Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas

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СКАЧАТЬ decades of the nineteenth century. In 1812 agitated planters, who lived north of the Florida-Georgia border and called themselves “Patriots,” independently invaded East Florida in an attempt to overthrow Spain. Although Seminoles and Africans joined together and repelled the planters, this unprovoked invasion caused fighting that destroyed what little plantation culture had developed in Spanish Florida after the Revolution. It also provoked Spain to bring a militia of Africans from Cuba to defend the peninsula.²⁴ Soon the British also armed Africans in Florida. During the War of 1812 British troops engaged both Seminoles and Africans to build a fort near Tallahassee and enticed additional Africans to Spanish Florida by offering freedom for loyalty to the British crown.²⁵ Unable to tolerate an ever-enlarging population of Indians and free, armed blacks from the Caribbean and the U.S. South on the nation’s borders, Andrew Jackson invaded Florida in 1818. With the tacit approval of some government officials, Jackson seized Florida for the United States, intensifying local border skirmishes into what we now call the First Seminole War (1817–18), and compelling Spain to relinquish Florida for good.²⁶

      By the time the United States annexed Florida officially in 1821, its local populations and landscape were already infamous subjects of national interest. Florida had long challenged plantation slavery as well as control of the Gulf of Mexico, border security, and the burgeoning project of Indian removal. The new U.S. territory of Florida thus raised challenges to national cohesion and imperial expansion over and beyond the continent—challenges that only intensified as expansionist ambitions burgeoned. For this reason the federal government sponsored several costly interventions in antebellum Florida to prepare the territory for statehood. Government officials believed that Florida’s settlement by a landholding populace loyal to the United States would peacefully expel maroon communities, discourage additional Africans from arriving, and guard the coast from imperial opponents and independent profiteers.

      Yet Florida’s populations and landscape continued to complicate efforts at U.S. settlement and sovereignty. A territorial survey, required for public land sales, began in the mid-1820s, though it was delayed for decades by bad weather, swampy ground, preexisting Spanish land grants, and conflicts with the Seminole. A reliable map including the Florida interior south of Lake Okeechobee was not available until the mid-nineteenth century.²⁷ Military officials began surveying the Florida Reef and Keys during the 1820s, and plans for lighthouses and coastal fortifications soon developed, but difficulties of weather and topography stalled these projects also. Although some lighthouses appeared along the reef during the 1830s, there was no complete reef survey until 1851, and coastal forts proved altogether impractical. In fact, on tiny Florida islands that were supposed to become the U.S. “Gibraltar of the Gulf,” the remnants of one partially built fort still stand. The construction begun by slaves in the 1840s was abandoned after four decades of struggle during which hurricanes, waves, and sinking sands continually undermined the fort’s foundations.²⁸ Plans to drain Florida’s interior swamps also ran aground. This initiative garnered national interest and funding on a number of occasions, beginning when Congress sponsored an expedition to the Everglades for reclamation in the late 1840s. But the sponge-like flatlands repeatedly confounded such projects.²⁹

      While federally funded initiatives propelled Florida’s swamps, shores, reefs, and keys into national discussion and debate, the most costly and galvanizing issue during this period was war. The United States waged a series of military conflicts with Florida’s populations of Africans and Seminoles that erupted into war on three separate occasions between 1818 and 1858. The second of these wars—the Florida War, or Second Seminole War (1835–42)—was the nation’s longest and most expensive Indian war. It drew thousands of American troops into the swamp, where they battled Seminoles and Africans in an effort to establish U.S. control over Florida, for sovereignty over this contested space had become essential to the preservation of plantation slavery throughout the South. Not all inhabitants of the United States supported the war, which prompted debates about the use of federal funding to sustain slavery and pursue Indian removal.³⁰ In the end, the Florida War exterminated or expelled thousands of Africans and Seminoles. Yet it also pushed many maroon communities farther south onto the peninsula, where their justified hostility to encroaching American settlements initiated the Third Seminole War in 1855—a full ten years after Florida had become the nation’s twenty-seventh state.³¹ While all three Indian wars drastically reduced Florida’s populations of Africans and Seminoles, many members of both groups remained, and their descendants continue to live in Florida today.

      During the post-Civil War period, when this study concludes, Florida’s porosity and dispersal continued to challenge key understandings of ground and founding that made it possible to imagine the country as a single entity that could continually expand, yet still cohere. Florida differed dramatically from other parts of the U.S. South. It was the region’s poorest and most sparsely populated state, and the only area where plantation culture had never flourished on a large scale.³² Decades of war against Seminoles and Africans had disrupted U.S. settlement and, while no decisive Civil War battles were fought there, Union troops repeatedly occupied and ravaged several cities after Florida seceded in 1861.³³ It was difficult to travel in and to Florida as well, for public roads were in deplorable condition, and an extensive railroad would not exist until the 1890s.

      Nonetheless, post-Civil War Florida’s lack of traditional foundations gave many populations a home in the post-slavery United States. Freedmen came south to live as squatters on unoccupied lands or purchase farms cooperatively. Poor white Southerners became owners of Florida’s inexpensive, abandoned lands. And well-established white Northerners, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and her extended family, pulled up stakes and came to Florida by steamboat to found farms, churches, and schools.³⁴ As a place without a traditional plantation past, postbellum Florida accommodated Americans both black and white who could not manage—or did not desire—to belong in traditional ways on other parts of the continent. Even after Reconstruction, Florida’s unfounded ground gave many people from other parts of the nation new and necessary ways to pursue and imagine roots.

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      The value of attending carefully to the large and largely underexamined variety of early American writings about Florida is twofold. From local surveys to classic works of literature, reflections on Florida offer new understandings of both the conceptual history of U.S. incorporation and the roots and routes of U.S. writing.³⁵ The case of William Bartram in eighteenth-century Florida provides a useful illustration of how this study’s consideration of Florida simultaneously enriches the conceptual history of belonging in North America and U.S. literary history. Bartram’s Travels (1791), a natural history of the Southeast, portrays Florida as a place where land and water continually combine and trade places with little warning, dissolving property lines and even geographic boundaries: “porous rocks” channel waters “by gradual but constant percolation” through “innumerable doublings, windings, and secret labyrinths” just beneath one’s feet.³⁶ Fish “descend into the earth through wells and cavities or vast perforations of the rocks, and from thence are conducted or carried away, by secret subterranean conduits and gloomy vaults, to other distant lakes and rivers” (206); “vast reservoirs” of water “suddenly break through [the] perforated fluted rocks … flooding large districts of land” (226); “floods of rain” drive lake waters over their usual bounds and creeks “contrary” to their “natural course” (142); and “old habitations … [moulder] to earth” (95). There is a “deserted” British plantation, the “ruins of ancient French plantations,” the “vestiges” of Spanish ones, and a functioning plantation that disintegrates when a hurricane flattens buildings and destroys fields of indigo and sugar cane (253, 407, 233, 143).³⁷

      Yet Bartram’s Floridian ground fosters and rewards a model of permanent inhabitance nonetheless. Sailing along Florida’s St. Johns River on “a fine cool morning,” Bartram finds his small boat surrounded by “vast quantities of the Pistia stratiotes, a very singular aquatic plant” (88). This plant—commonly known as water lettuce—displays remarkable resilience in a volatile and watery landscape, a capacity for СКАЧАТЬ