TO BE A GOOD ALL-ROUND MAN:

BLACK MOBILITY IN FLORIDA IN THE DECADES FOLLOWING THE CIVIL WAR

Christopher E. Linsin

Florida State University

As in the rest of the South, black slaves in Florida in 1865 confronted the realization of their long-held dream of freedom. Liberated from plantation confinement and their masters' control, Florida's freedmen exercised the right of apparently unrestricted movement as the first manifestation of freedom. Initially pursuing the dream of forty acres and a mule, black Floridians in the decades following the Civil War sought land ownership, tenancy, and itinerancy. Ultimately, their quest to improve their economic, social, and political conditions led to urbanization.(1) Mobility remained central to this quest.

In the 1910s, large numbers of southern blacks began deserting the South. Seeking economic opportunities in the Midwestern and Northeastern urban centers of the industrial heartland, southern blacks began what historians have identified as the Great Migration. Not all of this out-migration stemmed from economic motives. Southern blacks also fled the terrors of lynching and the agony of social oppression. But economic "pull" has outweighed the social "push" in motivating the Great Migration of the 1910s. This migratory wave of southern blacks into the North continued throughout most of the twentieth century.(2)

In 1923, Charles S. Johnson, editor of the National Urban League's Opportunity and future president of Fisk University, helped set the tone for what would become historical canon in black migration studies: "Negroes, like all others with a spark of ambition and self-interest, have been deserting [southern] soil which cannot yield returns in proportion to their population increase."(3) Johnson maintained that black in-migration, the movement of southern blacks from rural to urban areas within the South, reflected essentially economic--not racial--motives. Otherwise, the "direction of Negroes . . . would have been North instead of further South." Johnson concluded that

[h]ere, of course, is the economic factor at work hand in hand, with greater mobility, increased transportation, restlessness and the monotony and uncertainty of agricultural life ever against the allurements of the city.(4)

Although an astute analyst of black America, Johnson, as well as contemporary migration historians, have failed to understand fully the function of this precipitant movement.(5) Black in-migration of the late nineteenth century prepared southern blacks for the move North—both during the Great Migration of the 1910s and in subsequent migratory waves. Moving in concentric rings and gradually extending their spheres of influence, increasingly mobile southern blacks built upon earlier migration experiences. Moving within the South, to the West, and ultimately North, each succeeding movement was rooted in earlier experiences.

In 1860, the estimated black population of the United States stood at about four and a half million. By 1890, this figure had grown to about seven and a half million, approximately 12 percent of the total population of the United States.(6) The 1885 state census estimated Florida's black population at about 203,000. The federal census of 1890, reflecting a dramatic increase, ranked Florida eleventh in total black population in the South with approximately 309,000. Between the years of 1860 and 1910, black population increased in Florida by about 268,000.(7) Granted, some of this can be attributed to natural increase. But because Florida had one of the higher rates of infant mortality in the South, coupled with dwindling rates of longevity, some of this increase reflected the rising rural and urban in-migration of southern blacks moving into Florida.(8) While not approaching the figures of either Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, or Louisiana--the top five states in black population between 1870 and 1910--about 46 percent of Florida's population was black.

While Florida would retain a large indigenous black population, some of Florida's blacks already had begun the incipient trek North.(9) But blacks from other southern states--particularly from Georgia and South Carolina--began moving into Florida.(10) By 1910, nearly one third of the approximately 300,000 blacks residing in the state had migrated into Florida, most coming from states of the Lower South and some from the Upper South. Virginia contributed 2200, North Carolina 9700, South Carolina 27,500, and Georgia 45,700.(11) This migration, begun after the Civil War, continued until the 1910s when the path of movement shifted North.(12) The increasing black population in Florida between 1870 and 1900 reflected an aggregate increase of 34.6 percent. The traditional slave counties of Middle Florida, however, showed limited growth, well below the state's average.(13) By 1910, Florida's four largest black counties were Duval, Alachua, Marion, and Escambia. Other Florida counties also demonstrated significant growth rates.(14) Clearly blacks were moving—both into and within Florida.

