Florida's Frontiers

Florida's Frontiers

by Paul E. Hoffman
Florida's Frontiers

Florida's Frontiers

by Paul E. Hoffman

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Overview

Florida has had many frontiers. Imagination, greed, missionary zeal, disease, war, and diplomacy have created its historical boundaries. Bodies of water, soil, flora and fauna, the patterns of Native American occupation, and ways of colonizing have defined Florida's frontiers. Paul E. Hoffman tells the story of those frontiers and how the land and the people shaped them during the three centuries from 1565 to 1860.

For settlers to La Florida, the American Southeast ca. 1500, better natural and human resources were found on the piedmont and on the western side of Florida's central ridge, while the coasts and coastal plains proved far less inviting. But natural environment was only one important factor in the settlement of Florida. The Spaniards, the British, the Seminole and Miccosuki, the Spaniards once again, and finally Americans constructed their Florida frontiers in interaction with the Native Americans who were present, the vestiges of earlier frontiers, and international events. The near-completion of the range and township surveys by 1860 and of the deportation of most of the Seminole and Miccosuki mark the end of the Florida frontier, though frontier-like conditions persisted in many parts of the state into the early 20th century.

For this major work of Florida history, Hoffman has drawn from a broad range of secondary works and from his intensive research in Spanish archival sources of the 16th and 17th centuries. Florida's Frontiers will be welcomed by students of history well beyond the Sunshine State.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780253340191
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication date: 01/11/2002
Series: A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier
Pages: 496
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Paul E. Hoffman is Professor of History at Louisiana State University and author of several books including the prize-winning A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast during the Sixteenth Century. He is honored by LSU with appointment as the Paul W. and Nancy W. Murrill Distinguished Professor.

Read an Excerpt

Florida's Frontiers


By Paul E. Hoffman

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2002 Paul E. Hoffman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34019-1



CHAPTER 1

The Secrets of the Land


Florida has experienced five frontiers since 1492. The first, a tidewater frontier that embraced the Atlantic coast of much of the Southeast, was created when Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine in 1565, two generations after Licenciado Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's pioneering colony had failed in 1526. The last, the American frontier that opened in 1821 when the United States annexed the area of the present state of Florida, closed in i860 when the federal range and township surveys reached the edges of the Everglades. To be sure, frontier conditions continued to exist after i860 in isolated areas, but in the main the peninsula had been brought under the various forms of control that nineteenth-century Americans defined as "civilization." The Native Americans who had populated and then repopulated the peninsula were gone, save for a few small remnants living deep in the region of the Everglades. Euro-Americans, along with their Black slaves, their livestock, and their crops, dominated the land.

Some of the survivors of Ayllón's colony anticipated such an outcome, if under different auspices and in a different part of the vast area that the Spaniards called La Florida. According to the Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, "with all that they had suffered, some praised the nature of the region that they had seen, and said that taking the form that is required for settling in that part [of the world], and enough food until the land is discovered and understood, could not fail to be a good thing because the nature of it is more appropriate for Spaniards [than the Caribbean's tropical areas]."

Discovering and understanding the secrets of the land and its Native American inhabitants proved to be the work of many generations of Spaniards and Anglo-Americans. In the end, they, like the Native Americans, were constrained by a geography that limited the better soils and floral and faunal resources to a few places. We begin with a consideration of these resources and of the Native American presence in that part of the Southeast that the Spaniards called La Florida.


Physical Geography

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the royal cosmographer Juan López de Velasco had no doubts during the last decades of the sixteenth century that the province of La Florida encompassed the eastern half of North America from the cod fisheries of Nova Scotia in the northeast to the Mexican mines at Santa Barbara in the southwest. A royal decree of 1573 temporarily fixed that southwestern boundary at the Río de las Palmas, the modern Soto la Marina River. The province's northwestern boundary was the arm of the Pacific Ocean that Menéndez de Avilés, in common with some other men of his time, imagined ran across the continent north of New Mexico to within 250 miles or so of the Atlantic coast. La Florida's western limit was New Mexico.

This definition of the province of La Florida was more theoretical than factual. In practice, the sixteenth-century Spanish definition of La Florida roughly encompassed the coastal and piedmont zones of the modern states of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia; the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina and southeastern Tennessee; parts of eastern Alabama; and Florida east of the Apalachicola River. The first two Florida frontiers were developed on that stage from 1565 to approximately the year 1680. Yet well before Spain recognized the English possession of Virginia and most of the Carolinas in the Treaty of Madrid of 1670, La Florida had come to mean only the coastal plain south of the Edisto River in South Carolina, Florida east of the Apalachicola River and, less certainly, the Chattahoochee and Flint river valleys. By 1714, the term meant only the area of the current state of the same name and sometimes only northeast Florida. On that much reduced stage, the Spaniards and then the British and later the Anglo-Americans developed yet other frontiers.

Understanding, then, that the Florida of our title has varied in size over time, we can see that initially it embraced most of the eastern portions of the Southeast. As some of Ayllon's survivors envisioned, the discovery and understanding of the area's natural and human resources were the prerequisites if the Spaniards (or any other old-world peoples) were to settle the land.

