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Florida History Florida was experiencing great political and social changes during the time period of the end of 19 th Century. The main themes that were the relationships of the Spanish people with Americans as well as the relationships between different ethnic identities. This was a pre-Civil War period and therefore the conditions that the state was in played a significant contribution to the states development processes. The issues that had been the core influential ones during the time period and we are going to focus our research on were the Spanish missions in the area, the relationships of Southwest Indians, the slavery abolition issue and the issue of race and gender relationships as well. For decades scholars have published many historical, anthropological, and archaeological studies as well as transcribed and translated documents illustrating the history of Spanish colonization of northern Mexico, missions on the Mexican frontier, and the consequences of Spanish colonization for native peoples. The literature on the so-called Spanish Borderlands is extensive, and the history of the region continues to attract a younger generation of researchers.
The survival of ruins of Spanish settlements such as the missions sparked a strong interest in the history of Spanish settlement in what today is the United States. The one exception was Spanish Florida, permanently settled after 1565. Spanish place names survive in Florida, often in an anglicized form, but with the exception of St. Augustine nothing remains to evoke the memory of the Spanish presence. And that presence was extensive, and stretched from coastal South Carolina and Georgia to the Florida panhandle. Franciscan missionaries established an extensive chain of missions, Spanish entrepreneurs established ranches and farms.
Small settlements grew up around the major military garrisons. However, the mission, farm, and ranch buildings were generally built of wattle and daub or wooden planks, and have not survived. Floridas role as a strategic borderland led to the demise of the mission system at the hands of English colonial militias from the Carolinas, and their Indian allies. It has been only over the past decade and a half that extensive research on Spanish Florida has been published.
Until the 1970 s few mission sites were known, let alone systematically studied, and only one major book had been published on Florida missions (Mark Boyd, Hale Smith, and John Griffen, Here They Once Stood: The Tragic End of the Apalachee missions. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1951). Over the last several decades archaeologists have identified many missions sites, and ethno historians have reconstructed many facets of the Spanish-Indian encounter. The book reviewed here offers the first synthesis of the new scholarship of Spanish Florida. Jerald Milanich, an archaeologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History and one of the major contributors to the renaissance in the study of Spanish Florida, presents his synthesis from the perspective of the experiences of the native peoples of the southeast, and the missions as an element of colonialism. Milanich skillfully blends the archaeological, ethno historical, and historical literature to provide the reader with a clear understanding of Spanish Florida.
The author begins with a review of the study of Spanish Florida, and follows with a discussion of the societies and cultures of the native peoples the Spanish encountered, early efforts at colonization leading up to the settlement of Saint Augustine in 1565, the establishment of the missions, life in the missions including mission economics, demographic patterns, native resistance, and the demise of the missions. Milanich asserts the importance of relations between traditional Indian chiefs and the missionaries, and how the missions fit into the f rame work of Spanish colonialism. The missions provided surplus food to the garrison and town at St. Augustine, as well as labor organized through a repartimiento draft. Raids by hostile Indians and English colonial militia in the first years of the eighteenth-century destroyed most of the missions, and only a small number of survivors resettled in the immediate environs of St. Augustine.
Disease had already killed thousands of Indians. Written for a general audience as well as specialists, Milanich's volume should be the first book read by anybody wishing to learn more about Spanish Florida, and the book is easy to read (no specialized jargon). Moreover, the maps and illustrations (many of artifacts from excavations) provide the readers with a clear sense of place as well as of the material culture. One weakness the book has is the narrow focus on Florida. I would like to have seen some comparison with other Spanish mission frontiers, which is lacking in this book. That one quibble aside, this book is well worth reading.
Another great contribution to the scholarly research on the Florida history was made by Larry Eugene Rivers, in his book Slavery in Florida. Florida has proven fertile ground for scholars of slavery in recent years. Jane Landers has traced the passages to freedom that slaves hacked out on the borderlands of the Spanish empire and British North America, then the United States. Edward E. Baptist has pieced together how kinship ties between planters extended the Old South to Florida. Now comes Larry Eugene Rivers with a vivid survey of antebellum slave society.
Rivers distinguishes between two regions. Slaveholdings were small, production was diversified, and slaves worked by the task in east and west Florida, tending cattle, distilling turpentine, and cultivating rice, indigo, and cotton. In middle Florida, plantations prevailed, cotton and tobacco were the staples, and slaves worked mainly in gangs. Rivers attends to differences within regions, too. The ratio between slave men and women was roughly even by 1830 in east Florida, by 1840 in middle Florida, yet men always predominated in west Florida, nearly three-to-two during the 1850 s.