White Floridians in 1865, were shocked and worried by the sudden departure from the farms and plantations of their black folks. Susan Bradford Eppes, recalling conditions on her father's Leon County plantation at the end of the Civil War, wrote that

[t]he Negro loves to roam; and his attachments are not strong; new scenes lure him on; the more he travels the better he likes it, and he is ready at any time to drop anything he is doing to hunt green fields and pastures anew.(15)

Eppes reflected the patronizing view of many white southerners--a view stemming from a misguided belief that most blacks lacked responsibility.(16) Octavia Bryant-Stephens in Thomasville, Georgia, similarly lamented over what she saw as the irresponsible flight of ex-slaves into Tallahassee in the summer of 1865. She wrote in her diary that "most of the Negroes went to town having a holiday, cannons fired, the town full of Negroes, about 3000."(17) By implying that the freedmen's need for mobility was irresponsibly rooted Eppes, Bryant-Stephens, and other white commentators revealed their racism. Such tendencies, deeply rooted in the slavery experience and exacerbated during Reconstruction, emerged as an unfortunately characteristic element of the New South ethos.

The dream of acquiring land catalyzed black in-migration. As Michael L. Lanza has identified, the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 that promised free land to the landless played an important, stimulating role in Florida.(18) It opened millions of acres of public land--land many of the freedmen were eager to occupy. Lacking the needed capital, much of this land remained out of reach for most freedmen. Furthermore, white planters were generally not inclined to rent their land to blacks, for it was believed by some that such a responsibility would "ruin the negro."(19)

The freedmen's desire for land reflected more than a longing for crass material improvement. Land ownership implied independence and responsibility, the twin ideals of citizenship. For Florida's freedmen such notions fused with their efforts "to enjoy America" while negating the symbolic images of slavery: dependency, stifled opportunity, and restricted mobility. Nell Irvin Painter in her examination of the 1879 Exodus to Kansas declared that poor black freedmen believed that land ownership held the key not only to material prosperity but to equal opportunity and happiness as well.(20)

Journalistic asservations notwithstanding, public lands in Florida failed to become what one Florida newspaper editor called "an asylum for the oppressed."(21) Public lands were still available in Florida by the mid-1870s, and not only in the southern part of the state, but in counties like Orange, which saw a significant increase in black population in the 1880s.(22) The promotion of these public lands, however, reflected the racist climate of the late nineteenth-century United States and not the professed aims of the Southern Homestead Act of 1866.(23) Consequently, few freedmen in Florida or elsewhere throughout the South succeeded in acquiring rural land.(24)

Initially frustrated in their attempts to obtain land, itinerant tenancy initially offered blacks a relatively secure alternative. But, if a better situation came along, black tenant farmers were prepared to move. One ex-slave, Charles Coates, having suffered slavery in Georgia, migrated to Florida after working as a tenant farmer and in a series of odd jobs throughout the southeast.(25) He finally came to Florida on the wave of urban migration into Jacksonville during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. His story was not unique. Other blacks migrating into and within Florida shared similar itinerant experiences.(26) The urge to move, to be "good and gone," prompted southern blacks to seek not only economic aggrandizement but the simple benefits enjoyed by white Americans.(27) The promise of land ownership fused with this initial phase of black migration and melded with the American myths of individualism and independence.(28) By seeking land blacks presumably sought safety, better education for their children, independence, responsibility, and maintenance of community--in addition to economic improvement.

White southerners, facing the task of rebuilding the South, sought to manipulate black labor.(29) Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, the disposition of black labor in Florida commanded the attention of Florida's elites.(30) The acute labor shortage in Florida following emancipation prompted one foreign observer to wonder:

Negro labor seems abundant, yet we understand there is difficulty in securing it. But there are reasons why this is so. They dislike, as a rule, to do any labor for their old masters, since that would seem to them very much like the old system which they now have such a horror of.(31)

Time validated this observation. Blacks, exercising free geographic mobility, did the same with their labor. Even though some southern whites remained divided over the role blacks were to play, the importance of their labor persisted for decades as a central concern.(32) Freedom ostensibly liberated economically oppressed blacks whose labor had been appropriated in slavery. Mobility emerged as a critical part of this economic liberation by offering blacks the chance to migrate to those places where their opportunities were greatest.(33) In areas where the plantation economy and its elites still held sway, black labor was highly prized and efforts to thwart black mobility were evident in the black codes and vagrancy laws.(34) Where black labor threatened to impede the ability of working-class whites to secure employment, black labor was clearly less valued. Restrictions on black labor, cast within the context of the Mississippi Plan, persisted in the New South era.(35)

