. Gleason. In his letter dated January

9, 1867, to Forbush, Marshall reported on his meeting with Governor Walker indicating

[The Governor] is earnestly desirous of northern emigration, & says Florida will welcome N.E. settlers with open arms, feeling that in no better way can her prosperity be assured, than by an influx of northern labor, capital, & enterprise.. . . Indeed I have found such to be the prevailing views of all thinking men in the state with whom I have in contact, even among those who were most ardent secessionists, and who were ruined by the war.105

53 Farther in the letter, however, Marshall indicated that while the State needed black emigrants “the settlement of freedmen in large bodies by themselves will not prove a success . . . the desire of the whites to have the control of their labor may prejudice them in the matter.”106 Marshall demonstrated his knowledge of the underlying tensions between the dominant southern white culture and freedmen. He recognized that without a system for protection of black settlers, the possibility for exploitation by white southerners still existed in post-war Florida.107

The Company professed to target all populations including the less fortunate.

Marshall’s letters, however, indicate that the emerging middle class and European settlers stood as the primary targets for the Company and similar organizations. In the same letter warning of the exploitation of black settlers, Marshall commended Forbush for the plan to entice “young men of moderate means” to pool their resources in purchasing a plantation.108 In the meeting with William H. Gleason, future governor of

Florida, Marshall learned that the United States granted to Gleason lands south of the

27.5 parallel. Gleason planned to sell 500,000 acres to Danish colonists through the

New York Emigrant Aid and Homestead Company for a price of 12.5 cents per acre.

The settlement established by Gleason stood at the mouth of the Miami River in southeast Florida that he named Miami.109

The opening of at least one office for the New England Emigrant Aid Company resulted from Marshall’s reports. The agent sent to man the office, Edward Cheney, purchased the newspaper the Florida Union and used it to promote Northern interests.

In July 1868, Cheney reprinted an article from the Christian Register promoting the prospect of having the New England Emigrant Aid Company settle colonists in Florida. 54 The piece outlined the successes of a German colony established in Brazil by the

Company. The article specifically highlights the self-sufficiency of the settlers to pay for their own means of transportation to the colony and purchase of land; if not able to do so prior to settlement, the Company offered an arrangement for the debt payment of

5 years to the colonists. The conclusion of the article argued for the same sort of arrangement to occur in Florida due to the environment, both physical and political, being conducive to the establishment of similar colonies.110

The impression created by these sources in Florida’s desire to attract European settlers is deceptive. A review of the 1860 Federal Census report indicates that settlers came to Florida prior to the Civil War from several international locations. Florida’s population in 1860 totaled 140,424 individuals of which 62,677 were enslaved. Of the

77,747 free population, 2.36% were foreign born with the majority of immigrants being

Irish. In Nassau County, Florida, the percentage of foreign-born residents stood at

8.76%. After the Civil War, the composition of the population transformed. By 1870,

Florida’s aggregate population grew 23.55% to 187,748. Foreign-born residents, though, contributed only 2.65% of the population. Specifically in Nassau County, the foreign born population fell to 158 dropping the percentage to 3.72%. A majority of those, 128, lived in Fernandina with Irish immigrants outnumbering German immigrants by 1.111

Radical Reconstructionists recognized the importance of attracting European and Northern settlers to Florida as an economic imperative. In addition to equal suffrage rights for blacks, the 1868 Republican platform, printed in the July 2, 1868 edition of the Florida Union, included support of foreign immigration because “in the past [it] has 55 added to much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation.”112 Additionally, while the hand of friendship extended towards the once rebellious Southerners, Northerners missed the familiarity of their homes. As one

Northern settler identified as the Massachusetts Ploughman indicated in a published letter to a friend,

My motives in getting good reliable northern men with some capital to come here are to have around or near me such society as I have been accustomed to, to have our country settled up with those who will improve our lands - will establish schools and churches and bring amongst us those labor saving implements.113

Inducing settlers with land guaranteed agricultural recovery from war, motivation to improve industrial prospects and change the social and political patterns of the past.

Sources indicating Billings’ participation in motivating fellow Northerners to immigrate to Florida is shallow at best. Billings maintained contact with family and friends in the northeast. The 1870 census provides evidence of this in that his younger sister lived with him at the time. Records also reveal that the same sister remained in

Florida after Billings’ death. The fact that he married again in 1876 to a woman named

Angela Osgood of Portland, Maine also supports Billings’ continuous contact with long-distance associations. Other individuals that moved from Maine to Fernandina included a clergyman, a pilot, and a hotel owner. Whether Billings’ knew these individuals prior to their residence in Florida, though, is unclear.114

Billings would have promoted immigration, as he understood the need to industrialize the state. The most prevalent occupation prior to the Civil War in Florida was in the agricultural area with farmers numbering 7,534 and planters standing at

1,175. The next largest occupation was that of laborers at 2,452. Within the 56 manufactures and mechanical industry, carpenters composed the largest group with 693.

The 1870 census demonstrates that these occupations remained the prevalent work groups in post-war Florida with farming maintaining its position as the primary industry. The town of Fernandina, where Billings resided, followed a similar pattern with the addition of railroad employee rounding out the top four occupations. The differences in the percentages, however, demonstrate how Billings and Radical

Republicans failed to incorporate the black community in the changing economic environment. A large percentage of whites in Fernandina, 61.40%, worked as employees of the Florida Railroad Company owned by David Levy Yulee while

80.43% blacks, on the other hand, dominated the farming industry. The smallest percentage of whites gained employment as laborers while this category counted as the second largest occupation for blacks.115

The reason for the discrepancy in occupations is credited to the failure of

Billings and others to overcome their racist beliefs. White society predominately followed the paradigm of the black community being well suited for outdoor work under a blazing sun as pointed out by historians such as Paul Ortiz. Even abolitionist

Harriet Beecher Stowe doubted if blacks had the right work ethic to perform agricultural or domestic duties. As a result, Northerners immigrated to Florida with the hope of educating the black community on the means of supporting themselves as the white society determined. Emancipation ideology faded and the gap between whites and blacks created by the institution of slavery remained. 116

The acceptance of non-native immigrants over blacks contributed to the ever- widening gap in Reconstruction Florida. Former Florida Supreme Court Justice Charles 57 H. DuPont addressed the industrial recovery of the State in a speech to the District

Association of Tallahassee in December 1871. Historian Jerrell Shofner notes DuPont’s anti-black labor policies in the early days of Reconstruction and how DuPont supported

European laborers as a replacement of black laborers. The speech of December 1871, however, indicates the results of Northern influence on individuals such as DuPont. In the address, DuPont clearly stated that one purpose of the association was to promote

“mechanical arts and sciences.”117 DuPont reflected on how Florida planters in the past devoted their attention to one crop, cotton, and the impact on Florida’s economy in comparison to New England with its diverse economy. In an attempt to move away from the agricultural practices of the past that limited the advancement of the State,

DuPont suggested limiting areas for farming, institution of crop rotation and fertilization, protection of fields from grazing stock and the provision of the proper tools for the field laborers.118

DuPont went on in his speech to outline how to the State needed to move from an agrarian centered economy to one that embraced industry that would provide the proper tools. He encouraged industrialists to be involved in the education of agriculturalists showing them how their specific trade would benefit the farm. He also admonished agrarians telling them to avoid devaluing cottage industries recognizing the value of its productivity in New England fifty years prior. It is easy to recognize

DuPont’s logic in his argument for European immigrants who became New England mill operatives, mechanics and laborers; DuPont hoped that the same results could be realized in Florida in the same manner. He denied in the speech that his immigration plan intended to “crowd [the black population] out of the country.”119 Yet, using 58 language of the time reserved for blacks and Republicans, he proposed that his plan would rid the State of “the vicious, the licentious, the idle, and the dishonest, be he white or colored.”120

The government of the State wholeheartedly supported immigration whether from the free and freed blacks, northern whites or Europeans. To promote such immigration in 1869, Governor Harrison Reed appointed John S. Adams as

Commissioner of Immigration. In his report of December 1871, Adams reiterated the feeling behind DuPont’s message of holding to the past in the area of agriculture. He condemned the planters who held on to large tracts of land while cultivating small portions of it with corn and cotton. His report pointed out that the State held tremendous potential in cultivating the abundant pine grown naturally. He projected that by utilizing this natural resource the lumber industry of the State would increase the diversity of

Florida’s economy. The report also included a copy of the pamphlet Adams designed to induce immigrants to Florida outlining the availability of lands, climate, and crops other than cotton and corn that could be grown in the rich soils.121

Radical Reconstruction failed in its primary objective of equalizing the playing field for blacks after the abolishment of slavery. Historians since W.E.B. Du Bois in the early 20th century have demonstrated this failure pointing to the lack of Federal support, funding and planning. Yet the secondary goal of reconciling the warring sections slowly marched on into the 1900s. The increased need for transportation of produce to markets and travelers to tropical locations along with emerging communication technologies Florida further complicated the land issue. Railroad, canal and telegraph companies entered into the foray for valuable acreage and rights. The next 59 chapter looks at the politics surrounding these new forms of transportation and communication during Reconstruction Florida emphasizing its impact on the State’s development.

Land reform during this period encompassed more than redistribution of confiscated lands. Republicans recognized the need to wrest land from plantation owners to provide freed slaves an opportunity for economic freedom. Protecting the rights of the new landowners fell to the Federal government first through the

Freedmen’s Bureau. The stance of the Johnson Administration, however, also placed the ownership rights of Northerners in danger. The historiography demonstrates the frustrations faced by the Bureau in securing land for the Black population while ignoring the same issues faced by Northerners. By examining the cases Billings pursued in front of the Florida Supreme Court evidence, it is evident that whites also struggled to retain their property in face of the confusion created by the direct tax sales. Billings assisted in clarifying the State laws on ejectment and quiet title actions in the matters he brought before the Court. He also demonstrated, however, that while Republicans hoped to deconstruct the dominant white pre-Civil War culture they still emphasized the need for a growth in population by enticing predominately non-black immigrants to the State.

Land, though, also provided the foundation for moving the State from its antebellum agrarian ways to industrialization and commercial developments. This need to transform the economy required a growth in the population, which helped to fill the vacuum created with the abolition of slavery. While blacks attempted to create their place in the new government and economy, Republicans invited their fellow

Northerners and Europeans to supplement their numbers. This satisfied the desire to 60 attract residents and bring new trades to the State. The questions which arose during this period revolved around who would control the land and, hence, the labor. Such control required new laws and policies which Republicans, like Liberty Billings, provided through their daily actions during Reconstruction.