Landers argues that east Florida is one place that bears out claims that Spanish slavery was the least severe in the Americas. Rivers likewise finds a milder regime in east and west Florida but largely because threats of slave insurrection prompted a strict discipline in middle Florida. Unfortunately, regional distinctions are not sufficiently integrated into this study to sustain generalizations or explain them. Chapters devoted to mainstay topics in the literature on the slave community- the family, religion, the master-slave relation, culture, and resistance- are the core of Slavery in Florida. The daily routines of household production as well as the social status that accrued to slaveholding created a mutual dependence between masters and slaves.
It may sound like paternalism, but Rivers never invokes that thesis explicitly, evidently because both parties were prone to assume roles and masks. Slaves carved out a modicum of independence amidst their owners impositions. Slave culture manifested African dimensions in names with African homonyms, percussive music, plaited hair and other styles of adornment. The typical slave was neither rebellious nor submissive as a rule but both resisted and accommodated slavery at times. During the Civil War, the plantations of middle Florida were distant from Union lines. Over one thousand slaves from east and west Florida served the North as soldiers, laborers, spies, and sailors guiding the Federals to coastal salt works.
Because Rivers covers oft-trod ground, readers familiar with revisionist scholarship since the 1960 s will find few new arguments. The alliance between fugitive slaves and Seminole Indians offers the most intriguing discussion. The Seminoles needed aid to protect their lands, the fugitives to protect their freedom. Black Seminoles lived in separate villages from their patrons, turned over a share of their crops and livestock, and served as sense bearers, translators and counselors, in diplomacy and warfare. Rivers takes the view that the Black Seminoles are better understood as maroons than Indian slaves and that the 750 to 1, 000 plantation slaves who sided with them in 1835 - 38 during the Second Seminole War were engaged in a slave rebellion, perhaps the largest in U. S.
history. American military commanders, recognizing the strategic importance of the Black Seminoles, began to target their villages in late 1836. By June 1838, most Black Seminoles had surrendered to the Americans, advocating removal to Arkansas. Addressing the concerns of revisionist scholars in the context of Florida is a service, although the coverage is broader than deep, and thin in spots. Yet Rivers enlivens this monograph with anecdotes and has a deft way with them that allows readers to turn his evidence to their own analytical purposes. This book deserves an audience among scholars who teach slavery and anyone interested in Florida history.
Creating an Old South examines the evolution of the Florida frontier from the 1820 s through secession. Tracing the migration of planters, ordinary whites, and enslaved people from slaveholding regions, Baptist stresses the acrimonious process by which Florida emerged from a raw territory to a stable slave society. This process, he suggests, should lead scholars to question the applicability of the image of the Old South, which he believes distorts as much as it clarifies. Recommendation Baptists book is a sweeping reassessment of the southern frontier as well as an assault on some conventional understandings of antebellum southern history. His main target is the hegemony-based mode of yeoman-planter relations identified most strongly with Eugene D. Genovese.
Yeomen and planters came to Florida with very different visions of the society they wished to fashion there. The former wished to exercise dominance over subordinates (social inferiors, women, slaves); the latter sought independence. Baptist argues that yeomen were able to force planters to make crucial concessions their worldview, the most significant being a recognition of their equality as white men. Since economic and political power remained in the hands of planters, however, it is likely that many scholars will find this argument unpersuasive.
While Baptist is largely successful in recreating the material and mental worlds of Florida whites, and thus making their often bizarre struggles meaningful, he is less successful in integrating the story of enslaved African-Americans into his narrative. Though his two chapters on slave life are sophisticated and well drawn, they fit at best awkwardly into a narrative that is, ultimately, about how one version of an Old South emerged out of struggles between white men and those of different color. To summarize the research we can state that Florida was experiencing hard times during the time period of the 19 th Century. The state was actually at its formation faze and many things were to be solved to have a descent lives for people. One of the main issues to solve was the issue of relationships between people of different color and nation. These were pretty much solved by the events of the Civil War.
The slavery was abolished and women gained much more rights after the events. Now we have a beautiful state of Florida with its rich history and plenitude of the past events that now can be scholarly explored using all these literature sources. Bibliography: Jerald T. Milanich Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe.
Bernard Romans A Concise Description of East and West Florida. Edward E. Baptist Creating an Old South: Middle Floridas Plantation Frontier before the Civil War. Larry Eugene Rivers Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation. Jerald T. Milanich Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southwestern Indians.
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Research essay sample on 19 Th Century East And West
