Dictionary:

Florida

  (flôr'ĭ-də, flŏr'-) (Abbr. FL or Fla.)

A state of the southeast United States bordering on the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. It was admitted as the 27th state in 1845. The peninsula was explored by Juan Ponce de León in 1513 and became the center of a Spanish settlement that included the southeast part of the present-day United States. Spain finally ceded the area in 1819. Tallahassee is the capital and Jacksonville the largest city. Population: 18,300,000.

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The state of Florida consists of a peninsula and a strip of mainland at the southeastern corner of the United States. It is bounded on the west by the Gulf of Mexico and on the east by the Atlantic Ocean. The Gulf Stream runs only a few miles off the southeastern coast. Low-lying barrier islands and mangrove swamps fringe the long, flat coastline. Lake Okeechobee lies near the center of the peninsula. The Everglades, a grassy water-land, once extended over nearly all of southern Florida but is now restricted to the southwestern tip of the peninsula.

The first humans reached Florida at least twelve thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age. Because sea level was lower then, Florida was much larger, with the Gulf coast some 100 miles west of its current position. The first people found a drier, cooler climate than today, in which they hunted and gathered edible plants, collected shellfish, and used the fibers of palms and saw palmetto to make rope and mats. As the glaciers melted and the sea level rose, Florida shrank, and the climate grew wetter and hotter. The human population grew, with major centers at the present-day Saint Johns River, Tampa Bay, and Belle Glade. By 2000 B.C. people were living in villages and making pottery; by 750 A.D. they were growing corn.

European Exploration and Settlement

Juan Ponce de León sailed along the eastern coast of the peninsula in 1513 and named it La Florida because of its lush beauty and because it was the season of Pascua Florida, the Easter feast of flowers. In 1521 Ponce de León tried to establish a settlement in southern Florida but the local Indians quickly drove him off. In 1528 Pánfilo de Narváez landed at Tampa Bay with three hundred men and forty horses and disappeared into the wilderness. Eight years later the last four survivors of his expedition stumbled back to Mexico. Landing somewhere on Florida's Gulf coast in 1539, Hernando de Soto marched north on an unsuccessful trek that covered four thousand miles in four years.

The next European attempt to settle Florida came from French Huguenots, who built Fort Caroline on the Saint Johns River in 1564. Alarmed, Spain sent Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565 to wipe out Fort Caroline and establish a permanent Spanish presence. This settlement, Saint Augustine, remains the oldest continually inhabited European settlement in North America. As French and English interests grew in North America, Saint Augustine anchored the Spanish hold on the Caribbean. But during the Seven Years' War, Spain joined the French against the English, who seized Havana. To recover the Cuban city, the Spanish surrendered Florida in 1763. Diseases introduced by Europeans had already decimated the natives, and the last few indigenous Floridians joined the Spanish exodus to Cuba when the British took over.

British Rule

The British divided Florida at the Apalachicola River. West Florida extended as far as the Mississippi. With the Spanish gone, there were almost no whites in either territory. Peninsular Florida was still a wilderness of man-grove swamp, sawgrass, and everglades. The Seminoles, who had moved south into Florida beginning around 1700, maintained peaceful relations with the British.

The British crown offered settlers free land in Florida, often in tracts of thousands of acres. At first landholders used free labor and indentured servants, who balked at the brutal work. Therefore plantation owners began to import slaves. Since Indians could escape, and suffered terribly from European-borne diseases, the new owners brought in enslaved Africans. Under the Spanish, slavery had been relatively humane, and many free blacks thrived in Florida. The British brought the much harsher chattel slavery to Florida.

Coastal Florida was infertile, the cost of living high, the tropical fevers lethal. Nonetheless, the British began to squeeze profits from the new territories. Besides producing timber for the treeless West Indies, tar and pitch for ships, and furs and deerskins, West Florida maintained a vigorous clandestine trade with Spanish-controlled New Orleans. East Florida, where the plantations were larger, produced indigo and naval stores, and carried out an embryonic commerce in oranges, which the Spanish had introduced.

Florida remained loyalist throughout the American Revolution. American forces invaded Florida on several raids but the greatest danger came from Spain, eager to recover its old colony. A vigorous Spanish campaign took back West Florida, and when the British finally settled the issue with the Americans in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, they ceded Florida back to Spain, which was in no position to enjoy the recovery. The infant United States of America wanted Florida, and European troubles allowed her to take the territories piecemeal. In 1810 local people west of the Perdido proclaimed a Republic of West Florida, which the United States absorbed in 1812. Over the next several years, the pro-British Seminoles raided Alabama and Georgia, culminating in the first Seminole War (1817–1818). Andrew Jackson invaded West Florida in 1818 and took Pensacola. Although he eventually withdrew, the Spanish grip on Florida was clearly failing. Spain entered into negotiations with the United States, ceded Florida to the United States through the Adams-Onís Treaty in 1819, and on 17 July 1821 the American flag went up.