61

IV. RAILROAD POLITICS

Liberty Billings and his fellow Radical Republicans faced a daunting task of industrializing Florida while struggling with the issues of civil rights and land reform.

The devastated cotton industry provided an opportunity for new trades and industries to be introduced to the State. The destruction of the limited rail lines, however, severely constrained the infrastructure for transportation and communication. Yet by the late

1800s, New York Times correspondent William Drysdale stated “it would be a question for a political economist rather than for a casual writer whether Florida has built up the railroads or whether the railroads have built up Florida."122 Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, the growth of cities such as Fernandina, Jacksonville, Cedar Keys and Tampa could be credited to the railroads that originated or terminated in those locations.

The historiography on Florida’s railroads focuses on a select number of lines, the Florida Railroad Commission created in the 1880s, and the men who established the rail lines throughout the State. Authors Maury Klein and Kozo Yamamura characterize the historiography by stating "economic historians . . . have examined the development of railroads descriptively, quantitatively, and even counter-factually, while business historians have provided illuminating sketches of patterns of growth and entrepreneurial activities for several individual railroads."123 The early development of the State’s railroads parallels the life of Liberty Billings with the Reconstruction period being the most contentious for both. This chapter examines the development of the railroad and

62 how Northerners, including Billings, struggled with bringing industry, and therefore re- establishing the rail lines, to the State. For just as the complications surrounding civil rights and land reform evidenced a struggle for control, politics surrounding Florida’s development evidenced a conflict in transforming Southern culture from a master/slave society to a mirror image of Northern culture with a middle and working class.124

Billings’ experiences prior to arriving in Florida contributed to his vision of reconciliation through industrialization. His hometown of Saco contained 17 sawmills and an iron works factory prior to 1825. Owners of the iron foundry, Thomas Cutts and

Josiah Calef, established cotton mills in Saco during Billings’ youth. The first cotton mill, the largest in the area with seven floors, contained 1,200 spindles and 300 looms.

More cotton mills followed, as did factories for clapboards, shingles and lathes as Saco grew to be a dominant industrial town. Combined with the neighboring village of

Biddeford just across the river, the area’s population swelled from 4,200 to 15,000 in the 1850s. Railroads followed the mills and factories with the arrival of the Portland,

Saco and Portsmouth Railroad in 1842. These innovative technologies moved the town of Saco along in the market and transportation revolutions. The success of these industries, powered by the might of the Saco River and the integration of steam, brought both economic and social changes in the burgeoning town just as it did throughout the northern United States. As historian Hugo Meier points out

Years of early national development of American technology also began modestly to play the role of silent missionary of the American Way. That “Way” was embodied in the term “republicanism.” The devotion of Yankee technology to the everyday uses of the ordinary citizen was looked on as additional proof of republican blessings.125

63 Billings witnessed New England moving away from the agrarian centered lifestyle with the introduction of factories and mills, sometimes begrudgingly. The prospect of working for wages evinced feelings of prosperity and introduced new concepts of daily living. Wage labor paved the way for members of society to seek upward mobility both socially and financially. Republicanism embraced capitalism and the need for new ways of thinking. Historian Charles Sellers remarks on the impact not only on entrepreneurs but also on lawyers calling them the “shock troops of capitalism” who “preach[ed] the market’s emerging ethic - that the unbridled pursuit of self-interest

[was] in the ultimate interest of all.”126 Those that found capitalism appealing became members of either the middle or working class. This stratification of society required new forms of authority and discipline.127

While Billings grew up in New England surrounded by the march of industrial progress between the 1820s and 1840s, railroads became the main technological advancement made in Florida during the State’s territorial period and progressed slowly. The territory’s 10th Legislative Council enacted the first law incorporating the

Leon Rail Road Company in 1832. The act provided for the privately owned company to build a road, within two years from the date of incorporation, from Tallahassee to

Fort St. Marks in the west. The bill also provided that the company had the right to take lands required for the project, utilize the natural resources necessary from the land, and, if necessary, provide recompense to the owner. The territorial legislative bodies put into place other incorporation acts for the Marine Railway Company of Key West, the

Peninsular and Jacksonville Rail Road Company the Florida, Alabama and Georgia Rail

Road Company, the Tallahassee Rail Road Company (all in 1834), the East Florida Rail 64 Road Company, and the Pensacola and Perdido Rail Road and Canal Company (both in

1835). In 1838, eleven rail lines with approximately 700 miles of rail existed in Florida extending from the west boundary with Mobile, Alabama to the east coast village of

Fernandina, from the city of Columbus, Georgia to the north and as far south as St.

Augustine.128

The year that Billings entered Meadville Theological School, 1845, the United

States federal government released 500,000 acres of land to the newly accepted State of

Florida. Even so, this did little to spur the State to develop lines. Ten years later, as

Billings ministered to the congregation in Quincy, Illinois and witnessed the fever over the proposed Union Pacific line, another federal grant of land stipulating a time limit for completion of rail lines motivated Florida legislators to form an Internal Improvement

Fund. Florida legislators assigned the task of assisting the construction of railroads through State aid to the Fund. Four rail lines took advantage of the Fund's ability to grant lands in exchange for first mortgage bonds: the Florida, Atlantic and Gulf Central

Railroad created in 1851; the Florida Railroad Company, the Alabama and Florida

Railroad and the Pensacola and Georgia Railroad all created in 1853. These four lines received grants of land totaling in the amount of 1,760,500 acres. With the contributions of land, the companies located roads between Jacksonville west to Alligator (now Lake

City) and from Alligator to Tallahassee. Two years following the land grants, DeBow's

Review, according to a report in the Florida Peninsular, reported that Florida had 736 miles of railroad in operation, more than Arkansas or Texas at the time. But the momentum in developing the transportation system throughout the State came to an abrupt halt during the Civil War.129 65 The rail lines played important roles during the Civil War acting as routes of escape, attack and defense, and transport for food, supplies and troops. Both sides targeted the cities of Pensacola, Fernandina, Jacksonville and Cedar Keys, which all contained rail lines, for destruction and occupation during the war because of their connection to the roads. The first documented attack on a Florida rail line occurred in

Cedar Keys, a small town located approximately 130 miles southwest of Jacksonville.

Brigadier General J.H. Trapier of the Confederate States Army reported on January 20,

1862, that the United States troops approached the village of Cedar Keys from the harbor and burned the wharf along with several rail cars owned by the Florida Railroad.

This action disabled any transport of Confederate troops or supplies to other ports located within the Gulf. Two months later, the east coast suffered a similar fate.130

Fernandina’s site on Amelia Island marked it as an important location for the

Florida Railroad Company and, therefore, a prime target for the Union Army in March

1862. Florida State Senator David Levy Yulee, owner of the Florida Railroad Company, chose the small village for the eastern terminus of the line as it provided access to the only deep-water harbor in northeastern Florida. Most of the residents in this little village remained loyal to the Union objecting to secession. Colonel Edward Hopkins of the

Fourth Florida Infantry, however, ordered the evacuation of all persons on March 2 before the anticipated arrival of Union troops stating that "a special train would leave the city expressly for the transportation of all women and children desirous of leaving."131 On the appointed day, a United States fleet entered the harbor as the train filled with Confederate sympathizers prepared to leave. United States Commodore 66 DuPonts of the flagship Mohican noted in his report the sighting of the train with passengers and the chase of the train by the Ottawa. The train escaped over the railroad bridge connecting Fernandina to the mainland. Two weeks after seizing Fernandina and its harbor the Union army occupied Jacksonville. 132

Billings’ experience with Florida railroads commenced during his service as a

Union officer. Confederate troops destroyed rail lines, bridges and depots as the retreated inland ahead of Union troops. Billings would have witnessed the destruction during his recruiting expeditions and raids along the rivers of Florida. Nevertheless, the

Union Army proved their ability to repair or find other uses for the railroad's bed, materials and positions. One such instance occurred two months after Billings arrived in

Jacksonville via Fernandina. In March 1863, the Seventh Regiment of New Hampshire

Volunteers repaired the bridge connecting Fernandina to the mainland and utilized it for transporting troops and supplies over the bridge. The same regiment, eleven months later, left Fernandina using the line between the turnpike and the Florida Railroad as a path in their march towards the only battle to take place in Florida, the Battle of

Olustee. As the regiment continued through Sanderson's Station reports of the

Confederate Army's presence was made and the regiment's historian noted, "rebels occupied a fortified position at the edge of a large swamp in front of the railroad bed or dump, forming a ready breastwork in case they were driven out of their trenches."133

The failure of the Union Army in their defeat at Olustee was credited in part to a lack of troops provided via the Florida Central railroad,

If the movement was intended for permanent occupation, then the supporting troops, many of which had not even reached Jacksonville on the date of the battle of Olustee, should have been at Baldwin's Station, 67 Barbour's and Sanderson's; and largely, the Florida Central railroad, as far as Sanderson's, could have been equipped and utilized in moving our troops and supplies.134

The need to introduce new technologies and industries into the state demanded rebuilding of the destroyed infrastructure. Members of the elite class considered how to assist the state in this process. In 1866, the United States Government granted a five- year extension on the 1856 land grants to motivate the railroad companies to complete the rail lines. Northern correspondents reported on the deplorable transportation system while also encouraging readers to migrate south to enjoy mild summers and capitalize on the abundant entrepreneurial opportunities. Members of the emerging middle class,

Northerners and Southerners, understood the rail lines to be an important element in the reconciliation process. Even so, members of both the elite and middles classes disagreed on what price to pay for reconciliation.135

During the period known as military reconstruction (1865-1868), the Florida revealed racial inequality as the price they were willing to pay for reconciliation. The legislative bodies incorporated new railroads like the Great Southern

Railway Company and amended the acts incorporating existing railroads such as the

Pensacola and Georgia Railroad Company and the Lake City and Suwannee Railroad

Company. The 1866 report of the Internal Improvement Fund indicates that the Florida

Railroad Company, which suffered so much destruction during the war, failed to pay the interest on the mortgage bonds issued prior to the war. As a result, the Fund sold the line to Edward N. Dickerson on November 1, 1866 for the amount of $323,400. It is in the 1866 Governor’s address, though, where the Governor gave the first indication of

Florida’s betrayal to the laboring class, now associated with the black community. 68 Governor Walker declared a threatening tone stating that while the State ratified the

Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, he believed the Freedmen’s Bureau overextended their judicial powers raising the question of federal powers versus state’s powers. Walker stated his position that the State lawmakers, which at the time consisted of white Southern men of the elite planter class, held the powers to create and enforce laws concerning the black community.136

The stance of Governor Walker and other white Southerners instigated a forceful push by Radical Republicans and the commencement of Radical

Reconstruction. Billings, holding to his emancipationist beliefs, joined forces with

Daniel Richards and other Radical Republicans to fight against the oppressive stance of

Southern whites. Billings, Richards and William Saunders stumped throughout the state prior to the 1868 Constitution Convention gaining support from the black community.

