Statehood and the Antebellum Peninsula, Eighteen Forty-Five

Florida entered the Union on March third, eighteen forty-five, the twenty-seventh state, admitted as part of a sectional balancing arrangement, with free Iowa to follow, to maintain the balance between slave and free states in the Senate. The Florida that became a state was a place of astonishing contrasts, a thin spine of settlement along the northern border, a scattering of cattle ranches on the central peninsula, and very few white settlers south of the Peace River, where the Seminole wars had made the interior dangerous and the subtropical humidity made it seem nearly uninhabitable. The population in eighteen forty-five was tiny.

The first federal census conducted after statehood, in eighteen fifty, counted roughly eighty-seven thousand people in all of Florida, and close to half of them were enslaved. The plantation districts concentrated in Middle Florida, that fertile band between the Suwannee and Apalachicola rivers, produced long-staple cotton and some tobacco. The town of Tallahassee, barely twenty years old, served as the capital, positioned as a compromise between the coastal settlements at Pensacola to the west and Saint Augustine to the east.

The cattle business unfolded differently and across a wider territory. Florida crackers, so called by some for the crack of the whips used to drive cattle through the scrub, ran herds of Spanish-descended cattle across the flatwoods and prairies of the central peninsula. These were small, hardy animals, descendants of stock the Spanish had introduced centuries earlier.

Florida beef fed Confederate armies during the Civil War, and the drives north became critical to the Confederate supply system after eighteen sixty-one. Florida seceded on January tenth, eighteen sixty-one, the third state to leave the Union. Its white population was small enough and its geography inconvenient enough that the war played out strangely here, a string of Union coastal occupations, a few pitched battles in the interior, and the preservation of cattle routes that kept the Confederacy fed longer than its northern supply lines could have managed.

When it was over, Florida would spend the next two decades as one of the poorest, most sparsely settled states in the South.