Ironically, the planter elites initially found an ally in the Freedmen's Bureau.(36) Ostensibly designed to aid the freedmen and to prevent their return to slave-like conditions, the Freedmen's Bureau also served as an employment agency. The Bureau aimed not at land distribution, but at relocation of black labor to where it was in greatest demand--invariably in rural areas.(37) Bureau officials, convinced that an improved economy would also contribute to the security of the freedmen, rationalized the need to stimulate the southern economy by relocating black labor. Many of the same conditions prevailed in Florida, and the Bureau's actions in Florida encouraged in-migration.(38)

Cases exist whereby the planter elites continued to exercise significant control over the freedmen, in some instances denying them the reality of their rapidly approaching freedom. These elites were repulsed by the very thought of emancipation and their blacks leaving the plantations.(39) Matilda Brooks, a North Carolina slave who eventually migrated to Monticello, Florida, recalled of how, near the end of the war, slaves remained ignorant of the war and its progress. But when the federals were sighted near Brooks's plantation, news of impending freedom spread throughout the slave community "just like dry grass burning up a hill."(40)

Other slaveholders, in outright defiance of the Emancipation Proclamation and the surrender of all southern armies, held onto their slaves--in some instances up to the arrival of federal troops. Sarah Ross, a Mississippi slave, lost little time in leaving her liberated plantation when her former owner, forced by federal soldiers, reluctantly granted Sarah's freedom. Leaving the unpleasant memories of the plantation behind, Sarah headed for Florida, ultimately marrying and settling in Live Oak.(41) Rebecca Hooks, held in slavery in Georgia, was "hastily told" of her freedom as Union forces approached in search of planters who were still holding their slaves after the war had ended.(42)

Even though warned of the dangers of freedom by her master, Rebecca and her husband fled the plantation--two of the first to leave. Not knowing their destination, blacks like Rebecca Hooks, Sarah Ross, and Matilda Brooks did not hesitate to sever their ties with the plantation system and to jettison at least the realities, if not the memories, of slavery. All that mattered was to be "gone." The ultimate destination for these three ex-slaves, as for many others, was Florida. Ambrose Douglass, a North Carolina slave, reflected on his migration into Florida after freedom came:

I was 21 when freedom finally came, and that time I didn't take no chances on 'em taking it back . . . I lit out for Florida and wound up in Madison County. I had a nice time there; I got married, got plenty of work, and made me a little money.(43)

Douglass's experience mirrored that of many Florida migrants. Moving from job to job, always seeking to improve their material and social conditions, freedmen failed to obtain any high degree of material security. They did, however, exhibit independence through mobility. Even though the Southern Homestead Act guaranteed free land, it failed, because it did not provide the ex-slaves with anything beyond land. For the Act to have realized its purpose of aiding the establishment of small yeoman farms, capital was needed in addition to land--capital for stock, tools, and the initial means of subsistence required of new settlers.(44)

With the dream of land ownership outstripping the realities involved, many blacks recognized that a small portion of independence and autonomy in the city surpassed a life of itinerancy or tenancy. Itinerancy reflected the economic oppression blacks faced in their attempts to secure just terms with their often temporary employers. Tenancy emerged too reminiscent of slavery, because it attempted to tie blacks to the plantation. Frustrated by these modes of existence, blacks were often forced to move. It is not surprising then, that black in-migration both within and into Florida increasingly turned toward cities like Jacksonville.

In Florida and other southern states where a planter elite struggled for control of the South, whites encouraged blacks to stay either in rural areas or to migrate where rural labor was in demand. But cities and towns beckoned, and freedmen responded. "The streets of Tallahassee were clustered with these jubilant [black] people going here and there," ex-slave Louis Napoleon observed, and "it was a joyous and unforgettable occasion."(45)

More than just the "allurements of the city," and the promise of greater autonomy and community security that drew freedmen to Florida.(46) Seeking employment in Florida's timber, turpentine, phosphate, and railroad industries, blacks moving into and within Florida would, in growing numbers, seek the accoutrements that such employment promised. Blacks also secured urban employment in Florida as blacksmiths, carpenters, cooks, and domestic servants. By 1910, about 50 percent of Florida's employed black work force labored in urban-oriented jobs.(47)

Not all such urban activity was seen in a positive light. Newspapers, reflecting concern over urban growth and its attendant problems, characterized Florida's cities as "nurseries of vice, corruption, crime, and consequent pauperism."(48) To serve best the interests of the state, the steady stream of black emigration into Florida's cities and towns demanded control,(49) and, with freedmen "flocking" into the state's cities and towns, southerners feared that crops would be neglected.(50) White Floridians feared the costs--both social and economic--of uncontrolled black mobility.