Billings’ messages to his audiences indicated he believed that racial inequality was too high a price for reconciliation. Even so, Billings and Richards failed to gain seats in the convention due to ineligibility. Members of the Convention accused the two along with the New York Tribune reporter Solon Robinson to have used the Convention in a plan to

"obtain possession of the railroads of the State."137 Ironically, the very individuals that accused Billings and the others became embroiled in controversies involving the railroads for the next four years.138

The legislative members that did gain seats, predominately Conservative

Republicans such as Marcellus Stearns, Ossian B. Hart and Claiborne R. Mobley, worked to increase the number of lines within the State. Due to the fact the State

Constitution provided no codification of the formation of railroad companies, State 69 politicians created a Committee on Railroads to oversee the incorporation of the lines.

The eagerness to overlook certain requirements is apparent, however, when considering the various other bills considered during the first session. By July 24, 1868, the Senate entertained seven bills to either incorporate, amend the incorporation of or revive the charter of various lines, new and old, most of which proposed to develop the rail system in western Florida. The flurry of activity caused the Committee on Corporations to question “whether any act of incorporation of a private character . . . has a legal and valid existence without the three months notice having been given, and without the payment of one hundred dollars into the State treasury previous to the application for granting of such charter.”139 State Attorney General James D. Westcott responded by stating that the 1865 Florida Constitution required the payment of a $100 fee prior to the introduction of the application for incorporation for a railroad company.

Additionally, the Constitution required notice to be given. Westcott pointed out that the

Constitution required both sections; if the Senate waived one or both sections in favor of any railroad corporation, the act of incorporation would be unconstitutional.140

The legal interpretation by the Attorney General failed to influence the Senate in their consideration of the acts. The Senate's Committee on Railroads, three days later, recommended postponement of all bills previously introduced for the incorporation of rail companies. Nevertheless, the Committee promoted the passage of the bill incorporating the Jacksonville and St. Augustine Railroad Company for a road in eastern Florida. While the Senate agreed with the postponement, the House passed bills incorporating the Pensacola and Perdido Railroad, Pensacola and Louisville Railroad

Company (formerly the Alabama and Florida Railroad), Jacksonville and St. Augustine 70 Railroad Company and the Georgia, Gainesville and Tampa Railroad Company.

Additionally, upon recommendation of the Committee on Railroads, Governor Harrison

Reed approved the act enabling the purchasers of the Florida, Atlantic and Gulf Central to conduct business under the same name.141

The frenetic development of Florida's transportation system created a crisis in

1869. Governor Harrison Reed called a special session stating that

The recent sale of the Pensacola and Georgia Railroad, and the Tallahassee Railroad, renders immediate legislation necessary to protect the public interest and enable the purchasers to provide for the extension and completion of their roads, and to enjoy the benefits of the Internal Improvement laws of the State.142

One specific issue mentioned in the Governor's Message on June 9, charged the legislative bodies with securing "the purchasers of the Pensacola and Georgia and the

Tallahassee Railroads, recently sold by the Board of Internal Improvements, corporate powers and facilities to complete the road to the western boundary of the State."143

Franklin Dibble, A. Huling, R.M. Cheney and associates purchased the two lines with

State Bonds issued to the previous owners and $400,000 cash. The Governor called the extra session due to the fact that this group of men became embroiled in the annexation issue circulating in northwestern Florida at this time. The Weekly Floridian and the

Florida Peninsular reported a threat made by the citizens of northwestern Florida that if the State failed to build a road for them, Alabama would annex eight counties:

Escambia, Santa Rosa, Washington, Walton, Holmes, Jackson, Calhoun and Franklin.

In response to the threat, both legislative bodies passed bills incorporating the

Jacksonville, Pensacola and Mobile Railroad Company with exclusive rights. The president of the Atlantic Gulf Railroad Company, John Screven, protested against these 71 rights considering them a monopoly in favor of the new corporation. His mainly questioned the restriction of other railroads connecting or crossing the line operated by the competition. Focusing the petition on the benefits to the people of Florida, Screven argued against the restriction and petitioned the legislation to amend the Jacksonville,

Pensacola and Mobile Railroad Company incorporation act granting the lines in northwestern Florida the ability to work in cooperation.144

While the House and Senate promoted the development of the rail system, mainly in the northeastern portion of the state, the newspapers Weekly Floridian and

Florida Peninsular revealed underlying issues in the matter. The Weekly Floridian, based in Tallahassee, criticized the aid provided to the new Jacksonville, Pensacola and

Mobile Railroad Company. The editor of the paper agreed with Screvens in that the act created a monopoly and pointed out that the aid consisted of a cash amount between

$16,000 and $20,000 per acre would be paid to the company for the estimated length of the line prior to the commencement of the construction. Additionally, the complete grant of land for the right of way of the road instantly vested to the company rather than after the completion of a determined set of mileage in the road. In exchange for the aid, the newly formed company would issue company bonds to the State. While this in and of itself was a standard exchange between the State and railroad companies, the editor speculated this created an issue in that the "company and road exist[ed] in paper only."145 The danger lay in the ability of the company to perform a survey and begin construction in a timely manner without causing an undue burden and inconvenience on the citizens of the State. The editor also pointed out that the act incorporating the company required a private owner of land to release any claim to land that the railroad 72 company perchance required for the building of the road. The provision in the act regarding this eminent domain provided no relief to the private owner of the land other than whatever advantage could be found in having the line run through the subject property.146

The Florida Peninsular, located in Tampa, evidences how residents of

Hillsborough County, at the time considered south Florida, desired a rail line built connecting Tampa Bay with the Atlantic Ocean. The correspondent of the paper conveyed this desire while at the same time objecting to the proposal of the eastern terminus set at Mellonville just outside of Jacksonville. The article alleged that

Governor Reed pushed for this location and questioned his motive considering his interest in land in the area. Reed also promoted that the line terminate in Charlotte

Harbor, south of Tampa, with a trunk running to Tampa. The residents of Hillsborough

County felt cheated by the Florida Railroad which 15 years previously promised a road to Tampa with a trunk to Cedar Key but instead constructed their mainline to Cedar Key neglecting the promised portion to Tampa. Throughout the months of June and July, citizens of Tampa met to discuss the promotion of a line running to Tampa; in support of such a line, the leading members of the city drafted a resolution stating the city's support for the incorporation of the Georgia, Gainesville and Tampa Railroad

Company. In July, the editor of the Florida Peninsular joined in the protest of the

Weekly Floridian against the Jacksonville, Pensacola and Mobile Railroad Company. In addition to objecting to the aid provided to the company, the editor pointed out that

George W. Swepson, John P. Anderson and General Milton S. Littlefield actually owned the company. Anderson was a Jacksonville attorney who previously worked for 73 the Florida, Atlantic and Gulf Central; Swepson and Littlefield fled to Florida after committing fraud against the state of North Carolina in a railroad bonds scheme.147

By 1871, when Billings returned to Tallahassee as State Senator, reconciliation through industrialization was the predominant theme throughout the south. Billings followed the party line by promoting the development of railroads specifically if it benefitted David Yulee’s interest in the Florida Railroad Company. Yulee’s efforts to bring the market revolution to Florida since the 1850s would have appealed to Billings’ desire to transform post-war Florida. During the 1871 session, Billings called for an investigation into the 1869 sale of the Jacksonville, Pensacola and Mobile Railroad

Company and accepted appointment to a special committee on railroads for the investigation. One bill proposed by another Senator called for the repeal of the incorporation of the Great Southern Railway. Three members of the committee on railroads rejected the bill stating that such action denied the people of South Florida adequate transportation and communication. Billings, however, continued to promote the passage of the bill. When the bill came up to vote on January 19, Billings abstained from voting on the bill; even so, it passed giving Yulee’s company free access to South

Florida under the name of the Atlantic, Gulf and West India Transit Company.148

It is no surprise that Billings supported Yulee’s enterprises. Fernandina, where

Billings resided after the Civil War, emerged as a potential major commercial site due to Yulee’s planning. After the Civil War, the Florida Railroad Company employed 11% of the working population in Fernandina Beach according to the 1870 census.

Additionally, the rebuilding of the railroad lines required carpenters, which in this small town comprised 8.5% of the working population. The success or failure of Yulee’s 74 company affected one out of five members of the working class in Fernandina. Billings, as the representative of this area, understood the impact and importance of continuing the line.149

Another reason for Billings aligning with Yulee could be accounted to Yulee’s belief in reconstruction of the South. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Yulee abdicated his seat when Florida seceded and remained loyal to the

Confederate Army throughout the rebellion. After the War, Yulee lost control of the

Florida Railroad Company only to regain it once released from the federal prison. In

1874, the Fernandina Observer reported that allegations made against Yulee for rallying behind the idea of Southern planters receive compensation for the loss of slave labor were false. To prove that Yulee stood behind the ideas of Reconstruction, the newspaper published resolutions formulated by Yulee five years previously. These resolutions indicated Yulee’s thought process fell in line with a Northerner like Billings who wished to see the North and South reconciled after the Civil War.150

One resolution made by Yulee that would have appealed to Billings during his tenure as Senator was the statement

That the material progress of all communities depends upon the useful and profitable employment of their inhabitants; that steady and useful occupation is a social duty; and that while every citizen is under obligation to contribute by his individual labor to the general productive ability of society, it is also a proper concern of society to provide, by a judicious and liberal promotion of public improvements, the facilities necessary to secure to industry its best results.151

To a Northerner like Billings this statement embraced the concept of republicanism through industry and free labor, the very idea that permeated Republican politics prior to the Civil War. Reminiscent of Billings’ childhood days in Saco, Maine, this specific 75 resolution called on every able-bodied resident of Florida to work towards the progress of the State and move away from its previous agrarian methods. Yet, one of the succeeding resolutions evidenced a flaw within both the Northerners’ and Conservative

Southerners’ understanding of “every citizen.”152

Yulee recognized that to satisfy the desire of bringing new industries and trade to the State a growth in population was necessary. As discussed in the previous chapter,

Florida welcomed immigrants from the North for this very reason. One of the resolutions formulated by Yulee stated that the State would welcome “all who can better their condition by a change of homes, and especially the people of our sister

States, to come with their strong arms, their useful skills, and their accumulated wealth, and casting their lots with us, partaking in the inviting attractions of this section of our country.”153 The wording used by Yulee makes it clear that, while declaring a welcome to all members of either race, he anticipated a division of labor between two classes.