To untutored eyes, such as those of the Spanish and French mariners who first viewed these shores, the Southeast appeared to be an almost unbroken sea of trees from Chesapeake Bay to eastern Texas. From the ocean's shore to a point well inland, the forest appeared to consist almost entirely of pine trees (slash and some long-leaf), although hardwood species were present along streams and rivers. Further inland, the great stands of long-leaf pine trees marked the edge of the piedmont in Georgia and the Carolinas and the northern highlands in Florida. As the traveler Basil Hall, who visited the South in 1827-1828, wrote:

For five hundred miles, at least, we traveled in different paths of the South, over a countryside of this description, almost everywhere consisting of sand, feebly held together by a short wiry grass, shaded by the endless forest. ... millions upon millions of tall and slender columns, growing up in solitude, not crowded upon one another, but gradually appearing to come closer and closer, until they formed a compact mass, beyond which nothing was to be seen.


These expanses of pines eventually gave way to the oak-pine-hickory forests covering the piedmont, which in turn yielded to the oak-chestnut-hickory-elm hardwoods on some slopes of the Appalachian mountains.

This seeming uniformity was and is an illusion. Each band of forest is actually composed of many floristic communities, as the early spring flowering and leafing out of deciduous species makes clear. Within communities are mosaics of stands of trees and other plants of varying ages and species. Soils, drainage, temperatures, and rainfall create this diversity. In addition, changes are produced by lightning and its resulting fires, pine bark beetles, and cycles in weather patterns. Human manipulation of the forest alters the environment through the acts of clearing and burning. Moreover, this diversity is dynamic, changing over time in response to the factors just noted. Associated with this floral diversity is a faunal diversity, although most of the species are too small to have food value for humans.

The diversity of soils under this floral exuberance arises from the area's geologic history. Geologists have identified at least a dozen step-like "terraces" on the lower (or outer), middle, and upper (or inner) sections of the coastal plain (from sea level to about one hundred meters). Each terrace seems to be associated with a change in the level of the Atlantic Ocean and the warping of the North American plate. Each was once a back barrier marsh surface, bay bottom, or area of alluvial deposition, now often overlaid by other deposits. Inland swamps, marshes, and low areas that flood during the rainy season reflect this history, as do the soils on the terraces. Terrace soils, though highly variable, are mostly acidic, sandy soils of generally low fertility and high moisture content, at least during the rainy season. On the lower coastal plain they are white and yellow, on the middle red-yellow, and on the upper plain red-yellow or grey-brown in color. Terrace edges are sometimes marked by low sand hills which are the remnants of sand dunes, spits, and other coastal features. Although most such bands of sandhills are narrow and discontinuous, they can reach a width of up to ten miles, as for example on the fall line in Georgia, at the western edge of the coastal plain. Where these sandhills are not present, the terrace edge is marked by a sudden change in elevation or scarp. This is uniformly the case in the piedmont.

The coastal plain's terraces are most obvious in Virginia and North Carolina, and least so in Florida. In Florida only five of the eight terraces of the lower coastal plain tentatively have been identified for the strip of land from the Atlantic Ocean to the fifty-foot (fifteen-meter) contour west of the St. Johns River. The lower coastal plain terraces become even less evident south of Orlando, but are represented by the higher ground of the flat woods of the upper St. Johns and Kissimmee River basins as well as by the flat woods between Sebring and Lake Okeechobee, along the Caloosahatchee River, and between Fort Myers and Tampa Bay. On the western side of Florida's central ridge, the terraces are more evident and broader than along the St. Johns River, but are still narrow compared to those of coastal Georgia and the Carolinas. The middle coastal plain has three terraces in Virginia and North Carolina, four in South Carolina and Florida (east of the Haines City Ridge in central Florida and west of the Trail Ridge feature of northern Florida and southern Georgia), but only two in Georgia in a small area near the Savannah River. The upper coastal plain is found mostly in Virginia and the Carolinas, although some of the highest elevations of Florida's central ridge seem to be related to it.

The natural climax forest of the coastal plain varies. On the lower coastal plain it is thought to be an oak-hickory forest on higher ground with pines on the dry sandhills. However, until recently, frequent fires maintained a pine subclimax over much of the area but with hardwood forests in the riverine and swamp bottomlands. At the higher elevations of the upper coastal plain, the predominately pine forests give way to the oak-pine forest of the piedmont. Along the coasts and on the barrier islands, and in southern Florida on higher ground (called hammocks), live oaks (Quercus virginiana) are the dominant trees. North of Florida, on bluff and ravine slopes along rivers, beech and magnolia trees dominate in mixed hardwood forests.

