Florida Resources

This text traces the growth and social development of the Florida frontier through its experience with crime and punishment. Using court records, government documents, newspapers and personal papers, it explores how crime affected ordinary citizens in antebellum Florida.

Brings together the reminiscences of two pioneers who came of age in antebellum Florida's Columbia County and the nearby Suwannee River Valley. Though they held markedly different positions in society, the two shared the adventure, hardship and tragedy that characterized Florida's pioneer era.

In The Threshold of Manifest Destiny, Laurel Clark Shire illuminates the vital role women played in national expansion and shows how gender ideology was a key mechanism in U.S. settler colonialism. Among the many contentious frontier zones in nineteenth-century North America, Florida was an early and important borderland where the United States worked out how it would colonize new territories. From 1821, when it acquired Florida from Spain, through the Second Seminole War, and into the 1850s, the federal government relied on women's physical labor to create homes, farms, families, and communities. It also capitalized on the symbolism of white women's presence on the frontier; images of imperiled women presented settlement as the spread of domesticity and civilization and rationalized the violence of territorial expansion as the protection of women and families. Through careful parsing of previously unexplored military, court, and land records, as well as popular culture sources and native oral tradition, Shire tracks the diverse effects of settler colonialism on free and enslaved blacks and Seminole families. She demonstrates that land-grant policies and innovations in women's property law implemented in Florida had long-lasting effects on American expansion. Ideologically, the frontier in Florida laid the groundwork for Manifest Destiny, while, practically, the Armed Occupation Act of 1842 presaged the Homestead Act.

Each day thousands of revelers trudge down DuVal Street in Florida's Key West, but few know for whom the street is named. In Florida Founder William P. DuVal, James M. Denham provides the first full-length biography of the well-connected, but nearly forgotten frontier politician of antebellum America.

Peace River is a location near Lake Hancock, north of present-day Bartow. Seminole hunting towns on Peace River lay in a five or six mile wide belt of land centered on and running down the river from Lake Hancock to below present-day Fort Meade. Oponay, who also was named Ochacona Tustenatty, was sent into Florida as a representative to the Seminoles on behalf of the Creek chiefs remaining loyal to the United States during the Seminole War. Oponay occupied the land adjacent to Lake Hancock and Saddle Creek. Peter McQueen and his party occupied the area to the south of Bartow. Quite likely their settlement included the remains of Seminole lodges and other facilities located on the west bank near the great ford of the river at Fort Meade. This important strategic position would have allowed the Red Sticks (Indians) to control not only access to the hunting grounds to the south, but communication and the trade with the Cuban fishermen at Charlotte Harbor, as well as the passage of representatives of Spain and England through the harbor.

Echoes from a Distant Frontier is an edited, annotated selection of the correspondence of Corinna and Ellen Brown, two single women in their twenties, who left a comfortable New England home in 1835 for the Florida frontier. Moving with two aunts and a brother following the deaths of their parents, the Brown sisters settled near the village of Mandarin on the east bank of the St. Johns River, just south of present-day Jacksonville. These two articulate and literate women, both aspiring authors, wrote of their experiences and observations to family members - most important their brother Mannevillette Brown, an artist who lived in various European locales and eventually in Utica, New York. Within a month of their arrival on the shores of the St. Johns, the frontier erupted in Indian war. The Browns witnessed the terror and carnage firsthand, and their letters paint a vivid picture of the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). observations about everyday life in a time, place, and society for which a very limited record remains. Resolute and independent, the Brown sisters eventually married men who were actively engaged in the conflict - an army officer and a surgeon attached to the army. The sisters corresponded from the many places they lived during their fifteen-year residence in Florida, including St. Augustine, Newnansville, Fort King (Ocala), Pensacola, and Key West. Both as transplanted New Englanders struggling to survive in America's southernmost frontier and as wives of southern-born men, the sisters provide valuable insights on their social and domestic circumstances and on a largely undocumented region of the South.

*PDF version available via UF digital collection.

Both an American slave and a slaveowner--and possibly an African princess--Anna was a teenager when she was captured in her homeland of Senegal in 1806 and sold into slavery. Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr., a planter and slave trader from Spanish East Florida, bought her in Havana, Cuba, and took her to his St. Johns River plantation in northeast Florida, where she soon became his household manager, his wife, and eventually the mother of four of his children. Her husband formally emancipated her in 1811, and she became the owner of her own farm and twelve slaves the following year. For 25 years, life on her farm and at the Kingsley plantation on Fort George Island was relatively tranquil. But when Florida passed from Spanish to American control, and racism and discrimination increased in the American territories, Anna Kingsley and her children migrated to a colony in Haiti established by her husband as a refuge for free blacks. Amid the spiraling racial tensions of the antebellum period, Anna returned to north Florida, where she bought and sold land, sued white people in the courts, and became a central figure in a free black community.