Those with “strong arms” and “useful skills” comprised the working class and those with “accumulated wealth” represented the middle-class.154

This division of class and race is apparent when considering the occupations reported for the residents of Fernandina on the 1870 census. White males still engaged in skilled occupations such as blacksmith, brickmason and carpenters though in smaller numbers than the previous 1860 census. Black males also worked in these skilled areas with their numbers being 3, 5 and 11, respectively. Black males dominated the occupations of farmers, laborers and sawmill/timber employees followed by being employed by the Florida Railroad, working as stevedores and as hotel employees. While the census indicated that most of the working age women in Fernandina remained at 76 home, a large proportion of black women reported being domestic servants, 61, compared to the 17 white women in the same occupation. Six black women reported still working on farms and five reported working as washers and seamstresses. While the majority of black employees filled labor type occupations, whites in Fernandina worked as clerks for the Florida Railroad Company, retail stores, sawmills and the shipping industry.155

Billings’ occupation of lawyer placed him in the emerging middle-class but his real property holdings raised his standing within the Fernandina community. Only thirteen men in Fernandina claimed having property, both real and intangible, with values over $10,000. Three of these men worked for the Florida Railroad Company, while the other men reported being retired, a lumber manufacturer, a hotel owner, a clerk of the Circuit Court and the Bishop of the Episcopal Church. The disparity between these thirteen white men, native and foreign born, and the remaining residents indicates the beginning of the gap between the classes. The majority of the residents, both black and white, reported owning less than $1,000 in combined real and intangible property. This group included teachers, farmers, stevedores, and city employees such as the Marshall, a black man, and the one police officer, a white man. Those individuals comprising the middle class in Fernandina included a black farmer, a judge, a second clerk of the Circuit Court, retailers, lawyers and retired foreign-born individuals from various occupations.156

Those individuals that viewed themselves as the instruments of Reconstruction, such as Billings, instituted policies favoring those with wealth. Besides the overly generous funding to the railroads companies, corporations often found favor through 77 various policies. On the State level, Billings in 1873 introduced and voted for the passage of a bill to repeal the act granting State citizens protection from defaulting foreign corporations. Governor Reed called for a repeal of this bill in his 1872 address stating that the insurance companies providing the bonds for foreign companies were themselves foreign companies. Reed believed that the State could protect its own citizens without having out-of-state corporations getting involved. Additionally, the out- of-state insurance companies profited from premiums paid to them yet “they neither directly or indirectly contribute[d] to the support of the government.”157 This action of

Billings, however, is significant due to the fact that out-of-state corporations controlled many of the State’s railroads. By removing legislation that protected State citizens against failing businesses incorporated in other States, State legislators opened the door for more foreign corporations to do business in Florida.158

Favorable inducements occurred on the local level as well. One example is found in the April 25, 1874 edition of the Fernandina Observer. The paper posted the terms of a new City ordinance exempting certain businesses from local taxes. Any manufacturing company with $3,000 to $5,000 in capital received an exemption of three years; for a company with $5,000 to $10,000 capital the exemption extended to 5 years and 7 years for over $10,000 capital. As a means of enticing companies in the hospitality industry, the city of Fernandina provided a seven year exemption for hotels that provided accommodations for 50+ guests and required a $20,000 investment.159

As the railroad companies received State financial aid, State legislators looked the other way when the companies failed to pay either the interest on the State aid or taxes until such neglect reflected badly on State legislators. Governor Reed addressed these 78 issues in his 1872 address to the General Assembly and Senate calling for an investigation and resolution. For Reed, though, the call for a solution came too late as his participation in the railroad dealings gave way to the final impeachment attempt against him. Interestingly enough, however, residents who failed to pay taxes underwent harsh punishment. In the same 1872 address by Governor Reed, he reported of incidents where poor citizens, and specifically a black man, sacrificed their personal belongings even though the items fell under the protection of homestead status. Such incidents demonstrated the disparity between race and class Radical Republicans imported with their attempts in reconciling North and South.160

Favoritism for railroad companies and corporations did not stop with Governor

Reed’s term as governor though it did slow down. Governor Ossian B. Hart’s 1873 address continued to point out that railroad companies failed to pay taxes and interest on their bonds. Not until Hart’s successor, Marcellus Stearns did legislators provide a way to protect citizens with regard to railroad companies. Governor Stearns called for the passage of bills standardizing the incorporation of railroads, regulating the sale of rail tickets and denying the Jacksonville, Pensacola and Mobile Railroad Company the ability to issue bonds. Regarding the legislation on the incorporation of railroad and canal companies Governor Stearns stated in his address on January 16, 1875, that

It is the hope that this act will take the place of all special legislation on this subject, and that hereafter no private act of incorporation will be granted in this State. Special legislation is the bane of any government. It is anti-republican in its tendency, and dangerous to the liberties of the people. It is usually asked for the purpose of obtaining extraordinary powers and privileges, thus creating unjust monopolies, and confining to a few those rights and facilities which should remain accessible to all.161

79 This law made the number of incorporators uniform, provided powers to the company to conduct surveys, purchase and sell land, construct a road that provided the most public benefit, work in conjunction with other lines by intersecting or joining of the two lines and regulate the timetables of traveling. Interestingly enough, Senator John

Wallace, author of Carpet-Bag Rule in Florida: the Inside Workings of the

Reconstruction of Civil Government in Florida after the Close of the Civil War (1913), on January 20 introduced a bill to repeal the legislation. The bill passed through the three readings only to be defeated on February 15. Wallace does not specifically address this piece of legislation in his book. His opposition to Governor Stearns is apparent, however, as it is towards any individual in a government position who was not a native to Florida. Any action committed by Stearns, or Harrison Reed or Liberty Billings, met with complete resistance by Wallace.162

The passage of Chapter 39 of the Florida Statutes under Governor Stearns helped to eliminate the monopolistic activities of the railroads prior to the end of

Radical Reconstruction. The importance of commerce and immigration emerged as the

Reconstructionists’ purpose for the rails rather than the "get rich quick schemes" of previous years. In response to the change of emphasis, the companies of the West India,

Atlantic & Gulf Transit (formerly the Florida Railroad Company) and the Jacksonville,

Pensacola & Mobile Railroad reduced their rates for an influx of immigrants from New

Orleans in 1874 and Minnesotans in 1875, respectively. Florida newspapers joined in the promotion of the lines by generating positive articles on the usefulness of the roads.

The East Florida Banner interviewed one of the incorporators of the St. John's, Lake

Eustis and Gulf Railroad and found him respectable. In turn, the correspondent reported 80 that the road connected Floridians in the "common interest" of the State’s welfare.163

The railroad companies used the papers to create a connection with the farmers. The

East Florida Banner announced the Atlantic & Gulf Railroad Company offered inducements for the growers who utilized their line in shipping their crops to northern markets while the Tallahassee Sentinel reported the change of travel times for growers of early vegetables.164

Florida’s railroad politics in the years following the Civil War tarnished the reputations of Northerners and Southerners alike. The memory of progress during the antebellum period, though, motivated Reconstructionists, like Liberty Billings, to push for railroads and industry in the South. Billings’ childhood taught him just how industrialization benefitted a town, a region and the people residing within. While he preached in Quincy, Illinois during one of the Underground Railroad’s most active periods, he witnessed the push made by Stephen Douglas for a transcontinental line.

Florida appeared to be the perfect place for Billings to pursue what he saw others achieve through industrialization. Recognizing that such progress required cooperation from government and business owners, Billings utilized his position as Senator to assist in the transformation of Florida. In so doing, Billings cooperated with the separation of classes and races in his attempts to reunite North and South.

81

V. CONCLUSIONS

Billings delivered his speech to the Senate in 1871 in response to the violence and intimidation felt by Republicans for their efforts in enforcing civil equality. Radical

Republicans believed in a dream, which Billings described in the speech stating

We wish to see this Southern land rise from the ashes of a dead past to grasp the future with its new and holier civilization. We wish to see freedom secured to all, and toil and industry honored and respected. We wish to see an awful respect for human life . . . and witness in this State the glorious spectacle of liberty as the result of law.165

The dream though was corrupted. Republicans sacrificed liberty and freedom for industry and capitalism. Billings followed the crowd and left behind his pursuit of political and legal equality for the black community.

Predominant historians treat Billings’ as a person on the periphery of

Reconstruction Florida politics. Yet, his life exemplifies the dominant themes of this topic. The conflicts and defeats Radical Republicans experienced while struggling for civil equality are prevalent in his story. The process of transitioning from a hopeful activist of emancipation to a promoter of reconciliation is also present. Finally, Billings presents a view at the process of how the concerns of class supplanted those of race.

This study, therefore, attempts to bring him more into full view by examining his complete life. The challenge to such a study, as in many others, is the lack of records originating from the subject’s own hand. Sources from individuals with whom Billings associated provide a biased picture of him. Senate journals and Florida Supreme Court

82 cases not previously considered provide a new perspective on Billings. These sources require a fresh look at Billings, and other individuals, to gain further insight into the development of Florida.

Billings’ personal ideology formed long before he arrived in Florida as a soldier in late 1862. He learned the tenets of Yankee republicanism and capitalism as he watched his hometown grow into a bustling industrial center. He witnessed how labor in factories supplanted the importance of farm labor. Northern society composed of whites, free blacks and immigrants fractured into classes that demonstrated not only positions in society but political beliefs as well. The evidence indicates that Billings subscribed to the Whiggish position of government’s contribution to economic growth and social control.

The concept of slavery clashed with the moralistic and emerging capitalistic ethics of the North. Abolitionists fought against slavery based on economic and spiritual arguments. Billings’ faith, Unitarianism, held that slavery went against the command to love one’s fellow man. His entry into the to take up the fight against immorality appears logical for a third son. Whether or not Billings participated in the Underground

Railroad while in Quincy, Illinois is one aspect of his life yet to be determined. Even so, sources indicate that Billings opposed slavery based on moral and political grounds.

