The History of Florida (49 page)

of Hillsborough County, where only ninety-six permanent residents had

been counted in 1840. Families that had moved from Virginia and Maryland

to Middle Florida in the 1820s and had prospered there until the national

depression of 1837 moved to their second Florida frontier after passage of

the AOA. Sons of the Braden, Gamble, and Craig families moved their slave

communities to tracts along the Manatee River, where a longer growing

season protected sugarcane from the early frosts that hindered sugar pro-

proof

duction in north Florida. Men like Jacob Summerlin drove herds of cattle

from northeast Florida to graze free on the vast open range of Hillsbor-

ough County. By 1860, more than 30,000 head of cattle roamed the inland

grasslands and more than 900 people lived among the prosperous Manatee

River plantations. Historian Janet Snyder Mathews has characterized the

Hil sborough settlements as “the edge of wilderness” and an important part

of “a new American frontier.”2

The Gambles and Bradens were frontier aristocrats, not the “plain folk”

who pioneered in Florida from adjacent southern states after 1842. Histo-

rian James M. Denham has written with understanding of the culture of

the Florida “crackers” who brought their families and farm animals to Flor-

ida seeking affordable and fertile land. Highly individualistic and mobile,

fiercely dedicated to popular democracy, general y possessing antipathy

toward Native Americans and African Americans, and quick to anger, the

crackers would become the majority of the population in farming regions

of the state.

Seminole removal also contributed to the growth and development of

northeast Florida. The rural plantations had been periodical y disrupted by

Indian attacks between 1835 and 1842, but the stimulus of a military garrison

U.S. Territory and State · 233

proof

Jacob Summerlin, known as the King of the Crackers. Summerlin was born in Alachua

County in 1820. As a young man, he moved to central Florida and started a career as a

cattle rancher by rounding up wild cattle that roamed the Florida grasslands. Cracking

long whips, Summerlin and his men drove the cattle to ports on the Gulf for shipment

to Cuba. Prior to the Civil War, Summerlin grazed more than 15,000 cattle in the Peace

and Kissimmee River valleys. Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida,
Florida Memory
,

http://floridamemory.com/items/show/26245.

and supply post at Jacksonville led to the doubling of Duval County’s popu-

lation between 1830 and 1840. After 1842, wagon caravans of settlers and

their slaves rolled through Jacksonville with the tools and supplies needed

to build homes in the backcountry that became Clay County and beyond to

the Alachua Prairie. The wagons soon rolled farther south and west, carry-

ing Georgians and South Carolinians to cotton plantations in Marion and

Columbia Counties. A record 530 vessels carried exports from Jacksonville

in 1855. Reports of streets jammed with wagons and carts prompted the

234 · Daniel L. Schafer

editor of the
Jacksonvil e
News
to boast on 18 December 1856 that Florida’s

“crop is greater in quantity of cotton, and aggregate value, than any State in

proportion to its population.”

By 1842, three steam-powered sawmil s were cutting lumber on the St.

Johns River, supported by commerce with the military. On October 11, 1851,

a newsman reported in the
Florida
Republican
that Jacksonvil e was “the

largest lumber market in the South.” Three years later, twenty sawmil s were

producing boards for export. Mil s on the Nassau and St. Marys Rivers

and Black Creek also cut yellow pine and shipped Florida lumber to ports

throughout the world. Late in the 1850s, railroads tapped new timberlands,

sustaining an economic enterprise of major significance and encouraging

an influx of additional small farmers.

As the loggers cut the pine, new homesteads were cleared for settlement.

In 1860, Clay County was a land of white yeoman farmers; 73 percent of its

population was white, 93 percent of whom had been born in slave states.

Only 19 percent of the heads of Clay County households owned slaves, and

more than half of all bondsmen were held at only six estates.

Whites were 57 percent of Duval County’s 5,074 residents in 1860. Slaves

in Duval numbered 2,046 (40 percent), and free black persons totaled 164

(3 percent). Approximately 41 percent of al Duval residents lived in the

proof

City of Jacksonville in 1860, working at diverse occupations that reflected

the expansion of the region’s economy. There were slightly more whites than

blacks among the 2,128 residents of the town, and 44 percent of the heads of

household had been born in the North or in foreign countries. Outside the

town, however, four of every five white household heads were from slave-

holding states. Just north of Jacksonville, the growing town of Fernandina,

with a population of 1,360 residents in 1860, showed similar patterns.

By the 1840s and 1850s, governmental affairs in Florida were dominated

by a coalition of elites known as the “Nucleus,” led by Richard K. Cal . This

combination of early Monroe and Jackson appointees and wealthy migrants

from Virginia who had settled in Middle Florida had gained control of the

Florida Land Office as well as executive and judicial posts throughout the

territory. Often land speculators, slave owners, and cotton planters, as mem-

bers of the Whig Party they advocated government-assisted internal im-

provements and liberal bank charters. Their banking policies evolved into

the most controversial political issue of the territorial years.

