New Perspective on Jax Role in Florida's History

[jaxlongtimer]

This is a fascinating story recounting early Florida history centered greatly around abolitionists, Jacksonville and Harriet Beecher Stowe living here:

Long before DeSantis, abolitionists had a similar 'Free Florida' vision, fueled by 'wokeism'

A group of Republican activists intent on battling the idea of "systemic racism" and creating a "Free Florida" plotted to control state government and steer policies to benefit development and business while aggressively marketing the state of Florida to the rest of the country.

The year was 1866....

.....to address the real systemic injustices of the post-Civil War is what motivated thousands of abolitionists to move to Florida with a mission to prevent poverty from pushing poor Black citizens back into a slave-like status, explained Foster.

History is open to interpretation and Foster has a fresh take outlined in his new book "At the Dawn of Tourism in Florida, Abolitionists, Print Media, and Images for Early Vacationers."

Published by the Florida Historical Society Press, "At the Dawn" provides a steady stream of data to indicate the "woke" abolitionists were extremely successful. They made Florida go viral (before virality was a thing), with national magazines racing to publish articles about the state, and Florida's population nearly doubling in 15 years. 

Foster's revelation began with the discovery of an 1866 pocket diary found in an antique ebony table. That eventually led him to a Feb. 1864 article in the Atlantic Monthly, "The Northern Invasions of the South."

The article is a manifesto written by Edward Everett Hale to create a "Free Florida" – a multi-racial society with equality for all. Hale had created the New England Emigrant Aid Company in the 1850s to settle abolitionists in Kansas to stop the spread of slavery. As the end of the Civil War approached, the group began to recruit volunteers to move to "Free Florida."...

....A prominent role in the plan is played by Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose book "Uncle Tom's Cabin" President Abraham Lincoln reportedly credited with starting the war.....

.....Stowe was among a corps of writers, which also included publisher Edward Cheney and columnist John Swaim, who moved to Jacksonville. Cheney would go on to purchase the predecessor of the Jacksonville Times Union and change its editorial content to support the Free Florida idea, while Swaim began to lure northerners to the state by writing about Florida's natural beauty and economic potential. 

Their goal was to form a coalition of free Black Americans, southern opponents to the Confederacy, and newly arrived Yankees united by an economy based on tourism, development, population growth, and citrus/produce.

"It flickered brightly in pockets of North Florida for a generation," said Foster....

....Foster's interest in Reconstruction Florida was triggered when he discovered he had inadvertently inherited John Swaim's diary. It was stored in an antique table that belonged to his grandparents — the table fascinated him as a child and his grandmother left it to him. Turns out, she was the great-grandniece by marriage of Swaim's grandson, and used a drawer to store family documents.

Swaim, a Methodist minister, wrote it while he operated a boarding house during Reconstruction in Jacksonville. The house, in the vicinity of Bay and River streets, served as a way station to a Florida life for many new residents, including Wisconsinite Harrison Reed, Florida's first Republican governor.

Swaim's diary has inspired Foster to write three books about Stowe and her promotion of Florida. 

"At the Dawn" joins "Calling Yankees to Florida: Hariett Beecher Stowe's Forgotten Tourism Articles," and "Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers: The Transformation of Florida" – the latter two he wrote with his late wife, Sarah Whitmer Foster....

....Foster's case to declare Harriet Beecher Stowe the Mother of Florida Tourism rests on 67 magazine and newspaper articles she wrote between 1865 and 1879 that promoted Florida as a place to live, play and do business.

In the 1860s, the Stowes bought land in Mandarin, Florida, on the St. Johns River near Jacksonville.

In one national article, she concedes Florida weather patterns can reflect the turbulence of the north, but in the case of March roaring in like a lion, she paints Florida in a much more benign light than her native Connecticut.

"It is not without charm. To sit in the house and see great splendid trees tossing their green arms and swaying their long festoons of gray moss as the winds toss and drive them hither and thither, is quite different matter from being choked up with drifting snow or driving hail and sleet." ....

...."At the Dawn" documents a decade-long birth of modern Florida.

Foster reports the exploits of northern capitalists in Jacksonville, Green Cove, and St. Augustine were standard fare in New York area newspapers of the late 1860s and enabled Florida to capture people's imaginations.