Blacks encountered resistance to urbanization--even after Reconstruction. Planter elites did not want their blacks to pursue the aims of the New South boosters by becoming industrial workers, and Redeemers wanted blacks tied to rural-based industry. All three feared the idea of black/white working-class solidarity that might arise in the liberal climate of urbanity.(51)

Furthermore, major sources of employment in Florida ran counter to both the notion of land ownership and urbanization among black migrants. Both the timber and the turpentine industries, the phosphate industry, and the railroad boom of the late nineteenth century, kept blacks forever on the move toward new stands of yellow pine for turpentine and lumber, new phosphate deposits, and the construction of new railroad milage.(52)

Southern cities encouraged black urbanization. Despite the initial efforts of the Freedmen's Bureau to keep blacks tied to the land; despite the subsequent efforts of New South boosters to channel the flow of black labor into itinerancy; despite legislative efforts to keep blacks locked into rural labor through vagrancy laws; and despite the promise of acquiring land of their own, freedom encouraged a significant minority of blacks to migrate to the city.(53) By 1910, nearly two million blacks lived in southern cities, 21 percent of the entire estimated black population of the South.

Almost 30 percent of Florida's black population lived in urban areas by 1910.(54) In the decades following the Civil War, Jacksonville led the way in black urbanization, showing an increase in black population of 80 percent in the first decade of the twentieth century alone.(55) By 1910, Jacksonville's black population of 29,300 represented nearly 51 percent of the city's population. Following Jacksonville were Pensacola with over 10,000 blacks in residence, Tampa with nearly 9,000, and Key West with 5,500.(56)

The most rapid increase of southern and Florida blacks moving into Florida counties came where blacks made up from 25 percent to 49.9 percent of the total population.(57) This initially suggests that blacks moved into white-dominated counties to secure work. While this seems probable, an equally valid assumption suggests that blacks moving into such counties sought improved conditions in the realm of education and community services--services absent in predominantly black counties that actually saw a decrease in black population. Densely populated black counties lacked the tax base needed to support the community services enjoyed in predominantly white counties. James B. Crooks has argued persuasively that the community services offered the citizens of Jacksonville helped to draw both whites and blacks into that city.(58)

Urban centers like Jacksonville satisfied the desire of blacks to secure the education seriously deficient in rural areas. For many of the ex-slaves, freedom and its responsibilities merged with a "lust" to secure an education for their children, as one European observer noted. He continued, "[N]egroes show a laudable zeal for education."(59)

In the decades following the Civil War, Florida remained essentially rural for both whites and blacks. But the trend of black urbanization had taken root, primarily in the city of Jacksonville.(60) Jacksonville displayed a distinctively northern character because of its close connections with northern investors and tourists and because of the presence of Union troops occupying the city almost at will during the Civil War. Such a social climate, endowed with improved educational opportunities, promoted the idea that urbanization could provide security for blacks. Much like the promise of free land with the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, urban life promised blacks increased freedom and autonomy—long feared by whites in the South.(61)

Florida blacks demonstrated an urban affinity even before the Civil War had ended. Drawn to the South's cities and towns by the protection assured them by the Union troops stationed there, blacks found a measure safety.(62) They believed, and with good reason, that the federal government had assumed the role of caretaker of those blacks arriving in cities and towns throughout the South. Augmenting such a belief, the Freedmen's Bureau moved quickly to provide the freedmen with food, clothing, and protection.(63) According to Howard N. Rabinowitz:

There were many reasons for this flow of freedmen to the cities; and despite unsatisfactory living conditions the migration continued and even intensified. Many former slaves were simply influenced by the headiness of freedom which removed their bonds to the land and permitted them to flee the control of their old masters. . . . The cities served as sanctuaries housing the federal troops and later the headquarters of the Reconstruction governments; there too was safety in numbers.(64)

This "headiness of freedom" points squarely at the idea that migration, especially urban in-migration, reflected more than just economic drives. As William Cohen has indicated:

Central to slavery had been the ability of the masters to control black movement; central to freedom was the right of former bondsmen to pick up and move when they wished . . . [and] [w]hen emancipation came, blacks all over the South decided that if freedom meant anything, it meant the right to reject slavery.(65)

In short, "freedom" meant the right to move.

