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Travels on the St. Johns River

John Bartram and William Bartram

Thomas Hallock and Richard Franz (eds)

Travels on the St. Johns River presents writings by pioneering American naturalists John Bartram and William Bartram during their exploration of Florida in the second half of the eighteenth century. ... More

Travels on the St. Johns River presents writings by pioneering American naturalists John Bartram and William Bartram during their exploration of Florida in the second half of the eighteenth century. Part I (chapters one–three) includes selections from John Bartram's Diary, William Bartram's description of the St. Johns River valley in his celebrated Travels, and selected correspondence. Part II (chapter four) describes the landscapes, plants and animals, people, and cultural artifacts that John and William encountered in their explorations. Descriptions of the natural world, written in binominal nomenclature, are updated and redefined. Here, armchair and active travelers will find a guide to both the St. Johns River valley, its landscapes, its flora and fauna, and to the Bartrams' responses to the natural world of their time. Photographs, drawings, and maps accompany the writings and the editors’ modern interpretations.Less

Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-Era Charleston

Jeff Strickland

Charleston, South Carolina, was a cosmopolitan city during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Germans, Irish, and a host of European and Latin American immigrants shared the same workplaces, ... More

Charleston, South Carolina, was a cosmopolitan city during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Germans, Irish, and a host of European and Latin American immigrants shared the same workplaces, neighborhoods, streets, residences, and even households. Charleston was a slave society, and its economy relied on the forced labor of thousands of slaves. Immigrants also worked as entrepreneurs, skilled artisans, and laborers. Immigrants and African Americans interacted on a daily basis, and their relations were often positive. White southerners found those positive relations threatening, and nativist sentiments prevailed during the 1850s. Slaveholding meant economic and political power, and although some immigrants owned slaves many found it objectionable. The Civil War presented slaveholding immigrants, and those that aspired to it, the opportunity to side with the Confederacy. While many German and Irish immigrants enlisted in the fight to preserve slavery, others avoided the conflict. Following the Civil War, German immigrants that had continued to operate their businesses during the war led efforts to rebuild the city. Reconstruction afforded German and Irish immigrants and African Americans political opportunities previously limited or denied. The majority of European immigrants supported the Democratic Party, the party of white supremacy, and African Americans chose the Republican Party.Less

Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans

Nathalie Dessens

The first half of the nineteenth century was, for New Orleans, a seminal period. Based on a voluminous correspondence, archived at The Historic New Orleans Collection, the present book draws a ... More

The first half of the nineteenth century was, for New Orleans, a seminal period. Based on a voluminous correspondence, archived at The Historic New Orleans Collection, the present book draws a chronicle of the Crescent City in the 1820s and 1830s. Starting in 1818, six years after Louisiana became a state, the 1200-page correspondence of Jean Boze, a resident of New Orleans, to Henri de Sainte-Gême, a former inhabitant of the city returned to his hometown in Southwestern France, describes at length the extraordinary changes the city underwent during the early American period. A small provincial frontier town in the early nineteenth century, it was the third largest city in the United States in 1840. Over these three decades, the city grew and modernized, taking advantage of its strategic geographical position at the mouth of the Mississippi River to become a bustling crossroads of the Atlantic World, connecting the young American Republic, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. It also welcomed, in numbers unheard of until then, new migrants from the United States, Europe, and the former colony of Saint-Domingue, which became, in 1804, the Haitian republic. These migrants changed the face of the city and established with the Creole population complex relationships that eventually shaped the original identity of the city. The book, following Boze's eyes, draws an original chronicle of one of the most unusual cities in the United States, trying to understand and explain the process that turned the city into the Creole capital.Less

Mr. Flagler's St. Augustine

Thomas Graham

This book is a sympathetic, personal biography of Henry M. Flagler during the years after he left Standard Oil to pursue his second career as builder of Florida. This is also a narrative history of ... More

This book is a sympathetic, personal biography of Henry M. Flagler during the years after he left Standard Oil to pursue his second career as builder of Florida. This is also a narrative history of the transformation of St. Augustine, Florida, from a remote village on the Southern frontier of America into a modern city. However, the narrative expands beyond St. Augustine to follow the extension of Flagler's railroad and hotel empire down the East Coast of Florida to Palm Beach, Miami, and, ultimately, Key West. This book tells the stories of a variety of people whose lives touched Henry M. Flagler: the women who wrote guide books to promote tourism, the architects who designed his hotels, the artists who decorated the hotels, the black hotel waiters (and baseball players), the people who wrote society columns for the newspapers, employees of the hotels and railroads, Flagler's friends and relatives, and, of course, the rich and famous guests who stayed in Flagler's hotels. John D. Rockefeller makes several appearances that are not mentioned in earlier Flagler biographies. This, the first biography of Henry M. Flagler to appear in a quarter century, achieves a level of personal detail not reached in earlier books on Flagler during his Florida years. It is based upon years of research by a historian who spent his career teaching at Flagler College, which today occupies the magnificent halls of Flagler's former Hotel Ponce de Leon.Less

Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World: Slave Trader, Plantation Owner, Emancipator

Daniel L. Schafer

Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., 1765–1843, was born in England, reared in Charleston, South Carolina during the American Revolution, and moved to British New Brunswick when his merchant father was banished ... More

Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., 1765–1843, was born in England, reared in Charleston, South Carolina during the American Revolution, and moved to British New Brunswick when his merchant father was banished with other Loyalists. He became a ship captain engaged in Atlantic commerce, buying sugar and coffee in the Caribbean and slaves in Africa, and exchanging British nationality for loyalty to the United States, Denmark, and Spain to enhance his trade. Abolition of the Atlantic slave trade prompted Kingsley to become a plantation and slave owner in Spanish East Florida, and an advocate of liberal manumission policies found in Spanish laws on race and slavery. Kingsley practiced the humane and patriarchal system of labor discussed in his monograph, A Treatise on the Patriarchal. Kingsley is also remembered for his unorthodox family. Although never married, he fathered children by several enslaved women on his plantation and lived with them in coterminous relationships that lasted for decades. Anta Majigeen Njaay, Kingsley’s only acknowledged “wife,” was of royal lineage in the Kingdom of Jolof in Senegal before being captured in a slave raid. The 1821 American annexation of Florida brought severe laws regulating slavery, banning emancipation, and threatening rights and freedoms of free persons of color. Kingsley responded by purchasing thirty thousand acres of land near Puerto Plata, Haiti (now the Dominican Republic), and establishing a thriving agricultural settlement. Between 1836 and 1840, his extended family and more than fifty slaves (emancipated) moved to this refuge. Descendants still live in the area.Less

The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim

Robert E. May

This collection of essays addresses the role of foreign affairs in the American Civil War. It argues that foreign relations held far more significance for the war's outcome than is generally ... More

This collection of essays addresses the role of foreign affairs in the American Civil War. It argues that foreign relations held far more significance for the war's outcome than is generally recognized. Particular emphasis is given to the policies that Union president Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward adopted to ward off European recognition of Confederate independence—including their reluctance to enforce the Monroe Doctrine—and why the South's “King Cotton” diplomacy never achieved the results that Confederate founders expected when they created their new nation. The authors probe the economic, ideological, cultural, and geopolitical factors in the Confederate failure to earn recognition from a single foreign power and why dangerous international incidents such as the “Trent affair” and the Confederate raid from Canada on St. Albans, Vermont, failed to bring about European involvement in the war. The book addresses the international complications of the Union blockade, considers the impact on British public opinion of public addresses in England by former southern slaves, assesses Union and Confederate reactions to French emperor Napoleon III's intervention in Mexico, and treats the impact abroad of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The book suggests that the war's outcome inspired liberal and reform movement all over the world and that Civil War diplomatic issues still hold relevance in modern times.Less

Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South

William A. Link, David Brown, Brian Ward, and Martyn Bone (eds)

This volume brings together historians and literary scholars in a discussion about the evolving concept of citizenship in the nineteenth-century South. Race, and especially slavery and emancipation, ... More

This volume brings together historians and literary scholars in a discussion about the evolving concept of citizenship in the nineteenth-century South. Race, and especially slavery and emancipation, determined much about citizenship, in large part because the South was a society with “anti-citizens”-people whose status defined them outside of the realm of citizenship. However, Civil War and Reconstruction changed things radically, redefining the meaning of citizenship and thrusting this new meaning into center stage. This volume explores various dimensions of how citizenship changed, and what it meant, using a variety of disciplines and disciplinary approaches. Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South contains eleven original essays, and an epilogue from a distinguished list of scholars.Less

James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War

Michael J. Birkner and John W. Quist (eds)

As James Buchanan took office in 1857 the United States stood at a crossroads. A potential Union-breaking presidential election result had been averted. The Democratic Party maintained its control of ... More

As James Buchanan took office in 1857 the United States stood at a crossroads. A potential Union-breaking presidential election result had been averted. The Democratic Party maintained its control of the federal government and the nation watched to see whether Pennsylvania’s first president could make good on his promise to calm sectional tensions. It was not to be, as Buchanan’s presidency concluded with the breakup of the Union. Because historians agree that Buchanan caused many of his own troubles, beginning with his rigidly pro-southern policy on the admission of Kansas to the Union, he has been largely relegated to the basement among inhabitants of the White House. But can anything else be said about the fifteenth president? In assembling the essays for this volume, editors John W. Quist and Michael J. Birkner asked leading scholars to revisit standard issues and explore newer ones. These essays bring Buchanan’s presidency into sharper focus. Buchanan’s dealings with Utah shed light on his handling of the secession crisis. His approach to Dred Scott reinforces the image of a president whose doughface views were less a matter of hypocrisy than a thorough identification with southern interests. Essays on the secession crisis provide fodder for debate about the strengths and limitations of presidential authority in an existential moment for the young nation. Together, these essays will contribute to a deeper understanding of a turbulent and complex era.Less

The Triumph of the Antebellum Free Trade Movement

William S. Belko

As a result of the Tariffs of 1824 and 1828, a powerful aversion to the protectionist policies had arisen throughout the United States by the middle of President Jackson's first term. In order to ... More

As a result of the Tariffs of 1824 and 1828, a powerful aversion to the protectionist policies had arisen throughout the United States by the middle of President Jackson's first term. In order to counter the spectre of the recent tariff legislation, in the summer of 1831 communities across the country elected delegates to a national convention of anti-tariff, free trade men, which convened in Philadelphia later that fall. Some of the more recognized men steeped in political economy and some of the more recognized statesmen of the day attended the national event. The delegates brought with them disparate, often conflicting voices, and they represented various strands of anti-tariff, free trade thought. Despite these difficulties, the delegates succeeded in attaining harmony and unity, achieving a comprehensive and unified approach to end the protective system and establish free trade as the general economic policy of the United States. The Philadelphia Convention produced several public documents, which immediately became the textbook works for free traders of the day, who would go on to spearhead the anti-tariff position in the halls of Congress as the nullification crisis heated up. The ensuing political battles resulting in the Tariffs of 1832, 1833, 1842, and 1846 reflected the unification of the anti-tariff, free trade impulse as it emerged at the 1831 Convention, and which ultimately prevailed during the presidency of James Polk, lasting until the Civil War.Less