"A class of people neither freemen nor slaves": from Spanish to American race relations in Florida, 1821-1861

Arch F. Blakey has described the transformation of the back country that became Clay County after 1842, when the forced Seminole exodus opened rich cotton lands for cultivation. High cotton prices drew planters from South Carolina and Georgia to Florida ports, while steamships carried out thousands of bales collected at the new towns of Middleburg and Whitesville. (66) There also were record agricultural exports from nearby Jacksonville in 1850, plus the nearly four million feet of sawed timber and thousands of squared pine, cedar and oak logs that left the St. Johns River. (67)

A record 530 vessels carried exports from Jacksonville in 1855. Reports of huge profits and of streets jammed with wagons and carts loaded with cotton and other plantation produce prompted the editor of the News to boast in 1856 that Florida's "crop is greater in quantity of cotton, and aggregate value, than any State in proportion to its population." (68)

In 1842 there were three steam powered sawmills on the St. Johns River; in 1854 there were twenty, making Jacksonville, one newsman said, "the largest lumber market in the South." (69) With comparable mills on Nassau and St. Marys Rivers and Black Creek, lumber from northeast Florida was being exported throughout the world. Late in the decade railroads tapped new timber lands, sustaining a boom of major proportions, and intensifying a serious labor shortage. (70)

Throughout the 1850s employers advertised for black or white laborers, and by mid-decade Irish immigrants were found in local crews. F. F. L'Engle's wife complained in 1857 that her husband had "failed in every quarter in getting Negroes to carry on the work" despite offering $20 monthly wages, while a rival had attracted "a large gang and is grading with Irishmen [who] are feeding on Hams and Eggs and other dainties." (71)

The labor shortage triggered an influx of workmen, but not without opposition. Dr. Joseph D. Mitchell, a migrant from Maine, wrote in his diary of the savage stabbing of an unarmed Northern man, followed by threats from the attackers "that every northern mechanic must leave town or they will drive them away." (72) News of another assault led a Charleston man to warn that Jacksonville was gaining a bad reputation in northern cities "on account of that bowie-knife business last spring." (73)

Every issue of the local newspapers carried notices of slave runaways, and in several instances chilling accounts of slaves arrested for murdering their owners. Fears of slave rebellions became common after the shock that spread through the South following the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in 1831. Only four years later the second Seminole war began. Blacks in the ranks of the Indian warriors created special terrors among Florida slaveholders. They proved implacable foes in combat, conspired in Seminole attacks on plantations, and escaped to remote Indian retreats. Retaining slave property became precarious. (74)

St. Augustine residents were alarmed when slaves and free blacks from their town conspired in a Seminole raid on a nearby plantation in 1836. Militia commanders in Jacksonville, fearful of "internal enemies," kept under detention all slaves and free blacks not under the direct supervision of their owners. (75)