With emancipation, Florida's freedmen and those of the Lower South migrating to Florida began their movement unplanned, following the labor market while exercising their newly-won freedom to move. Moving at will with the itinerant labor flow, mobile blacks in Florida gained the experience and confidence that would serve them well in their increasingly urban orientation.

A large number of freedmen moving into Florida after the Civil War came from Georgia. One of these migrants, Willis Dukes, stated that while he was too young and isolated to understand fully the meaning of freedom, he knew he wanted to get away. More than anything else, Dukes wanted to get away "to some place where [I] could earn enough money to buy [my] mother a real silk dress."(66) Dukes did get away when freedom came, migrating to Florida and settling in Titusville. Clayborn Gantling, born into slavery in Georgia, worked on four different plantations in Florida before moving to Jacksonville.(67) After trying itinerancy, and after a brief stint as a tenant farmer, Gantling followed the increasingly well-trod path to the city.

Ex-slaves throughout the South--men and women like Sarah Ross, Ambrose Douglass, Clayborn Gantling, Matilda Brooks, Rebecca Hooks, and Willis Dukes--migrated to and within Florida after the Civil War.(68) Demonstrating similar patterns of concentric movement, black mobility in Florida eventually assumed an urban cast. For black Americans, no less than for many white Americans, the city symbolized a sense of hope in an age of urbanization and modernization.

At bottom, southern black in-migration in Florida reflected more than just economic motives. Black migrants came into Florida after freedom because of complex reasons, most of them rooted in the notion of unrestricted mobility as the initial manifestation of freedom. This in-migration prepared the freedmen, in both pragmatic and emotional ways, for their move North in the 1910s. By moving, by testing their abilities in a free-labor system, blacks gained both the skills and the confidence needed for the Great Migration. Mobility liberated them. Virginia slave Philip Coleman succinctly described this liberating function of southern in-migration: "While I was at liberty to go where I pleased, I stayed down South until I got to be what I considered myself to be a good all-round man; then I came North."(69)

***

Christopher E. Linsin is a graduate student at Florida State University in Urban History. His doctoral dissertation will examine twentieth-century black urbanization in Florida. Mr. Linsin is working as an adjunct instructor of American history at Tallahassee Community College and at Florida State University as a teaching assistant.

ENDNOTES

1. For the purpose of this study, the terms "urban" and "city" reflect the determination of the Bureau of the Census that qualifies anything in excess of 2500 individuals concentrated in a definite area as "urban." Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 1790-1915 (Washington, DC, 1918), 90.

2. Maliaka Adero, Up South: Stories, Studies, and Letters of this Century's African-American Migrations (New York, 1993), viii. Beginning in the early 1980s, blacks have started a return migration. This movement South reflects similar trends of Sunbelt migration within the white community--trends that have melded economic opportunity with social enhancement. See Randall M. Miller and George E. Pozzetta, eds., Shades of the Sunbelt: Essays on Ethnicity, Race, and the Urban South (Boca Raton, FL, 1989). C. Vann Woodward has recently argued that this late 20th-century movement into the South by blacks may stem more from social concerns than from economic ones. See C. Vann Woodward, "Look Away, Look Away," Journal of Southern History 59 (Aug. 1993): 487-504.

3. Charles S. Johnson, "How Much is the Migration a Flight from Persecution?" Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life (Sept. 1923): 272.

4. Ibid., 273.

5. Clarence Walker's revisionist analyses of black history promote the primacy of race over class as the correct interpretive framework for studying black history. See Clarence E. Walker, "How Many Niggers Did Karl Marx Know? Or, A Peculiarity of the Americans," in Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville, TN, 1991), 1-33.