Read: Chapter 10: Free and Slave, by Jane Landers; Chapter 11: Florida's Seminole and Miccosukee Peoples, by John K. Mahon and Brent R. Weisman, Chapter 12: U.S. Territory and State, by Daniel L. Schafer

Though far from the major theaters of battle, Floridians experienced every facet of the Civil War. While most Florida soldiers fought forthe Confederacy, many Floridians, including former slaves, enlisted with the Union. Families were divided and partisanship tore communities apart. Some Floridians produced salt, beef, and supplies for the Confederacy; others profited during Union occupations. The one notable battle fought in Florida, the Battle of Olustee, was disproportionately bloody. is a true tale of survival, ingenuity, and opportunism. Though the third state to secede, Florida was ignored and unprotected by the Confederacy. The home front was contested, especially in port cities, and many Floridians became refugees. Raids and guerilla activity inflicted misery on civilians. While Confederate patriotism ruled in Middle Florida, in other areas apathy or a growing Unionism led to deprivations and desertion. Slaves fled to freedom and neighbor turned against neighbor. A frontier at the start of the war, the conflict left Florida even more of a wilderness. Florida's Civil War: Terrible Sacrifices highlights the diverse experiences of Florida's population. Whether Confederate or Unionist, free or slave, male or female, no Floridian could escape the war's impact. A concise narrative of life on the home front, this book explores how Floridians endured the war. Women, slaves, and Unionists are considered in detail, as well as how various areas of the state reacted to Federal incursions. The story of Florida's Civil War is complex

The 1st Florida Union Cavalry was formed in 1863 from men primarily from south Alabama and northwest Florida. These men were both deserters from the Confederate Army and men who had avoided conscription or turned eighteen during the war. The regiment was stationed at Fort Barrancas in Pensacola, Florida and served along the upper Gulf Coast with other Union regiments and participated in the Battle of Marianna, FL, the Mobile Campaign and the occupation of Montgomery, AL. The book explores the history of the area before and during the early years of the war and the history of the regiment including information on any engagements the 1st Florida Union Cavalry participated in (locations - then and now, regimental opponents, victors and summaries of the engagements). In addition, it includes data on the individual men who served in the regiment (detailed military data-Union and Confederate, 1860 census, birth and death, burial, and pension information). Together the information provides a glimpse of this area of the deep South during the Civil War.

A unit that saw significant action in many of the engagements of the Civil War's eastern theater. Until this work, no comprehensive study of the Florida units that served in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) had been attempted, and problems attend the few studies of particular Florida units that have appeared. Based on more than two decades of research, Waters and Edmonds have produced a study that covers all units from Florida in the ANV, and does so in an objective and reliable fashion. Drawn from what was then a turbulent and thinly settled frontier region, the Florida troops serving in the Confederacy were never numerous, but they had the good or bad luck of finding themselves at crucial points in several significant battles such as Gettysburg where their conduct continues to be a source of contention. Additionally, the study of these units and their service permits an examination of important topics affecting the Civil War soldier: lack of supplies, the status of folks at home, dissension over civilian control of soldiers and units from the various Confederate states, and widespread and understandable problems of morale. Despite the appalling conditions of combat, these soldiers were capable of the highest courage in combat.

The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida reader provides teachers with a valuable classroom resource to excite students as they examine social studies content. This engaging nonfiction reader delves deeper into Florida state studies with primary source documents. Build valuable literacy and content area knowledge with this informational text that provides an intimate glimpse of what life was like for Floridians during the Civil War era. Purposefully designed to strengthen student understanding of the material, this book contains text features to increase academic vocabulary, such as headings, glossary, and index. The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida reader connects to Florida state standards for Social Studies and English Language Arts, as well as WIDA and the NCSS/C3 Framework.

The Jackson County War offers original conclusions explaining why Jackson County became the bloodiest region in Reconstruction Florida and is the first book-length treatment of the subject.   From early 1869 through the end of 1871, citizens of Jackson County, Florida, slaughtered their neighbors by the score. The nearly threeyear frenzy of bloodshed became known as the Jackson County War. The killings, close to one hundred and by some estimates twice that number, brought Jackson County the notoriety of being the most violent county in Florida during the Reconstruction era.  Daniel R. Weinfeld has made a thorough investigation of contemporary accounts. He adds an assessment of recently discovered information, and presents a critical evaluation of the standard secondary sources.   The Jackson County War focuses on the role of the Freedmen's Bureau, the emergence of white "Regulators," and the development of African American political consciousness and leadership. It follows the community's descent after the Civil War into disorder punctuated by furious outbursts of violence until the county settled into uneasy stability seven years later. The Jackson County War emerges as an emblem of all that could and did go wrong in the uneasy years after Appomattox and that left a residue of hatred and fear that endured for generations.
*Available in print & eBook forms

In this exceptional biography, Canter Brown, Jr., removes Ossian Bingley Hart (1821-1874)--a Unionist, the principal founder of the Republican Party in Florida, and a Reconstruction-era governor of the state--from the shadows of history. Through an examination of Hart's life and career, Brown offers new insight into the political problems of the day--the role of Unionism in Deep South politics in particular--and enriches our understanding of the complexities of Reconstruction. Brown traces Hart's life from his privileged childhood in the newly founded port town of Jacksonville through his service as a volunteer soldier in the Second Seminole War, his education in South Carolina, and the dawn of his legal and political career on Florida's Atlantic frontier to his election as governor in 1872 and his premature death sixteen months later. Brown's multifaceted biography offers a rare glimpse at the persistence of Loyalism in the post-Civil War South and clearly illustrates the pivotal role played by both Loyalists and African Americans in southern politics of that era and how these two groups merged to resist carpetbag rule.

T. Thomas Fortune was a leading African American publisher, editor, and journalist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who was born a slave in antebellum Florida lived through emancipation, and rose to become a literary lion of his generation. In T. Thomas Fortune''s "After War Times," Daniel R. Weinfeld brings together a series of twenty-three autobiographical articles Fortune wrote about his formative childhood during Reconstruction and subsequent move to Washington, DC. By 1890 Fortune had founded a predecessor organization to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.