U.S. Territory and State

Florida was organized as a territory in 1822, and Jackson became its first governor. In 1824 Tallahassee became the capital, and the surrounding area rapidly became the dominant region. The cotton-growing counties surrounding Tallahassee produced 80 percent of the territory's crop. In 1830 Florida's census recorded a total population of more than 33,000, of whom 16,000 lived in the area around Tallahassee, so-called Middle Florida. In 1845 Florida was granted admission to the Union as a slave state.

Throughout this period, small farmers from Georgia and the Carolinas, often called crackers, were migrating to Florida. While the Tallahassee planters grew their cotton and the large landowners south of Saint Augustine turned to sugar cane, the crackers built small farms to raise cattle, corn, vegetables, tobacco, and citrus fruit. These newcomers quickly came into conflict with the Seminoles. Tensions between white settlers and the Indians grew, and white landowners pressed the government to wipe out or remove the Indians. The federal government's efforts to do so led to the second Seminole War (1835–1842), following which only a few hundred Seminoles remained in Florida. These isolated, outnumbered bands fought a third Seminole War (1855–1858), after which attempts to remove the few remaining Seminoles ceased.

At the beginning of the Civil War, the Union seized Saint Augustine, and the small Union garrison at Pensacola managed to hold on against a much larger Confederate force under Braxton Bragg. Conscription gangs roamed the countryside forcing men into the Confederate Army; more than 16,000 Florida men (from a total white population of about 77,746 in the 1860 Census) went north to fight for the Confederacy. Left behind to fend for themselves were women, old men, and children, and more than sixty thousand slaves, all trapped inside the Union blockade. Most lived in direst poverty. Florida's civic structure collapsed.

After the Civil War, Federal troops occupied the state to enforce Reconstruction. Radical Republicans, composed of Unionist Floridians (scalawags), newly arrived Northerners (carpetbaggers), and recently enfranchised blacks, dominated the constitutional convention of 1868; but a white conservative faction managed to lock the radicals out and ram through its own constitution. However odd its inception, this document allowed the army to give Florida back to civil government, and the battle for control heated up in earnest. White Democrats were devoted to restoring Florida to the same social order it had known before the war. Republican Harrison Reed of Massachusetts was elected the first postwar governor in 1868, but he spent his nearly five years in office fighting off impeachment efforts.

Meanwhile, white conservatives worked to under-mine the Republican base by intimidating black voters. Even during the war, occupying Federal authorities had broken up confiscated lands and distributed them to blacks, but after Lincoln's murder Federal policy reversed, the lands were returned to their original owners, and the blacks were kicked off. Discriminatory local laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and even cavalry charges into lines of voters terrorized former slaves. By 1881 the Democratic Party was in charge of the government, and a new constitution in 1885 imposed segregation and a poll tax. For the next eighty years all state elections were decided within the Democratic Party. Florida was still largely a frontier state, isolated and wretchedly poor. Sharecropping and tenant farming dominated agriculture. The state government was largely insolvent. With the lowest literacy rate in the south, the governor in 1876 nonetheless proposed eliminating public high schools.

Still, the seeds of modern Florida were germinating. The balmy climate had attracted tourists as early as the 1840s. By 1873, 50,000 people a year were boating up the Saint Johns River. New railroads, used at first to transport lumber, made other areas of the state accessible; economic troubles in the north encouraged people to move down into peninsular Florida. In 1880 the population was 269,493, of whom 126,690 were black. Beginning in 1883 Henry Flagler, an associate of John D. Rockefeller, developed resorts on Florida's Atlantic coast, starting at Saint Augustine. His East Coast Railroad reached West Palm Beach in 1894, bringing tourists and supplies to the extravagant resort hotels Flagler built there. The 1894–1895 freezes, which destroyed the citrus crop in the north, convinced Flagler to build on into Miami, where heiress Julia Tuttle had founded an ambitious but empty city. The Spanish-American War, with its bases in Tampa and Key West, further stimulated the economy. By 1912 Flagler's railroad had reached Key West, then a sleepy fishing and cigar-making community. The railroad linked Florida from its southernmost tip to the continental United States. The opening of the Panama Canal brought a steady increase in commerce to the area. Nonetheless, political power remained with North Florida.