For earlier studies of black migration, see Henderson Donald, "The Negro Migration of 1916-1918," Journal of Negro History 6 (Win. 1921): 383-498; Louise Venable Kennedy, The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward: Effects of Recent Migration to Northern Centers (New York, 1930); Edward E. Lewis, The Mobility of the Negro: A Study in the American Labor Supply (New York, 1931); E. J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War (New York, 1920); Carter G. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (New York, 1918); and Thomas Jackson Wooter, Negro Migration: Changes in Rural Organization and Population of the Cotton Belt (New York, 1920).

Few works have examined in-migration within the South. For two outstanding examples of scholarship that have, see Joe W. Trotter, Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington, IN, 1991) and William Cohen, At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861-1915 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1991).

6. Negro Population, 25. The 1890 census, much like the earlier 1870 census, reflected an under count of the black population. See Cohen, At Freedom's Edge, 300, 302.

7. Negro Population, 37.

8. Ibid., 306-311.

9. A significant number of blacks in Jacksonville would migrate to cities like Philadelphia around the turn of the century. See, Robert Gregg, Sparks From the Anvil of Oppression: Philadelphia's African Methodists and Southern Migrants, 1890-1940 (Philadelphia, 1993), esp. chapt. 8.

10. William E. Vickery, The Economics of Negro Migration, 1900-1960 (New York, 1977), 177-78.

11. Negro Population, 75.

12. Edward Ayers has determined that both in- and out-migration in the decades following the Civil War did not affect Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida nearly as much as other states of the former Confederacy. The reasons behind this phenomenon demand further inquiry. See Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York, 1992), 151.

13. Leon County showed a decrease of 3.9%, Madison a .9% increase, Jefferson a 1.25% increase, Jackson a 17.9% increase, and Gadsden with an increase of 25.6% between 1880 and 1910. Negro Population, 802.

14. Citrus grew by 767.4% between 1880 and 1990, Polk grew 542.6% between 1880 and 1890, Taylor grew 513.9% between 1900 and 1910, Manatee grew 412.2% between 1900 and 1910, Lee grew 398.4% between 1900 and 1910, Volusia grew 357.6% between 1880 and 1890, and Dade grew 224.4% between 1900 and 1910. Ibid., 778.

15. Susan Bradford Eppes, The Negro of the Old South (Chicago, 1925), 165.

16. See Eppes, Negro of the Old South, 139; John Wallace, Carpet-bag Rule in Florida (Jacksonville, FL, 1888), 23; William Watson Davis, The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida (1913; reprint, Gainesville, FL, 1964), 341, 343, 398; Ellen Call Long, Florida Breezes, or Florida, New and Old (1883; reprint, Gainesville, FL, 1962), 381. This white concern over black mobility can also be found in newspapers, government documents, and private correspondence. See New York Tribune, June 20, 1865; The New York Times, June 16, 1865 and Aug. 1, 1865; US Congress, House, Executive Documents, 39th. Cong., 1st. ses., no. 70, 82-83; F. Bruce Rosen, ed., "A Plan To Homestead Freedmen in Florida in 1866," Florida Historical Quarterly 43 (Apr. 1963): 379-84; and Ulrich B. Phillips and James David Glunt, eds., Florida Plantation Records: From the Papers of George Noble Jones (St. Louis, 1927), 179, 206.

17. Octavia Bryant-Stephens diary, 4 July 1865, Stephens Family Papers, P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History, University of Florida.

18. Michael L. Lanza, Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics: The Southern Homestead Act (Baton Rouge, LA, 1990), 1.

19. Floridian (Tallahassee), Sept. 26, Dec. 19, 1965, Apr. 13, 1866.

20. Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: The Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (New York, 1977), 108-11. W. E. B. Du Bois suggested that this longing for land of their own stemmed from the personal gardens kept by slaves. See his Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 (1935; reprint, New York, 1992), 123.

21. Tallahassee Sentinel, Aug. 14, 1875.

22. Negro Population, 778.

23. The New South, Jan. 9, 1875. Michael L. Lanza maintains that the distinguishing feature of the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 was that it provided free land for the expressed purpose of homesteading. The act aimed at thwarting the efforts of speculators by prohibiting the outright purchase of federal land in those public land states open to homesteading. Lanza argued that this intent sprang from three federal assumptions regarding land use: the Jeffersonian ideal of supporting the interests of small yeoman farmers over the desires of speculators; the Republican Party's advocacy of a "homestead-only" restriction of public land use that reflected the free-soil, free-labor ideology the Republicans had formulated in the 1850s; and the more radical aim of some Republicans in Congress who favored a policy designed to punish the former plantation owners. See Lanza, Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics, 1-2.

24. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 513; Wallace, Carpet-Bag Rule, 39; Joe M. Richardson, "The Freedmen's Bureau and Negro Labor in Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly 39 (Oct. 1960), 167-68.

25. George P. Rawick, gen. ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, vol. 17: Florida Narratives (Westport, CT, 1972), 70.

26. Ibid., 53, 98, 103, 119, 121-23, 143, 169, 221, 246.

27. Carol Marks, Farewell, We're Good and Gone (Bloomington, IN, 1989), 1.

28. Such a notion, long a part of the mythology of US history, emerged with significance in the 18th century. No doubt black bondsmen became imbued with such notions. See Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York, 1985) and Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976).

29. Jerrell H. Shofner, Jefferson County, Florida (Tallahassee, FL, 1976), 269-300; Davis, Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida, 397; Wallace, Carpet-Bag Rule, 33-34; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 693; and Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1989), 138-39.

30. Such preoccupation with black labor prevailed throughout the South. See De Bow's Review 34 (1866): 490; 35 (1866): 491; 36 (1867): 356; 38 (1868): 416; Tallahassee Sentinel, Feb, 5, 12, Oct. 31, 1876; Saint Augustine Weekly News, Sept. 26 1889; Susan Bradford Eppes, Through Some Eventful Years (Macon, Ga., 1926), 371. For a detailed outline of the New South ethos, see Henry W. Grady, The New South (New York, 1890). For a cogent examination of the aims of New South boosters, see Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), 261-69. For a Florida perspective, see James B. Crooks, Jacksonville After the Fire, 1901-1919 (Jacksonville, FL, 1990), 6-7.

31. Ledyard Bill, A Winter in Florida (New York, 1869), 217.

32. Cohen, Freedom's Edge, 5; Doyle, New Cities, 261; Ayers, Promise, 8; and C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, vol. 9: A History of the South (Baton Rouge, LA, 1971), 360-65.

33. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 395; Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (New York, 1931), 11.

34. Laws of Florida, 1865-66 (Tallahassee, FL, 1866), 28-33.

35. The "Mississippi Plan" stemmed from Mississippi's state constitutional convention of 1890--a convention called to disfranchise legally the state's 120,000 black citizens. To this end, the convention adopted a two dollar poll tax and education requirements. Not only blacks were disfranchised. In Mississippi some 11,000 poor whites also lost voting rights. The plan also added a list of crimes--burglary, theft, arson, perjury, murder, and bigamy--that, upon conviction, eliminated voting privileges. Other southern states soon followed suit, transforming the Mississippi Plan into what C. Vann Woodward identified as "the American Way." Woodward, Origins, 321. See also 321-49 and John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 7th ed. (New York, 1994), 259-63.

36. Randolph B. Campbell has examined the process of local government in Texas during Reconstruction. He contends that the federal government placed the future of the freedmen into the hands of the white planter elite of East Texas. See his "Grass Roots Reconstruction: The Personnel of County Government in Texas, 1865-1876." Journal of Southern History 58 (Feb. 1992): 99-116. Similar developments occurred in Florida. See Davis, Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida, 397 and Richardson, "Freedmen's Bureau in Florida," 167-68.

37. Cohen, Freedom's Edge, 54.

38. Davis, Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida, 370-71; Eppes, Some Eventful Years, 345; and Cohen, Freedom's Edge, 71. By enforcing both labor contracts and vagrancy laws, the Bureau clearly served the interests of the planter elites. See Richardson, "Freedmen's Bureau in Florida," 167-74.

William W. Davis, betraying his Dunningesque training, suggested that the Bureau's prime function was the protection of the freedmen, failing to note that the planter elites probably benefitted more from Bureau activities than did the freedmen. While noting southern white support for the Bureau, the question of "why" fails to emerge. See Davis, Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida, 382-83, 399. Davis was one of an array of talented young historians of the South, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips being another, who had studied under Reconstruction historian William A. Dunning at Columbia. Around 1900 Columbia had eclipsed Johns Hopkins as the best place to study the southern history--primarily because of Dunning. Condeming Reconstruction as an evil, corrupt institution imposed upon a prostrate land, Dunning emerged as an apologist for the South.

