Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas
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Название: Liquid Landscape
Автор: Michele Currie Navakas
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
Серия: Early American Studies
isbn: 9780812294422
isbn:
Uncultivable Outpost
In 1763, when Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain on the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the challenges posed by Florida’s porous and shifting ground became obstacles to the southern extension of the British Empire in North America. A widespread impression of Florida as a sterile imperial outpost, more Caribbean than continental, prevented British settlers from emigrating to Florida and investing money and time to render it both agriculturally productive and safe from imperial rivals and internal enemies. Seeking to revise this impression, the British Board of Trade undertook a massive information-gathering project that produced new surveys, maps, and natural histories of Florida. The idea was to establish Florida’s contours, describe its inland topography, and verify its connection to the North American continent once and for all, steps designed to attract a landholding populace to the region.6
The project had a dramatic effect on many popular images of Florida: during the 1760s and 1770s, on important maps of North America, the geographic shape of Florida altered, solidifying from islands to peninsula. The alteration is evident in a comparison of two maps by the same cartographer, the first created in 1755 (Figure 2), prior to British possession of Florida, and the second created after, in 1772 (Figure 3). Whereas the former map displays a region broken into elusive islands, as it had appeared on important European maps of North America since the beginning of the eighteenth century, the latter map, based largely on the board’s surveys, communicates a new understanding of Florida as a solid, integrated, and cultivable region that materially resembles the rest of North America.7
Maps of Florida during this period are one of several discourses through which British officials sought to attract prospective settlers to Florida by assuring them that the new colony was on a developmental path from elusive, tropical edge of North America to integrated, contiguous extension of the continental mainland. In what has been called “the first campaign of publicity for Florida,” promotional tracts and advertisements hailing Florida’s fertility, and announcing a policy granting one hundred acres of land to every head of family, circulated widely in North American and British newspapers, books, and periodicals.8 Challenging this narrative of progress, however, other writers perpetuated an idea of Florida as fluid ground irremediably resistant to settlement.
Figure 2. Emanuel Bowen, An Accurate Map of North America (1755), detail. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
American Husbandry (1775), published in London “By an American” and purporting to offer objective evaluations of each American colony’s agricultural capacity, is an especially memorable example of a popular text that casts Florida as a hopeless deviation from the rest of North America in its total resistance to improvement.9 The author blithely approves of New England: “cultivated, inclosed, and cheerful,” the place so greatly resembles Old England that, “In the best cultivated parts of it, you would not … know … that you were from home” (46). “The Floridas,” however, are unique, even among southern colonies, for their hostility to the transformative power of the plow. All southern colonies have some section of uncultivable land, typically in the form of a “flat sandy coast, full of swamps and marshes.” Florida, however, is “nothing else but the flat sandy country”; it is all “maritime”—all coast (363–64). There is no “back country” to cultivate, no “proper soil” to enclose and plant with the useful crops that other colonies produce (364, 365). And Florida’s geography enhances its fruitlessness: because Florida both “extends much to the south of any of our other colonies” and “forms a peninsula” that juts into the sea, “The rains … are almost incessant,” making it “very unhealthy” indeed (363). “Fact, and not opinion,” declares that Floridian soil is “such as no person would move to, from the worst of our colonies, in order to cultivate” (365). In Florida the plain facts of topography and geography combine, as they do nowhere else in the actual or prospective American colonies, to preclude cultivation, the basis of settler imperialism. At best, Florida may serve England as an outpost of empire where the “proper accommodations for shipping” may be stored; but “as to planting, none should be encouraged” (373). This description, though probably at least partly politically motivated, nonetheless accurately conveys a widespread British perception of Florida as a tropical backwater, topographically and geographically unfit for British citizens.10
Figure 3. Emanuel Bowen, An Accurate Map of North America (1772), detail. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
Emanuel Bowen’s maps and American Husbandry concisely capture both sides of a major debate about Floridian ground in the wake of Great Britain’s acquisition of Florida from Spain: while some British observers championed the peninsula’s capacity for improvement, others denigrated it as hopelessly retrograde. Yet it is important to recognize that a common perspective on land underpins and motivates both ways of responding to Florida: defenders and deniers of Florida’s potential for cultivation alike idealize solid, stable, contiguous land as the only acceptable basis of a settler empire. This is not surprising, considering the ideologies of landed possession that were most familiar during the eighteenth century.
Some of the period’s most highly regarded philosophical discussions of property and possession held that unvarying, solid, and divisible ground necessarily stabilized a polity, for such ground was the only kind that could be “subdued” and “improved,” acts that were critical to demonstrating and sustaining possession. An especially influential formulation of this idea may be found in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), in which Locke famously declares that “Whatsoever then [man] removes out of the state that nature hath provided … he hath mixed his labour with … and thereby makes it his property.”11 Through labor we “inclose [property] from the common,” for otherwise land would remain as subject to ingress and egress as the sea, “that great and still remaining common of mankind.”12 Drawing on Locke, philosophers of the Enlightenment such as David Hume also rule out the possibility of possessing the sea, which is “incapable of becoming the property of any nation” because we cannot “form any … distinct relation with it, as may be the foundation of property.”13 Locke, Hume, and other well-known philosophers of landed possession prioritize subdivision, demarcation, and enclosure, pursuits that would be impossible in the absence of solid ground.
Within a context of thinking about land as the opposite of sea, which by nature prevents the “distinct relation” that permits property, it is no wonder that fluid ground appears inimical to settler imperialism: this project depends on a genealogy of land and settlement that excluded shifting foundations. It is instructive to keep this fact in mind as we read late eighteenth-century reflections on North American ground, particularly in texts that circulated widely in North America before, during, and after the Revolution. At the earliest moments of the founding of the United States, readers across North America were steeped in an intellectual tradition that could not accommodate unfirm ground. For example, in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James envisions British North America as a polity of autonomous and independent yeomen achieving “ample subsistence” by dividing and laboring on the land.14 Letters is an idealized version of the agrarianism Jefferson espouses in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), for Jefferson’s own notion of the emergent United States as an expanding “empire of liberty” involves more mobility, exchange, and commerce than Farmer James endorses; yet even visions of a republic only partly sustained by small farmers СКАЧАТЬ