Ongoing political dissension split the dominant Democratic Party, pitting "wool hats" (farmers and small businessmen) against "silk hats" (wealthy businessmen and landowners). Farmers black and white found common ground in the Florida Farmers Alliance, whose Ocala Demands formed the basis for the platform of the national Populist Party formed in 1891. The threat of empowerment of black Floridians led to a savage backlash among whites; new laws segregated blacks and locked them into poverty and powerlessness. Yet blacks kept striving for equality, and whites resorted to increasing force to keep them down, including lynchings and the burning of black towns.

The Rise of South Florida

The Panama Canal brought another boon to Florida: weapons against the dreaded yellow fever. Terrifying epidemics of the "black vomit" had swept the state for years; the techniques that cleared the steaming jungles of Panama soon tamed the disease in Florida as well. Nonetheless, the state remained too poor to attract investors. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, elected governor in 1904, was a wool hat liberal; he began the reclamation of the Everglades, building canals to drain off the water. In 1900 the census counted 528,542 people in Florida; 1910, there were 752,619.

The Progressive movement sweeping the nation influenced Florida as well. Progressives demanded socially responsible government; May Mann Jennings, the wife of Governor William Sherman Jennings, promoted conservation, Seminole reservations, education, and public libraries. In 1905 the Buckman Act established the University of Florida for white men, the Florida Female College for women, and the Colored Normal School for blacks.

World War I brought a new boom to Florida. Flying schools took advantage of the consistent good weather and Key West was the site of a major submarine base. Toward Prohibition Florida exhibited the same fractured sensibility as the rest of the nation. Much of the state had passed local dry laws even before the Volstead Act of 1919; yet the long coastline and steady high demand made Florida a major nexus of liquor smuggling.

During the 1920s Florida experienced a spectacular land boom, especially in Miami Beach, Dade County, up and down both coasts, and into central Florida. Speculators designed and sold whole communities, like Coral Gables and Boca Raton. Between 1922 and 1925, 300,000 people arrived in Florida. The 1930 census showed a population of 1,468,211 (29 percent black). Many people arrived in cars, feeding the motel industry. Land values soared.

In 1926, like a harbinger of bad times to come, a terrible hurricane killed four hundred people and left five thousand homeless. The great boom was fizzling out. Undermined by speculation, banks began to fail; Florida was in a depression before the rest of the nation followed in 1930. The railroads went bankrupt; there was no money and no work. The state had no funds for relief, and no inclination to deliver it anyway. Local agencies took over as best they could. By 1932, 36 percent of blacks and 22 percent of whites were on relief.

In the 1932 presidential election Franklin Delano Roosevelt won Florida with 74 percent of the vote. The index of industrial production continued to drop, Prohibition was repealed in 1933, and Roosevelt's New Deal steadied the banks and provided employment through public works. In 1931 Florida had legalized pari-mutuel gambling, and thoroughbreds, greyhounds, and jai alai become major revenue producers. By 1934 tourism was making a comeback.

The New Deal stabilized Florida's economy but World War II ended the Great Depression. After Pearl Harbor, military bases opened around the state and the shipbuilding industry boomed. This resulted in a labor shortage, which authorities in some areas dealt with by rounding up "vagrants," mostly black, and putting them into peonage. The sugar industry, booming after the fall of the Philippines, was especially bad, with labor conditions like prison camps.

In 1940 the population of Florida was 1,897,414, making it the least populated state in the Southeast. Between 1940 and 1990 an average of 1.8 million people entered Florida each decade. Air conditioning and mosquito controls made South Florida livable in the summer. Key West, nearly bankrupt in the 1930s, got a new water pipeline from the federal government in 1942, and its population tripled by the end of the war. Miami and the Gold Coast above it was transformed as new military recruits came there to train, many stationed in luxury hotels because of the severe housing shortage. These recruits included blacks, who fought with distinction in the war, and chafed angrily under Jim Crow laws at home.

After the war Florida was clearly divided into two camps: the north, which clung to Jim Crow, and the south, which, flooded with newcomers, felt no attachment to customary norms and practices. Still the north controlled the state government: less than 20 percent of the population elected more than half the legislature. The stage was set for a major confrontation between Jim Crow and the civil rights movement.