39. The southern agricultural journals brim with such sentiment. See. e.g., De Bow's Review 34 (1866): 348, 353, 490; 35 (1866): 491; 36 (1867): 356, 419; and 38 (1868): 416.

40. Rawick, Florida Narratives, 49.

41. Ibid., 169.

42. Ibid., 177.

43. Ibid., 103.

44. Cohen, Freedom's Edge, 52.

45. Rawick, Florida Narratives, 246.

46. One slavery historian has suggested that the social void experienced by whites when freedom came had profound repercussions within the white southern community. No doubt blacks experienced a similar void in community. See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972), 97-112.

47. This work force was estimated to be 107,000. Negro Population, 517.

48. Tallahassee Sentinel, Oct. 2, 1865.

49. Saint Augustine Weekly News, Feb. 14, 1889; De Bow's Review 34 (1866): 348, 353. The concern over the "rush to the cities" occupied the minds of the northern contemporaries as well. See Bayard Still, ed., Urban America: A History With Documents (Boston, 1974), 6-7.

50. Caroline Mays Brevard, A History of Florida: From the Treaty of 1773 to Our Own Time (Deland, Fl., 1925), 2: 128; Long, Florida Breezes, 382-83; De Bow's Review 34 (1866): 348, 353; 36 (1867): 419.

51. For a cogent analysis of southern concerns over organized labor, see W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; reprint, New York, 1991), 345-57. Ironically, this fear found justification in the Populist movement of the 1890s, a rural- and not an urban-based movement. For an examination of the fears aroused by Populism, see Ayers, Promise, 249-82; and Woodward, Origins, 235-63.

52. This trend of itinerant black labor reflects similar patterns found throughout the South as it sought to fulfill the aims of Henry W. Grady and other New South boosters. See, Ayers, Promise, 154; Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Urbana, 1980), 24-25; Woodward, Origins, 207-8; and Doyle, New Cities, 263.

53. Vagrancy laws, ostensibly designed to secure a reliable work force while maintaining public morals, also aimed obliquely at controlling rampant black mobility. Among the planter elite, such laws enjoyed wide support. See, Laws of Florida, 1868 (Tallahassee, FL, 1868), 99; Tallahassee Sentinel, Sept. 9, 1876; De Bow's Review 35 (1866): 579; 2 (1866): 490.

54. Negro Population, 91. Much the same can be said for the white population in Florida, with approximately 30% living in Florida's urban areas. Clearly, Florida would remain predominantly rural until after the Second World War.

55. Ibid., 93.

56. Ibid., 96.

57. Ibid., 130.

58. Crooks, Jacksonville After the Fire, 5-6.

59. George Campbell, White And Black: The Outcome of a Visit to the United States (New York, 1879), 120. This "lust" for education among the freedmen has garnered wide attention. See Doyle, New Cities, 271; Davis, Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida, 385-86; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 189; Rawick, Florida Narratives, 58-59, 352; Shofner, Jefferson County, 296-98; and for a detailed examination of black education in the South after freedom, see James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988).

60. For a analysis of black community formation in Jacksonville see, Patricia Drozd Kenney, "LaVilla, Florida, 1866-1887: Reconstruction Dreams and the Formation of a Black Community," (Unpublished Master's Thesis, University of Florida, 1990). Kenney convincingly argued that black community formation in Jacksonville reflected five basic components in community development: (1) group identity, (2) "nodal points" that aided in group cohesion via black institutions, (3) physical geography, (4) a social hierarchy to organize the community, and (5) what Kenney identifies as "observable networks" of kith and kin.

61. Doyle, New Cities, 6; Rabinowitz, Urban South, 18; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 412-13; Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974), 41; and Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York, 1964), 80-110.

62. Rabinowitz, Urban South, 21-22.

63. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York, 1965), 131; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 224; and Foner, Reconstruction, 142-44.

64. Rabinowitz, Urban South, 22.

65. Cohen, Freedom's Edge, 3, 14.

66. Rawick, Florida Narratives, 121-22

67. Ibid., 143.

68. Rawick, Florida Narratives, 47, 101, 120, 139, 169, 172.

69. John Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge, LA, 1977), 561.

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