Tourists and capital flowed into the state while the coalition organized by Hale, Stowe and others implemented their pro-tourism, investment policies, according to Foster's telling of the story....

.....In 1865, Jacksonville had a population of 2,000, no hotels, and an economy based on wood processing.

In 1874, the New York Times reported 50,000 visitors trekked to Florida the previous winter – at the time Florida's population was fewer than 200,000.

In 1875, Jacksonville had a year-round population of 6,000, and a defined tourist season that attracted an additional 2,000 visitors. Along Bay Street there were six hotels with a combined total of at least 500 rooms and ongoing construction.

"Modern Florida therefore existed in downtown Jacksonville in 1875, where it had not been a decade earlier," said Foster. ....

....A three-punch pummeling ended the first Free Florida experiment around the turn of the century.

Killer winter freezes in 1894 and 1895 devastated Florida agriculture and resulted in an economic catastrophe.

Then the Great Fire of 1901 obliterated Jacksonville. More than 2,000 buildings in the downtown area were destroyed and 10,000 residents, 35% of the population, left homeless.....

.....The city rebuild would last for more than a decade and attracted thousands of workers from South Carolina and Georgia, who doubled the population. This new wave of emigrants brought Jim Crow and a segregated society with them. The abolitionists in the St. Johns River Valley suddenly were outnumbered.

It was then that the contributions of Hale, Stowe, and Swaim were erased, said Foster.

"The 'big lie' about who started tourism first appeared in the 1930s – at the height of Jim Crow and the myth that the abolitionists were carpetbaggers not interested in the well-being of Blacks," said Foster.

"A lot of them (abolitionists) started to die in the 1880s. So, they weren't around to defend themselves," said Foster.....

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/politics/2022/12/19/desantis-and-abolitionists-both-championed-free-florida-and-a-woke-war/69710135007/


Harriet Beecher Stowe's Mandarin home on the banks of the St. Johns River:



Harriet Beecher Stowe on steps of the Florida Capitol:

[thelakelander]

Very interesting. Jacksonville was also majority Black during the 19th century. That Reconstruction Era growth period was also fueled by freedmen and freedwomen flocking to what they called "The Magic City", ultimately leading to the city becoming a formative ragtime, jazz and blues destination. One thing I can easily predict is neither this abolitionist movement nor Jacksonville's true history will be taught in public schools!

[jaxlongtimer]

^ Thought this might add to your extensive history repertoire 

[BridgeTroll]

Interesting excerpts... too bad it's behind a pay wall...

[Snaketoz]

Interesting excerpts... too bad it's behind a pay wall...

I subscribed for 2 years for only $22 for the digital version.

[Houseboat Mike]

Interesting excerpts... too bad it's behind a pay wall...

I subscribed for 2 years for only $22 for the digital version.

same....and then promptly set a reminder to cancel 1 year and 11 months later...read the fine print and look at what it jumps to...

[BridgeTroll]

Interesting excerpts... too bad it's behind a pay wall...

I subscribed for 2 years for only $22 for the digital version.

No thank you

[thelakelander]

If you have a library card, you have digital access to most of the major papers across the country for free.

[Snaketoz]

Interesting excerpts... too bad it's behind a pay wall...

I subscribed for 2 years for only $22 for the digital version.

same....and then promptly set a reminder to cancel 1 year and 11 months later...read the fine print and look at what it jumps to...

Definitely over priced after the 2 years.  I cancel and wait for the next "special". Barely worth $11 per year, outrageous at $11.99 per month.

[sandyshoes]

Re: T-U subscription content
THANK YOU...I got raked over for not "just [taking] out a subscription", on another topic I can't remember.  I do think it would be considerate if T-U would just share articles to do with public health and safety without restricting them for subscribers (such as bad restaurant inspections, the best and worst local hospitals...)  I know this is off-topic, but just threw in my two cents.  Thanks.

[tufsu1]

Re: T-U subscription content
THANK YOU...I got raked over for not "just [taking] out a subscription", on another topic I can't remember.  I do think it would be considerate if T-U would just share articles to do with public health and safety without restricting them for subscribers (such as bad restaurant inspections, the best and worst local hospitals...)  I know this is off-topic, but just threw in my two cents.  Thanks.

how do you propose they recoup their costs without subscription revenues?