Billings’ escalated his attempts to defeat slavery by joining the Union Army in late 1862. His efforts as an officer of the First South Carolina Volunteers to recruit and train slaves, or contraband, to fight for the Union Army contributed to the acceptance of blacks as soldiers. The evidence regarding Billings during this period indicates he diligently promoted emancipation. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson did not hold 83 Billings in high regard as a soldier yet Higginson recognized that Billings’ oratorical skills influenced the soldiers to fight for their freedom. After being injured, Billings’ continued to pursue avenues to secure freedom for the enslaved.

Billings’ return to Florida in 1867 evidences his continuation to seek legal freedom for the black community. His activism in the Union League provided an outlet for his rhetorical skills. His Unitarian belief in human equality coupled with his

Whiggish holding to free labor motivated his pursuit of political office during the 1868 elections. Even though he spoke out against political and physical repression of the black community, this was as far as Billings would go for them. His plans for installing

Northern culture in Florida meant that the Northern concept of class and race would also find its place in the destroyed agrarian culture.

The 1868 elections marked a turning point for him. The ratification of Florida’s

1868 constitution accomplished enfranchisement for the black community even if for a limited time. Billings’ previous vindictive rhetoric against conservatives and Democrats served only to maintain a division amongst Florida citizens. The evidence indicates that after spending 30 days in jail he understood that reconciliation overshadowed any other goals that emancipation raised. Billings, like other Radical Republicans, turned to the task of industrializing Florida and reshaping southern society to imitate the Northern culture with which he was so familiar.

The cases that Billings appealed to the Florida Supreme Court indicate that the land reform impacted all citizens of Florida. The historiography on this period alludes to issues the black community confronted during the early years of Reconstruction focusing mainly on the Freedmen’s Bureau. Yet these cases demonstrate that farmland 84 was not the only type of land that fell under the Acts enacted by the Civil War

Congress. They also demonstrate that the complications surrounding the lands extended past the demise of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The decisions in the matters Billings v.

McDermott and Billings v. Starke set precedent in Florida’s real estate law that are still in force.

The industrialization of Florida stood as the key to reconciliation after the war and Billings endorsed this avenue as state senator. His votes regarding railroad companies indicate his support for Yulee’s railroad company. This paper considers the motive for these votes as practical rather than motivated by self-interest considering that the company employed a large percentage of citizens in Billings’ region. It is true that the company employed an imbalanced ratio of black to white. But, the loss of the railroad either by competition or lack of interest would have proven devastating to all of

Fernandina’s citizens. Billings’ efforts assisted in postponing this devastation until the

20th century.

Billings’ followed the crowd when he transitioned from emancipationist to reconciliationist. Just like Harriet Beecher Stowe and New York Tribune editor Horace

Greeley industry superseded freedom as reconciliation became the primary goal of

Reconstruction. The fight over who would control the industry and laborers of Florida meant that Billings’ needed to abandon the freedmen for whom he fought so hard for so long. In this abandonment, Billings’ faded from the pages of history and deemed less important than other Floridians. This thesis attempts to bring Billings, and others like him, back into focus. In so doing, a more objective lens can be focused on the individuals overlooked in the historiography of this contentious period. 85 Radical Reconstruction ended much the same way it began - under a dark cloud of chaos and disagreement. Billings, however, did not participate in Florida’s final argument that brought the death knell to this tumultuous period. Having been a widower for nearly ten years, Billings married in August 1876. The following fall, yellow fever swept through Fernandina instigating many of its residents to leave town. Billings remained though to care for the sick; he died October 11, 1877 due to his efforts.166

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NOTES

1 Liberty Billings to Senate of Florida, speech, January 12, 1871, in Reconstruction in Florida; Pamphlets (1867-1871), Harvard University Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Karl H. Grismer, A History of the City of Tampa and the Tampa Bay Region of Florida (St. Petersburg, FL: The St. Petersburg Printing Co. Inc., 1950), 151; Ernest Lauren Robinson, History of Hillsborough County, Florida; Narrative and Biographical (St. Augustine, FL: The Record Company, 1928), 271-3. 2 Saco City Council, First Book of Records of the Town of Pepperellborough now the City of Saco (Portland, ME: Thurston Print, 1896), 86; Thomas Hardiman, "An Introduction to Saco History," City of Saco, Maine, http://www.sacomaine.org/community/history/introduction.shtml [accessed May 24, 2011]; Thomas Hardiman, “Downtown Saco History,” City of Saco, Maine, http://www.sacomaine.org/community/history/downtown.shtml [accessed May 24, 2011]; Mitchell & Weston, The Peterborough Register (Brunswick, ME: The H.E. Mitchell, Co., 1905), 19. 3 Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972), 400. 4 Leonard Bacon, Slavery Discussed in Occasional Essays from 1833 to 1846 (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1846), 60. 5 Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945), 409- 67; Ahlstrom, 388-402, 600-14. 6 Florida Senate, A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the First General Assembly of the State of Florida at its First Session, 1845; Dorothy Dodd, “Florida in 1845 Statistics - Economic Life - Social Life,” Florida Historical Quarterly 24 (1945): 3, 29; For more information on the activities of the First General Assembly see W.T. Cash, Florida Becomes a State (Tallahassee: Florida Centennial, 1945), 85-95. 7 Dodd, 6, 8-9; Michael Gannon, ed., The New History of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 220, 224-5, 232; Charlton W. Tebeau, A History of Florida (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 182; Lewis N. Wynne and Robert A. Taylor, Florida in the Civil War (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2002), 21; Jane L. Landers, “Traditions of African American Freedom and Community in Spanish Colonial Florida,” in The African American Heritage of Florida ed. David R. Colburn and Jane L. Landers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 18, 19, 25, 34. 8 Leslie A. Thompson, Esq. Manual or Digest of the Statute Law of the State of Florida (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1947), 531-3, 536-7; State of Florida, The Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of Florida, Fifth Session (Tallahassee: Office of the Floridian and Journal, 1851), 114- 5, 132. 9 J.D. B. DeBow, The Commercial Review, Commerce, Polity, Agriculture, Manufactures, Internal Improvements and General Literature, Vol. VIII (New Orleans, 1850), 30, 31; East Floridian, April 1, 1858; George M. Barbour, Florida for Tourists, Invalids and Settlers: Containing Practical Information regarding Climate, Soil, and Productions; Citites, Towns, and People; the Culture of the Orange and other Tropical Fruits; Farming and Gardening; Scenery and Resorts; Sport; Routes of Travel, etc. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1884), 96; Gregg M. Turner, A Journey into Florida Railroad History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 80; Arthur W. Thompson, "The Railroad Background of the Florida Senatorial Election of 1851," Florida Historical Quarterly 31 (1953): 181-95.

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10 George W. Childs, National Almanac and Annual Record for the Year 1863 (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1863), 456; East Floridian, March 1, 1860, March 15, 1860; Julia F. Smith, “Slavetrading in Antebellum Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 3 (1972): 252-61; Daniel L. Schafer, “‘A Class of People Neither Freemen nor Slaves’: From Spanish to American Race Relations in Florida, 1821-1861,” Journal of Social History 26 (1993): 601-2; Gannon, 226, 228; Tebeau, 187. 11 American Unitarian Association, Tracts of the American Unitarian Association, First Series, Vol. XIX (Boston: Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1846), 47-62; American Unitarian Association, The Unitarian Annual Register for the Year 1849 (Boston: Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1849), 22; American Unitarian Association, The Unitarian Annual Register for the Year 1852 (Boston: Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1852), 17; Collins and Perry, 208-9; D. Hamilton Hurd, ed., History of Merrimack and Belknap Counties, New Hampshire (Philadelphia: J.W. Lewis & Co., 1885), 73; Ancestry.com, "U.S. Returns from Military Posts, 1806-1916," National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Washington, D.C., Returns from U.S. Military Posts, 1800-1916; Microfilm Serial: M617, Microfilm Roll: 1061, [accessed May 15, 2011]; Ayling, 1017; Ancestry.com, "U.S. Colored Troops Military Service Records, 1861-1865," National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, D.C.; Compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served With the United States Colored Troops: Infantry Organizations, 31st through 35th, Microfilm Serial: M1992, Microfilm Roll: 48, http://www.ancestry.com/ [accessed May 15, 2011]. 12 Frank Moore, The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1862), 2, 229-34, 283, 293, 325-7, 349; Augustus D. Ayling, Revised Register of the Soldiers and Sailors of New Hampshire in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1866 (Concord: Ira C. Evans, 1895), 1017; Mitchell & Weston, The Peterborough Register (Brunswick, ME: The H.E. Mitchell, Co., 1905), 19; Hon. William H. Collins and F. Perry, Past and Present of the City of Quincy and Adams County, Illinois (Chicago: S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1905), 208-9; Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson; The Story of His Life (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1914), 215-52. 13 Ancestry.com, "U.S. Colored Troops Military Service Records, 1861-1865;” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Life in a Black Regiment (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870), 6; Stephen V. Ash, Firebrand of Liberty; The Story of Two Black Regiments that Changed the Course of the Civil War (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008), 55, 87, 101, 160, 206. 14 W.R. Cochrane, D.D. and George K. Wood, History of Francestown, New Hampshire from its Earliest Settlement April 1758 to January 1, 1891 with a Brief Genealogical Record of all the Francestown Families (Nashua, NH: James H. Barker, 1895), 631; Richard L. Hume, “Membership of the Florida Constitutional Convention of 1868: A Case Study of Republican Factionalism in the Reconstruction South,” Florida Historical Quarterly 51 (1972): 1-21; Cantor Brown, Ossian Bingley Hart: Florida’s Loyalist Reconstruction Governor (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 202-74; Cantor Brown, Florida’s Black Public Officials, 1867-1924 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 9, 10; Jerrell H. Shofner, “The Constitution of 1868,” Florida Historical Quarterly 41 (1963): 358; Jerrell H. Shofner, "Political Reconstruction in Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly 45 (1966): 147; Jerrell H. Shofner, Nor Is It Over Yet; Florida in the Era of Reconstruction, 1863-1877 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1974), 177-97; Michael W. Fitzgerald, The Union League Movement in the Deep South; Politics and Agricultural Change During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 9, 10, 72. 15 James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of the Home Rule at the South in 1877, Volume VII (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1906), 74-127; William Archibald Dunning, Reconstruction Political and Economic, 1865-1877 (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1907), xv; W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York and London: The Free Press, 1935, 1962, 1992): 713-5, 487, "To the Reader"; Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: The