Modern Florida

In 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down segregated education in Brown v. Board of Education, white supremacists struggled to hold the color line, but blacks now had the federal government on their side. In 1949, five black students challenged the segregation of the University of Florida, and in 1959 the courts finally ordered the institution open to African Americans. Martin Luther King went to Saint Augustine in 1964 to preach and lead protest marches that drew national news attention. At the same time flourishing industries were realizing that race riots were bad for business. In 1968 another state constitution shifted legislative control to the south and modernized the government. Claude Kirk (1967–1971) became the first Republican governor since Reconstruction and in 1992 the first black Floridians in over a hundred years went to the House of Representatives. Leander Shaw in 1990 became the first black chief justice of the Florida supreme court.

Liberated from the long race war, which had sucked up the energies and suppressed the aspirations of so many, Florida transformed itself. No longer part of the Deep South, it now belonged to the Sunbelt, affluent and modern. Its business-friendly politics and balmy climate attracted growth industries. Starting in 1950, rockets from Cape Canaveral sent people into space and to the moon. Housing construction, high technology, and tourism pushed agriculture into the background of the economy. Disney World, opened in Orlando in 1965, drew millions of tourists a year, feeding the hotel and airline industries.

Florida's population was diversifying as it grew. In the thirty years after Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba in 1959, more than 800,000 Cubans moved to the Miami area. Haitians and Nicaraguans also fled to Florida from oppressive regimes in their homelands. People from all over Latin America and beyond came seeking jobs and advancement. From the northern states, retirees flooded into the sunshine and warmth. By 1990, 25 percent of the population was elderly. In 1990 the census counted 12,937,926 people, only 30 percent of them native Floridians.

This human tidal wave devastated Florida's natural environment. Starting at the turn of the twentieth century, developers drained the Everglades, diked Lake Okeechobee, and built high-rise hotels and condominiums on beaches and barrier islands—communities built not to exploit a local resource or serve local needs but simply to provide people a place to go that was not home. Rapid development strained water and energy supplies. The danger of such development in a hurricane zone was amply illustrated in August 1992, when Hurricane Andrew leveled extreme south Florida, killing more than 20 people and causing $20 billion in damage.

In 2000 Florida decided a presidential election. With the presidency in the balance, Democrat Albert Gore contested election results in Florida (where the governor was the brother of the Republican candidate, George W. Bush), demanding a recount; the subsequent confusion finally ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which stopped the recount and awarded the election to Bush.

In fifty years Florida evolved from the poorest and most isolated part of the South to a cosmopolitan, multicultural society, a winter playground for millions from the icy north, and a tourist mecca for the entire world. In 2000 the population was 15,982,378, and still growing.

Bibliography

Gannon, Michael, ed. The New History of Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

Newton, Michael. The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.

Storter, Rob. Crackers in the Glade: Life and Times in the Old Everglades. Edited and compiled by Betty Savidge Briggs. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.

Williams, Joy. The Florida Keys: A History and Guide. 9th ed. New York: Random House, 2000.

—Cecelia Holland

The southeasternmost state of the contiguous United States, bordered by Alabama and Georgia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, and the Gulf of Mexico and Alabama to the west. Its capital is Tallahassee, and its largest city is Jacksonville.

• Home of Walt Disney World, an amusement park near Orlando, and many other theme parks. (See Walt Disney.)
• Home of the Kennedy Space Center, launch site for many U.S. space missions.
• St. Augustine, located on the coast of Northern Florida, is the oldest city in the United States, settled in the sixteenth century by Spain.
• One of the Confederate states during the Civil War.

Local Time: Oct 10, 11:12 PM

Local Time: Oct 10, 10:12 PM

flag of Florida

• Abbreviation: FL
• Capital City: Tallahassee
• Date of Statehood: Mar. 3, 1845
• State #: 27
• Population: 15,982,378
• Area: 65758 sq.mi. Land 53997 sq. mi. Water 11761 sq.mi.
• Economy:
  Agriculture: citrus, vegetables, nursery stock, cattle, sugarcane, dairy products;
  Industry: tourism, electric equipment, food processing, printing and publishing, transportation equipment, machinery
• Where the name comes from: Named on Easter, 1513 by Ponce de Leon for Pascua Florida, meaning "Flowery Easter"
• State Bird: Mockingbird
• State Flower: Orange Blossom
• About the Flag: Adopted in 1899, on a white field emblazoned with a red X and the state seal, Florida's flag represents the land of sunshine, flowers, palm trees, rivers and lakes. The seal features a brilliant sun, a cabbage palmetto tree, a steamboat sailing and a Native American Seminole woman scattering flowers.
• State Motto: In God We Trust
• State Nickname: Sunshine State
• State Song: Swanee River