[BridgeTroll]

Re: T-U subscription content
THANK YOU...I got raked over for not "just [taking] out a subscription", on another topic I can't remember.  I do think it would be considerate if T-U would just share articles to do with public health and safety without restricting them for subscribers (such as bad restaurant inspections, the best and worst local hospitals...)  I know this is off-topic, but just threw in my two cents.  Thanks.

how do you propose they recoup their costs without subscription revenues?

Many very good free news sites contain... ADVERTISING!!  It may be annoying but I get 100% of national and international news in this manner. Of course these sites produce a quality product that advertisers appear willing to pay space for.  I can certainly understand why the TU may be unable attract such advertisers...

[Charles Hunter]

With the proliferation of Ad Blockers, that revenue stream is not as great as it once may have been. Some ad-supported websites have the equivalent of a paywall, requiring you to disable your ad blocker to read a news item. I decide based on how badly I want to read the article. Or how annoying their ads are from past experience.

[jaxlongtimer]

It is well known that virtual/online ads don't generate anything close to the revenue of traditional print ads.  Other than a handful of widely read national publications (e.g. NY Times, WSJ, Washington Post), nearly every print publication has either drastically scaled back to a shadow of its former self, begged for donations to supplement revenue and/or simply gone out of business.  This is a tremendous loss to, especially, local news coverage and investigations, that will yield more results like Mr. Santos running for Congress and getting elected based on a pack of lies because no one was really watching.  Imagine what will happen behind closed doors here with no one peering in.

I subscribe to the print version of the T-U which includes full access to their website.  While I am not happy with the print subscription rates* (which I have been able to negotiate down some by calling them to ask for better deals), I do it to support local journalism.  I also find that I can more easily digest a range of articles not clearly obvious on the website (call me old fashioned but I do prefer scanning a printed page over a screen when dealing with a larger volume of reading).  It's also easier to "save" a printed article than to try to print it off the web sometimes.

In the end, you get what you pay for.  Paying for the T-U is as much about preserving a vital function in our community as it is about anything else.  I can't imagine what the last few years here would be like without people at the T-U like Nate Monroe.  You can call him or others at the paper too "liberal" (I don't), but they have uncovered a tremendous amount of "hanky-panky" in this town and maybe have prevented a lot more due to those fearful of being exposed.

Lastly, when some of us complain about how uninformed our fellow citizens are about our local goings-on and a reduced level of engagement, I believe you can tie this directly to the reduction in readership of the Times-Union.  Similarly, this occurs throughout the country and, I believe, contributes to the divisiveness of our country and erosion of leadership as people turn to unvetted postings on social media instead.  This just adds to the concern above.

It will be a sad day if the T-U goes to less than daily editions.  I hope they continue to focus their limited resources on local politics, government and community in a way no one else can regularly match.

*You can always buy occasional printed copies at a convenience or grocery store if you don't want the paper everyday.  Lastly, subscribing to the virtual version (which includes the e-edition that fully replicates the printed paper) is much cheaper than the print version and is better than not supporting the paper at all.

FYI, I note that the monthly full online rate is $14.99/month (comparable to a NetFlix subscription or 50 cents/day) and for daily print delivery, $30.00/mo. (a mere slice of a robust cable TV subscription or $1/day).  At today's drink prices, it's equal to one or two specialty drinks a month and the paper would be a lot better for you too  .  I might add that, over the years, many an informative article or coupon in the paper has saved me far more than the cost of a subscription.

[thelakelander]

With the proliferation of Ad Blockers, that revenue stream is not as great as it once may have been. Some ad-supported websites have the equivalent of a paywall, requiring you to disable your ad blocker to read a news item. I decide based on how badly I want to read the article. Or how annoying their ads are from past experience.

It's definitely a dilemma for the press but at the end of the day, we all have our personal financial challenges, so we have to pick and choose what our spending priorities are. I use my public library card to read the TU content, as well as several other papers across the country. If not for that free option, I'd likely skip reading the majority of them altogether.