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Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War

2003; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3595052

1553-0620

Joanne Harris, Edward E. Baptist,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Creating an South: Middle Florida 's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War. By Edward E. Baptist. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xiv, 392. Illustrations. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $19.95.)Edward E. Baptist's history of antebellum Middle Florida will be of interest to all students of the South. Focused especially on two counties, Leon and Jackson, it is the best sort of local history, one that uses small places to answer big questions. Middle Florida evolved, after Florida's accession to the United States in 1821, into a region dominated by cotton cultivation and slave plantations. To some extent, Baptist agrees with the famous argument of W. J. Cash, in The Mind of the South (1941), that the frontier, more than anything else, defined the South. But in Baptist's account, this process is historicized and rooted in local circumstances. Middle Florida's society was not a simple replication of an older but the product of a history that was contingent, unplanned, and riddled by conflict (10). His is the story of an South, not the South, and of its creation, not simply its unfolding.This story follows, roughly, a three-part chronology. Until the Panic of 1837, Middle Florida was a rough and violent frontier. Planters migrated with their slaves, mainly from the Upper South, and small farmers-countrymen, in contemporary parlance-more often came from the Carolinas and Georgia. Planters dominated territorial politics and assumed that it was their right to do so; they did not hesitate to enforce their rale with personal violence. Raw accumulation of wealth was the goal; there was no room for paternalism with respect to slaves, most of whom suffered much from planter indifference and brutality.One way the elite expanded its wealth and power was through control of the Union Bank of Florida, which extended liberal credit to its stockholders for purchases of land and slaves. The crash of the bank after the Panic of 1837 rained some of these planters and humbled others. That, and the rise of competitive political parties dependent on the votes of a majority, curbed planter power and elevated the political status of countrymen.After about 1850, rising cotton prices underwrote greater prosperity for both planters and countrymen. Evangelical Christianity tempered character, and communities became more rooted and stable for whites; slaves, too, were able to build up new family and community relationships. Violence of all kinds declined. Planters began to see themselves as paternalists. In his most original chapter, Baptist argues that, in this final period, both private and public documents demonstrate the rise in the popular imagination of the idea of a mythological Old one which elided Middle Florida's violent past and celebrated the area as an extension of an old, stable Virginia society, made up of slaveholding squires, deferential yeomen, and grateful slaves. This myth, Baptist concludes, helped Florida's white men convince themselves that their society was worthy of independence and sufficiently united to win it.Baptist's research is both broad and deep. A variety of sources provide basic information on property ownership and enable him to trace the origins of black and white migrants. Using family papers, newspaper accounts, WPA slave narratives, court records, and public documents, he traces his themes through the stories of individuals. …