Between 1831 and 1835, the Legislative Council approved bank charters

for groups in Pensacola, Tal ahassee, and St. Augustine. Directors of the

banks, their stockholders, and the individuals who received loans were all

U.S. Territory and State · 235

members of the ruling elite. With inflated evaluations of their property from

bank officers who were friends and relatives, planters traded mortgages for

stock in the Union Bank of Tal ahassee and then received generous loans

to finance additional purchases of land and slaves. Additional capital came

from bond sales to investors in New York City, Boston, Amsterdam, and

London, sales made possible by the “good faith” promise of the Legislative

Council to back the bonds. Cal and his associates had been fol owers of

Old Hickory in earlier years, but in Florida they evolved into a conservative

ruling class opposed to the policies advocated in the 1830s by the Jacksonian

Democrats.

In less troubled times, the banks may have prospered, but the bitterly

cold winter of 1835 that destroyed the citrus industry in East Florida, cou-

pled with the economic dislocations caused by the Second Seminole War

and the repercussions of the Panic of 1837, led to bank failures through-

out the nation. In Florida, the legislative council passed laws to tax Florida

residents as a means to pay interest on the “faith bonds” as the council had

promised to bond holders. Outraged Florida residents condemned the laws

and taxes as evidence that politicians were corrupt and protecting only the

interests of the “Nucleus.”

Men outside of this circle of influence were also eager to acquire proper-

proof

ties and business, and became resentful of the antidemocratic politics of the

Florida elite. They denounced inherited privileges and monopolies that de-

nied opportunities to the common man. In response, leaders like Robert R.

Reid, David Levy, and James D. Westcott formed the Jacksonian Democratic

Party as a vehicle to unseat the entrenched aristocracy.

The Florida “Bank War” opened on an unlikely front: as the feature issue

in the drive for statehood that Richard Call and his Whig Party colleagues

spearheaded in the mid-1830s. Call pointed to the millions of acres of land

in the territory, control ed by Congress, that could be granted to Florida

and used by state officials as inducements for internal improvements, and

claimed that wealth, population growth, and economic development were

certain to come to Florida with statehood. When a referendum in May 1838

produced a majority of voters in favor of statehood, Governor Call autho-

rized elections of delegates to a constitutional convention to be held in De-

cember at St. Joseph, the new Gulf coast port near Apalachicola. During the

elections of delegates to the convention, candidates pledged to antibank po-

sitions denounced speculators and aristocrats who profited from the banks

and excluded the laboring classes. The antibank delegates won the majority

of the seats.

236 · Daniel L. Schafer

The leading men of the territory assembled at St. Joseph on 3 December.

Future governors Robert R. Reid, Thomas Brown, and Wil iam Marvin were

in attendance, as were future U.S. senators from Florida James D. Westcott,

Jackson Morton, and David Levy Yulee (who had adopted his family’s hon-

orary Moorish title). Delegates debated until 11 January 1839, when a consti-

tution was approved containing provisions that severely restricted banking

policies. It was a clear repudiation of the conservative elite. In a referendum

conducted in May, voters of the territory approved the constitution, but the

ratification campaign was again controversial and closely contested.

It was the leadership of congressional delegate Yulee that most directly

led to admission of Florida to the Union. He wrote numerous letters, gave

countless speeches, and published an influential pamphlet in support of

statehood. A convincing theme in the speeches was Yulee’s claim that once

statehood was approved, Congress would make federal lands available to

support railroad construction and other internal improvement projects that

would result in national prominence for Florida and additional population

growth.

In Washington, Yulee worked through southern congressmen, remind-

ing them that admitting Florida would correct the imbalance of free and

slave states expected to occur in 1846 with the admission of Iowa as a free

proof

state. In January 1845, the House of Representatives reported out a bill call-

ing for admission of Iowa and Florida that was approved and signed by

President John Tyler. On 3 March 1845, Florida became the twenty-seventh

state of the United States of America.

Governor John Branch declared 26 May 1845 as the date for election of

officers for the new State of Florida. Voters chose Democrats Wil iam D.

Moseley, a planter from Jefferson County for governor, and David Yulee for

congressman. Democrats also won majorities in both houses of the General

Assembly, and at the initial meeting in June 1845 chose Yulee and David

Westcott as Florida’s first United States senators. By adjournment on 26 July,

the assembly had created the executive and judicial structure of the new

state and passed tax and revenue bil s to support it.

Democrats remained in control of Florida politics until after the Civil

War. The party became adamantly insistent on states’ rights and made

increasingly radical demands for secession from the Union. While some

twentieth-century Floridians have argued that secession and the Civil War

were not related to defense of the institution of slavery, political leaders in

Florida during the late antebel um years would have unapologetical y and

strenuously disagreed. “Southern rights” to Florida’s Democrats meant the