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MacMillan Co., 1942); Howard K. Beale, "The Tariff and Reconstruction," American Historical Review 35 (1930): 276-294. 16 Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1997), xii. 17 Kenneth Stampp, Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York: Knopf, 1965), 11, 12; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), xx. 18 Foner, xxiii. 19 David Blight, Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univeristy, 2003), 2, 31-2, 47. 20 Caroline Mays Brevard, A History of Florida (New York: American Book Company, 1904), 187- 8; Maurice M. Vance, "Northerners in Late Nineteenth Century Florida: Carpetbaggers or Settlers?," Florida Historical Quarterly 38 (1959): 1-14. 21 Shofner, "The Constitution of 1868," 356-74; Shofner, "Political Reconstruction in Florida," 145- 70; Ralph L. Peek, "Election of 1870 and the End of Reconstruction Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly 45 (1967): 352-68; Merlin G. Cox, "Military Reconstruction in Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly 46 (1968): 219-33; Ralph L. Peek, "Military Reconstruction and the Growth of Anti-Negro Sentiment in Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly 47 (1969): 380-400; Joe M. Richardson, "Florida Back Codes," Florida Historical Quarterly 47 (1969): 365-79; Tebeau, 257-72; Hume, "Membership of the Florida Constitutional Convention of 1868,” 1-21; Shofner, Nor is It Over Yet. 22 Canter Brown, Jr., "Carpetbagger Intrigues, Black Leadership and Southern Loyalist Triumph: Florida Gubernatorial Election of 1872," Florida Historical Quarterly 72 (1994): 277. 23 Gannon, 249-65. 24 For the purposes of this work the term middle class is considered that group of individuals who viewed land as an investment rather than a means of subsistence, agreed that professionalism differentiated them from the typical laborer and believed in the control of society through evangelical reform; see William L. Barney, The Passage of the , an Interdisciplinary History of Nineteenth Century America (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1987), 87-92, 338-9. 25 Liberty Billings to Senate of Florida, speech, January 12, 1871, in Reconstruction in Florida; Pamphlets (1867-1871), Harvard University Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 26 For information on the free labor ideology see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Cox, “Military Reconstruction in Florida,” 219, 222; Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 225-7; Richard L. Hume and Jerry B. Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers and Scalawags; The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 2. 27 Seth C. Beach, “Unitarianism and the Reformation,” in Unitarianism: Its Origin and History; A Course of Sixteen Lectures delivered in Channing Hall, Boston ed. by American Unitarian Association (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1890), 48-77; George W. Cooke, Unitarianism in America; A History of its Origin and Development (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1910), 16; Conrad Wright, “Institutional Reconstruction in the Unitarian Controversy,” in American Unitarianism, 1805- 1865 ed. by Conrad Wright (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society and Northeastern University Press, 1989), 3; American Unitarian Association, The Unitarian Annual Register for the Year 1846 (Boston: Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1846), 41-2; Ahlstrom, 387, 395; Thomas Hardiman, “Downtown Saco History.”

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28 Ezra S. Gannett, “The Faith of the Unitarian Christian Explained, Justified and Distinguished,” in Tracts of the American Unitarian Association, First Series, Vol. XIX (Boston: Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1846), 117; Wilbur, 457-62; Conrad Wright, The Liberal Christians; Essays on American Unitarian History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 62-80; Ahlstrom, 640-4. 29 American Unitarian Association, Tracts, 52. 30 American Unitarian Association, Tracts, 59, 61; Christian Examiner, Vol. IV (1845), 281; Christian Examiner, Vol. VI (1846), 306; American Unitarian Association, The Unitarian Annual Register for the Year 1846, 25; American Unitarian Association, The Unitarian Annual Register for the Year 1848 (Boston: Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1848), 29. 31 American Unitarian Association, The Quarterly Journal of the American Unitarian Association, Vol. III (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1855), 226; Ishmael is a Biblical reference to the first born son of Abraham by the Egyptian slave Hagar. After the birth of Isaac by his wife Sarah, Abraham sent Hagar and Ishmael into the desert where God saved them from dying of dehydration. God promised Abraham, first, and Hagar, second, that Ishmael’s descendants would make a great nation; see Genesis 21. 32 Wilbur, 415, 465; American Unitarian Association, The Unitarian Annual Register for the Year 1849, 22; Andrew P. Parker, “Early New England Unitarians,” in Unitarianism: Its Origin and History; A Course of Sixteen Lectures delivered in Channing Hall, Boston (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1890), 155-77; G. Parker Lyon, The New Hampshire Annual Register and United States Calendar for the Year 1851, No. XXX (Concord: G. Parker Lyon, 1851), 119; American Unitarian Association, The Unitarian Annual Register for the Year 1852, 17; American Unitarian Association, The Quarterly Journal of the American Unitarian Association, Vol. III, 226-8; John R. McKivigan, “The Making of a Florida Carpetbagger: The Civil War Military Career of the Reverend Liberty Billings,” Journal of the Jacksonville Historical Society 3 (1996): 65-6. 33 Owen W. Muelder, The Underground Railroad in Western Illinois (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2008), 8-11, 26-7, 149-53. 34 Charles L. Blockson, The Underground Railroad (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987), 200; Karen Everingham, “African Americans in Illinois,” Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, http://www.state.il.us/hpa/lib/AfAmHist.htm [accessed November 8, 2011]; Thomas Adams Upchurch, Abolition Movement (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2011), xiv. 35 Douglas C. Stange, Patterns of Antislavery among American Unitarians, 1831-1860 (London: Associated University Press, 1977), 47-53, 100-20, ; Christian Examiner, Vol. IV (1845), 139; American Unitarian Association, The Unitarian Annual Register for the Year 1846, 34. 36 David Blight, “Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850,” (lecture recording, Open Yale University, New Haven, CT, Spring 2008); James A. Rawley, Race & Politics; “” and the Coming of the Civil War (Philadelphia & New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1969), 4-5, 26, 29, 33, 37, 72; David Blight, “‘A Hell of a Storm’: The Kansas- Nebraska Act and the Birth of the Republican Party, 1854-55,” (lecture recording, Open Yale University, New Haven, CT, Spring 2008); David Blight, “Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union, 1855-58,” (lecture recording, Open Yale University, New Haven, CT, Spring 2008); Stange, 38-42; Upchurch, 72, 77-80. 37 American Unitarian Association, The Monthly Journal, Vol. II (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1861), 232, 285; Hurd, 73; State of New Hampshire, Report of the Adjutant General of the State of New Hampshire for the Year ending May 20, 1865 (Concord: Amos Hadley State Printer, 1865), 341; Ancestry.com, "U.S. Returns from Military Posts, 1806-1916;” Ayling, 1017; Ancestry.com, "U.S. Colored Troops Military Service Records, 1861-1865;” Christopher Looby, ed., The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Chicago and London: University of

90

Chicago Press, 2000), 244-5; Mather Cleveland, New Hampshire Fights the Civil War (New London, New Hampshire: Mather Cleveland, MD, 1969), 51-2; McKivigan, 68. 38 Mary Thacher Higginson. 24, 41-54, 60, 88-9, 115, 142-52, 169, 190-8; Charlotte L. Forten, The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten (New York: Dryden Press, 1953), 137-8; for more information on the Anthony Burns matter, see Albert J. von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns; Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); for more information on the John Brown matter, see Edward J. Renehan, Jr., The Secret Six; The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1995) and Janet Kemper Beck, Creating the John Brown Legend; Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Child and Higginson in Defense of the Raid on Harper’s Ferry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., Inc., 2009). 39 James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War; How American Negroes Felt and Acted during the War for the Union (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 57, 165; Forten, 24; Mary Thacher Higginson, 202-15. 40 Looby, 45. 41 Looby, 51. 42 Looby, 92, 250-1; The New South, Port Royal, SC, January 17, 1863; Ash, 6-7. 43 Ash, 25, 29; Forten, 1, 7-8, 17, 19-25, 119, 133, 142-3. 44 Forten, 151; McKivigan, 72. 45 Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journal of Charlotte Forten Grimké (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 431; Forten, 153-5. 46 Looby, 92. 47 United States, The War of the Rebellion, A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 1, Vol. XIV (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1885), 195-8, 226; Looby, 92-94, 112; Tracy J. Revels, Grander in Her Daughters; Florida’s Women During the Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 120; Ash, 31-66; Colonel Montgomery shared a history with Colonel Higginson. Montgomery settled in Kansas the year of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and formed his reputation as a jayhawker in the violence following the passage of the bill. As a member of John Brown’s anti-slavery militant group, Montgomery met Higginson and continued to work with him as an agent for the Kansas National Committee. When Higginson needed a volunteer to evaluate whether John Brown could be rescued from jail, it was Montgomery to whom Higginson turned; see David L. Gilmore, The Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co., 2005), 89- 94; Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, ed., The Life and Letters of John Brown: Liberator of Kansas and Martyr of Virginia (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), 399, 385, 472-3, 480; Mary Thacher Higginson, 169, 196-7. 48 Looby, 117; Pensinula, April 18, 1863; United States, The War of the Rebellion, 236-9; Ash, 152, 160; McKivigan, 74-5. 49 Looby, 139. 50 Lobby, 282. 51 Looby, 144, 162, 272-3, 303; Ayling, 1017. 52 Looby, 340-2. 53 Looby, 323-4, 329-30, 347-8, 363-4; Cochrane and Wood, 631. 54 Brown, Ossian Bingley Hart, 190-5; Brown, Florida’s Black Public Officials, 7; Shofner, “The Constitution of 1868,” 358; John Wallace, Carpet-Bag Rule in Florida; The Inside Working of the

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Reconstruction of Civil Government in Florida after the Close of the Civil War, Allan Nevins, ed. (Gainesville: Press, 1964), 42-6; Fitzgerald, 4, 9-14, 136. 55 Semi-Weekly Floridian, October 8, 1867. 56 Florida Union, October 5, 1867; Brown, Ossian Bingley Hart, 191; Joe M. Richardson, "An Evaluation of the Freedmen's Bureau in Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly 41 (1963): 232; Brown, Florida’s Black Public Officials, 9; Shofner, Nor Is It Over Yet, 168-9; John W. Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1902), 271; William Watson Davis, Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1913), 470; The concept of Yankee republicanism is set forth in William L. Barney’s The Passage of the Republic; An Interdisciplinary History of Nineteenth-Century America. This sort of republicanism relied on churches, schools, capitalism and government to provide guidelines for morals and opportunities for financial growth which would in turn benefit all of society. See William L. Barney, The Passage of the Republic; An Interdisciplinary History of Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1987), 122, 253. 57 Florida Union, November 2, 1867. 58 Florida Union, October 26, 1867, November 2, 9, 1867. 59 Florida Union, November 16, 23, 1867. 60 Florida Union, January 11, 1868. 61 Ibid. 62 Florida House of Representatives, Proceedings of the Florida Convention, 40th Cong., 2d sess., 1868, Misc Doc No. 114, 1-7; Richard L. Hume, "Membership of the Florida Constitutional Convention of 1868," 4, 5, 7; Brown, Ossian Bingley Hart, 202; Shofner, "Political Reconstruction in Florida:" 149; Brown, Florida’s Black Public Officials, 10, 11. 63 George C. Osborn, ed. "Letters of a Carpetbagger in Florida, 1866-1869." Florida Historical Society 36 (1958): 270-84; Florida Union, April 11, 22, 1868, May 9, 1868. 64 Florida Union, June 4, July 2, 9, November 7, 1868; Osborn, 284; Richard Nelson Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 240. 65 Richard Hume in both the article “Membership of the Florida Constitutional Convention of 1868: A Case Study of Republican Factionalism in the Reconstruction South,” and subsequent book Blacks, Carpetbaggers and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction reports the value of Billings’ real and personal property as $75,000 yet upon close examination of the source, one can see that the actual value of Billings’ real property was recorded at $15,000 and that a check mark made on each entry connects with the “1” giving it the appearance of a “7”; a similar incident can be seen on line 8, page 42 of the same census. See Hume, "Membership of the Florida Constitutional Convention of 1868,” 14; Hume and Gough, 393; Ancestry.com, "1870 United States Federal Census," Roll: M593_132; Page: 396B; Image: 800; Family History Library Film: 545631. 66 Cochrane and Wood, 631; Ancestry.com, "1870 United States Federal Census;" "1850 United States Federal Census;" "1860 United States Federal Census 1860;" Hume and Gough, 318-9, 365-6, 393- 4. 67 Weekly Floridian, January 17, 1871; Liberty Billings to Senate of Florida, speech, January 12, 1871. 68 State of Florida, The Acts and Resolutions Adopted by the Legislature of Florida at its Fourth Session (Tallahassee: Charles H. Walton, State Printer, 1871), 31; a mill is defined as “a unit of monetary

92 value equal to 0.001 of a U.S. dollar,” see Dictionary.com LLC, “mill,” Dictionary.com LLC, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mill [accessed January 20, 2012]. 69 Weekly Floridian, January 10, 24 and February 7, 1871; State of Florida, The Acts and Resolutions Adopted by the Legislature of Florida at its Fourth Session, 30-3. 70 Allen H. Bush, Digest of the Statute Law of Florida (Tallahassee: Charles H. Walton, State Printer, 1872), 627; see also Florida Senate, A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Florida, 16th Legislature, 1st sess., 1870, 250. 71 Florida Senate, A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Florida, 18th Legislature, 1st sess., 1872, 158, 168, 173, 225, 256. 72 Section 14, Article V provided that the Lieutenant Governor acted as with only a casting vote. Section 14, Article V dictated when the Lieutenant Governor would be required to attend to the Governor’s responsibilities which included impeachment trials. 73 Florida Senate, 1872, 295. 74 Florida Senate, 1872, 258-9, 289-90, 293-5; Current, 285. 75 Florida Senate, 1872,164-6. 76 Florida Senate, 1872, 120, 123, 164-6, 169, 177, 201, 234-5, 359. 77 W.T. Sherman, “Order by the Commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi,” Freedmen and Southern Society , University of Maryland, Department of History http://www.history.umd.edu/Freedmen/sfo15.htm [accessed January 30, 2012]; Walter L. Fleming, “,” North American Review 182 (1906): 725. 78 Historian Charles Sellers marks the beginning of this period as 1815 when modes of transportation expanded to include steam operated engines, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution, Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 54; the term “investment land” for the purposes of the project means land separate from a person’s residence that provided a return of interest to the owner(s) either through the harvesting of its resources, lease agreements or sales, see Barney, 158; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 123; Foner, Reconstruction, 104-6. 79 Christian Examiner, May 1864; Foner, 6, 51-2, 55; Fleming, 721; Oubre, 1-3, 8, 11-12, 16-7; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 68. 80 Direct Tax, An Act for Increased Revenue from Imports, to Pay Interest on the Public Debt and for Other Purposes, Chapter XLV, Statutes at Large of the United States 12 (1863): 292-313; Charles F. Dunbar, “The Direct Tax of 1861,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 3 (1889): 436-61; Shofner, “ and the Fernandina Unionists,” 211. 81 An Act for the Collection of Direct Taxes in Insurrectionary Districts within the United States and for Other Purposes, Chapter XCVIII, Statutes at Large of the United States 12 (1863): 422-5. 82 Fleming, 721-2; George Winston Smith, “Carpetbag Imperialism in Florida, 1862-1868,” Florida Historical Quarterly 27 (1948): 112; Robert L. Clark, “Northern Plans for the Economic Invasion of Florida, 1862-1865,” Florida Historical Quarterly 28 (1950): 262; Jerrell H. Shofner, “Andrew Johnson and the Fernandina Unionists,” 213; Ash, 13, 25; Bentley, 26; Shofner, Nor Is It Over Yet, 4-6. 83 Peninsula (Fernandina), April 30, 1863; U.S. Federal Census, “1860 U.S. Census, Population Schedule;” George M. Barbour, Florida for Tourists, Invalids and Settlers: Containing Practical Information regarding Climate, Soil, and Productions; Cities, Towns, and People; the Culture of the Orange and other Tropical Fruits; Farming and Gardening; Scenery and Resorts; Sport; Routes of Travel, etc. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1884), 96; Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 97; Shofner, Nor Is It Over, 5-6, 115; Gannon, 234; Turner, 83-4; McKivigan, 73.

93

84 Billings v. Starke, 15 Fla 297; Looby, 177; Peninsula, April 18, 1863; United States, The War of the Rebellion, 236-9; Ash, 152; Shofner, Nor Is It Over, 6, 115; McKivigan, 74-5. 85 Billings v. Starke, 15 Fla 297, 300; Peninsula, April 30, 1863; William Watson Davis, The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1913), 353; Shofner, “Andrew Johnson and the Fernandina Unionists,” 213-4; Shofner, Nor Is It Over, 6, 15. 86 Billings v. Starke, 297. 87 Billings v. Starke, 297; County of Nassau, Florida, Public Records Archive, Book G, Page 508. 88 Ancestry.com, "1860 United States Federal Census 1860;” Michael J. Varhola, Life in Civil War America (Cincinnati: Family Tree Books, 1999), 101; Albert A. Nofi, A Civil War Treasury (New York: Castle Books, 2006), 381. 89 “1860 U.S. Census, Population Schedule,” Ancestry.com Operations Inc. http://search.ancestry.com/Browse/View.aspx?dbid=7667&path=Florida.Nassau.Fernandina.1 [accessed May 15, 2011]; U.S. Federal Census, “1870 U.S. Census, Population Schedule,” Ancestry.com Operations Inc. http://search.ancestry.com/Browse/View.aspx?dbid=7667&path=Florida.Nassau.Fernandina.1 [accessed May 15, 2011]; Billings v. McDermott, 15 Fla 60. 90 Cooley v. O’Connor, 12 Wallace 391, 13 Statutes at Large 502. 91 Ibid; prima facie is defined by Black’s Law Dictionary as “at first sight” indicating that without further testimony or evidence a document stands on its own as sufficient. See “prima facie,” Black’s Law Dictionary http://blackslawdictionary.org/prima-facie/ [accessed February 28, 2012]. 92 Bush, 148. 93 Billings v. McDermott, 60. 94 County of Nassau, Florida, Public Records Archive, Book G, Page 508; 1860 U.S. Census, Population Schedule,” Ancestry.com Operations Inc. http://search.ancestry.com/Browse/View.aspx?dbid=7667&path=Florida.Nassau.Fernandina.1 [accessed May 15, 2011]. 95 Billings v. Starke, 300. 96 County of Nassau, Florida, Public Records Archive, Book O, Page 164; Book R, Page 380. 97 Fleming, 721; Oubre, 20, 23; Bentley, 49; George R. Bentley, “The Political Activity of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 28 (1949): 28; Peek, “Military Reconstruction,” 387; Martin Abbott, “Free Land, Free Labor and the Freedmen’s Bureau,” Agricultural History 30 (1956): 152; Ralph L. Peek, “Lawlessness in Florida, 1868-1871,” Florida Historical Quarterly 40 (1961): 165-85; Ralph L. Peek, “Aftermath of Military Reconstruction, 1868-1869,” Florida Historical Quarterly 43 (1964): 134. 98 Homesteads, Statute II, Statutes at Large of the United States of America, 1789-1873 12 (1862): 392; Homestead Law, Statute I, Statutes at Large of the United States of America, 1789-1783 13 (1864): 35. 99 Homesteads, Statute II, Statutes at Large of the United States of America, 1789-1873 12 (1862): 392; Homestead Law, Statute I, Statutes at Large of the United States of America, 1789-1783 13 (1864): 35; Homesteads in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, Statute I, Statutes at Large of the United States of America, 1789-1783 14 (1866): 66. 100 O.B. Hart, et al., Appellants v. W.M. Bostwick and wife, Respondents, 14 Fla 162; Florida Union, October 26, 1867; November 2, 9, 1867.

94

101 Hart v. Bostwick, 170. 102 Hart v. Bostwick, 162, 170, 171; State of Florida, Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Florida, 5th sess., 1872, 124, 134, 202, 214, 246, 250, 269-70, 272, 279; Gannon, 232. 103 Samuel A. Johnson, “The Genesis of the New England Emigrant Aid Company,” The New England Quarterly 3 (1930): 95-6; Winston, 113; Clark, “Northern Plans for the Economic Invasion of Florida, 1862-1865,” 262; Gilmore, 89-94; Horace Andrews, “Kansas Crusade: Eli Thayer and the New England Emigrand Aid Company,” New England Quarterly 35 (1962): 498; Blight, “‘A Hell of a Storm’;” Blight, “Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union, 1855-58;” Upchurch, 77-80; Rawley, 26, 29, 33, 37, 72. 104 Patricia P. Clark and J.F.B. Marshall, “J.F.B. Marshall: A New England Emigrant Aid Company Agent in Post-War Florida, 1867,” Florida Historical Quarterly 54 (1975): 39-60; Patricia P. Clark, “A New England Emigrant Aid Company Agent in Postwar Florida: Selected letters of James F.B. Marshall, 1867,” Florida Historical Quarterly 55 (1977): 457-63. 105 Clark, “A New England Emigrant Aid Company Agent in Postwar Florida: Selected Letters of James F.B. Marshall, 1867,” 468. 106 Clark, “A New England Emigrant Aid Company Agent in Postwar Florida: Selected Letters of James F.B. Marshall, 1867,” 470. 107 For an example of the exploitation exerted on black settlers see Christie Farnham Pope, “Southern Homesteads for Negroes,” Agricultural History 44 (1970): 201-12 and Oubre, 143-5. 108 Clark, “A New England Emigrant Aid Company Agent in Postwar Florida: Selected Letters of James F.B. Marshall, 1867,” 469. 109 Patricia P. Clark, “Florida, ‘Our Own Italy’: James F. B. Marshall’s Post-Civil War Letters to Edward Everett Hale,” Florida Historical Quarterly 59 (1980): 56-7, Shofner, Nor Is It Over, 266-7. 110 Florida Union, June 11, 1868. 111 United States, Population of the United States in 1860, Eighth Census (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864), xxix, xxxi; United States, Statistics of the Population of the United States, Ninth Census, Vol. 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872), x-xiii, 3-5, 19, 98, 299, 306; Ancestry.com, “1860 U.S. Census, Population Schedule;” Ancestry.com, “1870 U.S. Census, Population Schedule.” 112 Florida Union, July 2, 1868. 113 Florida Union, June 18, 1868. 114 Ancestry.com, "1870 United States Federal Census;" “1880 United States Federal Census;” “Maine, Marriage Records, 1705-1922;” 115 United States, Population of the United States in 1860, Eighth Census, 57; United States, Statistics of the Population of the United States, Ninth Census, Vol. 1, 674-86, 699-702; Shofner, Nor Is It Over, 258-63. 116 Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 13. 117 Weekly Floridian, January 2, 1872. 118 Shofner, Nor Is It Over, 44, 51, 131, 259; Weekly Floridian, January 2, 1872. 119 Weekly Floridian, January 2, 1872. 120 Ibid.

95

121 Shofner, Nor Is It Over, 211, 259; Commission of Lands and Immigration, Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Florida, Appendix, 5th sess., 1872, 14-39. 122 William Drysdale, “Florida’s Rapid Change,” New York Times, February 15, 1891. 123 Maury Klein and Kozo Yamamura, "The Growth Strategies of Southern Railroads, 1865-1893," Business History Review 41 (1967): 358. 124 For more information on specific railroad companies, the Florida Railroad Commission and railroad developers see Paul E. Fenlon, "The Florida, Atlantic and Gulf Central Railroad: The Railroad in Jacksonville," Florida Historical Quarterly 32 (1953): 71-80; Charles H. Hildreth, "Railroads out of Pensacola, 1833-1883," Florida Historical Quarterly 37 (1959): 397-417; Canter Brown, Jr., "The Florida, Atlantic and Gulf Central Railroad, 1851-1868," The Florida Historical Quarterly 69 (1991): 411-29; Tracy E. Danese, "Railroads, Farmers and Senatorial Politics: The Florida Railroad Commission in the 1890s," Florida Historical Quarterly 75 (1996): 146-66; C. Wickliffe Yulee, "Senator David L. Yulee," Florida Historical Quarterly 2:1 (1909): 26-43; 2:2 (1909): 3-22; Edward C. Williamson, "William D. Chipley, West Florida's Mr. Railroad," Florida Historical Quarterly 25 (1947): 333-55; Dudley S. Johnson, "Henry Bradley Plant and Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly 45 (1966): 118-31; Edward N. Akin, Flagler: Rockefeller Partner and Florida Baron (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992). 125 Hugo A. Meier, “American Technology and the Nineteenth-Century World,” American Quarterly 10 (1958): 116-30; George Folsom, History of Saco and Biddeford with Notices of Other Early Settlements, and of the Proprietary Governments, in Maine (Saco, ME: Alex Putnam, 1830), 306, 308-9; Hardiman, “Factory Island;” Hugo A. Meier, “Technology and , 1800-1860,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (1957): 632; Maine Historical Society, “Mills and Changing Cities,” Maine Historical Society http://www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/760/slideshow/410/display?use_mmn=&prev_object_id=11 69&prev_object=page&slide_num=3 [accessed May 24, 2011]. 126 Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution, Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 682-3, 6901-1. 127 Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, ed., Technology in Western Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 217, 219. 128 While many of the primary sources utilize the format of "rail road" this paper will use the contemporary format of "railroad." The Lake Wimico and St. Joseph's Canal Company was also incorporated during the 1835 session of the Legislature. One year later it became the Lake Wimico and St. Joseph's Railroad and Canal Company; Florida Senate, A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the Territory of Florida, 1st sess., 1839, 5; Territory of Florida, Acts of the Legislative Council of the Territory of Florida, 10th sess., 1832, 87; Territory of Florida, Acts of the Legislative Council of the Territory of Florida, 12th sess., 1834; Territory of Florida, Acts of the Legislative Council of the Territory of Florida, 13th sess., 1835; Fenlon, 71, 73; Caroline Watkins, "Some Early Railroads in Alachua County," Florida Historical Quarterly 53 (1975): 450. 129 State of Florida, Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the General Assembly, 1 through 4 sess., 1845- 1848; The East Floridian, April 1, 1858; Florida General Assembly, The Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Florida, 1855, 13-16, 26; Turner, 80; Florida Peninsular, March 30, 1861; United States Senate, Message of the President of the United States, 39 Congress, 1 sess., April 7, 1866, 1-3; Thompson, 181-95; for more information on the Internal Improvement Fund see John Melvin DeGrove, "The Administration of Internal Improvement Problems in Florida, 1845-1869," M.A. diss Emory University, 1954; State of Florida, Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the Legislature, 11th Legislature, 1st sess., 1883, 20-2. 130 U.S. Congress, The War of the Rebellion, 76.

96

131 U.S. Congress, The War of the Rebellion, 94-5. 132 Moore, 229-35; U.S. Congress, The War of the Rebellion, 94-5, 100, 241; Turner, 83-4. 133 Little, 220-1. 134 Little, 98, 211-2, 220-1, 226. 135 New York Times, December 27, 1865; Zion's Herald and Wesleyan Journal, January 30, 1867; United States Senate, Message of the President of the United States, 1-3. 136 Florida Senate, A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the General Assembly of the State of Florida, 14th General Assembly, 2d sess., 1866, 14-15, 49, 115, 154, 205; Florida Senate, "Report of the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund," A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the General Assembly of the State of Florida, 14th General Assembly, 2d sess., 1866, 21; The issue of state’s rights versus federal rights echoed in a bankruptcy matter concerning the Alabama and Florida Railroad Company; see New York Times, January 2, 1868. 137 United States House of Representatives, Proceedings of the Florida Convention, 40th Congress, 2nd sess., 1868, 7. 138 Ibid. 139 Florida Senate, Journal of the Senate, 15th Legislature, 1st sess, 1868, 132. 140 Florida Senate, Journal of the Senate, 15th Legislature, 1st sess, 1868, 28, 64, 69, 76, 82, 87, 90, 95, 120, 132. 141 Florida Senate, Journal of the Senate, 15th Legislature, 1st sess, 1868, 155, 163. 142 Florida Senate, A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Florida, 15th Legislature, Extra Session, 1869, 1; Weekly Floridian, June 15, 1869. 143 Florida Senate, Journal of the Senate, 15th Legislature, Extra Session, 1869, 5-6; Florida Peninsular, May 19, 1869; Weekly Floridian, June 15, 1869. 144 Florida Senate, Journal of the Senate,15th Legislature, Extra Session, 1869, 34-5, 38-9, 42-3, 64- 8; Weekly Floridian, June 1, 1869; Florida Peninsular, July 14, 1869; Shofner, Nor Is It Over, 207-8. 145 Weekly Floridian, June 1, 1869. 146 Weekly Floridian, June 1, 1869; Shofner, Nor Is It Over, 207-8. 147 Florida Peninsular, June 9, 1869; June 16, 1869; July 14, 1869; Turner, 95-103; for more information on the Swepson/Littlefield scandal see Fenlon. 148 Florida Senate, A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Florida, 5th Legislature, 1872, 43, 61-2, 106-7, 113, 119; for more information on David Levy Yulee see C. Wickliffe Yulee, “Senator Yulee,” Publications of the Florida Historical Society (1909): 26-43. 149 U.S. Federal Census, “1870 U.S. Census, Population Schedule,” Ancestry.com Operations Inc. http://search.ancestry.com/Browse/View.aspx?dbid=7667&path=Florida.Nassau.Fernandina.1 [accessed May 15, 2011]. 150 Gannon, 222-4; Shofner, Nor Is It Over, 27, 42, 116; Fernandina Observer, December 1, 1874. 151 Fernandina Observer, December 1, 1874. 152 Ibid. 153 Fernandina Observer, December 1, 1874. 154 Ibid.

97

155 U.S. Federal Census, “1870 U.S. Census, Population Schedule,” Ancestry.com Operations Inc. http://search.ancestry.com/Browse/View.aspx?dbid=7667&path=Florida.Nassau.Fernandina.1 [accessed May 15, 2011]. 156 Ibid. 157 Florida Senate, Journal of the Senate, 1872, 29. 158 Florida Senate, A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Florida, 6th Legislature, 1873, 26-7, 132. 159 Fernandina Observer, April 25, 1874. 160 Florida Senate, Journal of the Senate, 1872, 25, 35-6. 161 Florida Senate, A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Florida, 8th Senate, 1st sess., 1875, 43. 162 Florida Senate, A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate, 1875, 31, 43, 70, 153, 275, 413; James F. McClellan, ed., A Digest of the Laws of the State of Florida from the Year 1822 to the Eleventh Day of March, 1881, inclusive (Tallahassee: Floridian Book and Job Office, 1881), 272-479; Wallace, Carpet- Bag Rule in Florida. 163 The Eastern Herald, October 9, 1875. 164 East Florida Banner, July 4, 1874; Eastern Herald, October 19, 1875; Eastern Herald, October 30, 1875; Tallahassee Sentinel, May 13, 1876. 165 Billings, Speech to Senate, January 12, 1871. 166 Ancestry.com. Maine Marriage Records, 1705-1922 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010; Maine Farmer, October 20, 1877; Christian Secretary, October 24, 1877.

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