The pine forests of the lower and middle coastal plain seem to have supported limited faunal life before modern times. Where the tree canopy is not too dense, the predominately slash pine flatwoods have understories of berry-bearing scrubs (especially of the Ilex family), cane, and saw palmettos (Serenoa repens) that provide a little browse for deer, turkeys, and some other species as well as habitat for reptiles. In slightly higher and drier areas, mostly long-leaf pine savannahs were marked by wire grass or bluestem or other grasses and forbes (according to soil, rainfall, and fire conditions) that provided poor, mostly spring browse. The dry, scrub-oak and long-leaf pine forests on the sandhills that mark many of the scarps on the coastal plain were similarly unproductive. Yet within the coastal flatwoods could be found areas of slightly higher ground — hammocks — where oaks (including white oaks), magnolias, pignut hickories, American holly, spruce pines (Pinus glabra) and associated plants like saw palmetto, blueberries (in Georgia), and other edible plants flourish and attract some game. Some low areas also form marshes and swamps with all of their biological diversity. The forests bordering the rivers that flow across the pine barrens also abound in edible plants and game. Scattered potsherds and an occasional lithic artifact found on hammocks from the Carolinas to the Everglades attest to their use by Native Americans, but little is known about their roles in annual subsistence or food cycles. For the most part, the pine barrens of the lower and middle coastal plains displayed little floral or faunal diversity and constituted a sort of green desert separating the coastal zone, the fall line, and the piedmont.

The piedmont ranges from less than one hundred meters to six hundred meters (1,969 feet) in elevation. It consists of rolling hills arranged in as many as six terraces, all heavily covered with soils called saprolites. These red-yellow and grey-brown soils developed due to the weathering of the underlying metamorphic and igneous crystalline rocks, and are more fertile than the soils of the coastal plain. The natural climax forest varies from the oak-hickory hardwood forest on the red-yellow soils, especially in Virginia and northeastern Georgia, to a mixed pine and oak-hickory forest on the grey-brown soils, especially on the watersheds of the Chattahoochee River in west central Georgia. In the Carolinas, the piedmont climax forests are banded into eastern and western pine dominant belts and a central oak-hickory dominant belt, the belts reflecting underlying soils. At least five species of oak — including the edible acorn-bearing white oak — and several species of hickories are found in the piedmont's forests. On bluffs and ravine slopes, beech trees dominate the same type of mixed hardwood forests as were noted for the coastal plain.

The Appalachian Mountains rise from 600 to 2,037 meters (1,969 to 6,684 feet) — Mt. Mitchell is the highest peak — in complex patterns of northeast-southwest ridges reflecting their ancient geologic history. Erosion has created numerous deep valleys of varying lengths and compass orientations. Within the Appalachians, the grey-brown soils of the valley floors are deep, well watered and drained: they tend to be fertile, even if often of small areal extent. Soils on the slopes and mountain tops are thin and erode easily if trees and other plant cover are removed. Prior to the introduction of a fungal chestnut blight in the early twentieth century, the dominant forest of the southern Appalachians was the oak-chestnut type. Moist coves, especially with northern exposures, contain mixed hardwood forests of six to eight locally dominant species, each grouping a subset of the thirty species of trees found in the coves taken as a whole. The inter-mountain plateaus and valleys, such as the Ashville Basin, were covered with the oak and oak-pine forests of the adjacent piedmont. The white oak was not common. Pines and other conifers were present, but not abundant except at the border with the oak-pine forest of the piedmont. On the highest mountains, spruce or northern beech-maple forests dominate. The mountains have been described as "a refugium where many plants ... persisted" during the periods of geologic and climatic change since the Tertiary period, creating an "area of greatest diversity of vegetation."

Peninsular Florida, the particular concern of much of this study, has some additional geological-ecological features that played a role in the story to be told here. In northern Florida and adjacent parts of southwestern Georgia ("the southern or Tifton uplands"), the Tallahassee and Mariana Red Hills and the Madison Hills form a complex heavily cut by stream and river action, often with moderate slopes (10-25 percent grades) into the stream valleys. The general tilt of the hills is to the south and southeast. The soils are red-yellow colored sands overlaying clayey subsoils in the Tallahassee and Mariana area and gray-brown sandy loams in the Madison Hills area. Both types have moderate to good fertility. Although there is some dispute among foresters on the point, the natural climax forest on the tops of the hills seems to have been the longleaf pine and wire grass type, maintained by a high number of lightning-caused fires as well as human activity. However, extensive areas of white oaks, beech, and other deciduous trees, up to thirty-five species per acre, were found on the slopes and in more moist environments, including hilltops. All students of this ecology agree that it is one of the more diverse to be found in the Southeast.

Equally notable are the central ridge and its outlying hills to the east and south. Generally covered with grey-brown sandy soils of varying slope, the middle of the ridge is crossed in a north-to-south pattern by an area of red-yellow sandy loams known as the Arredondo-Kendrick-Millhopper Association. Both soil types are moist to well drained and can be of moderate fertility. The natural climax forest varies with moisture but is generally pines with scrub oaks (on drier soils), although areas of oak and hickory hardwoods occur on the Arredondo-Kendrick-Millhopper Association soils and on the more moist slopes.

Most of the rest of peninsular Florida, north of a line from Fort Myers to Fort Pierce Inlet, has superficially grey, very acidic, infertile soils (over yellow or grey-white fine sands) that flood seasonally because of high water tables and underlying hardpans or limestones. These flat woods soils grow pine and palmetto forests, although they can be used for pasture and, with modern drainage, for growing orange trees and some other crops. Where drainage does not occur, swamps are common. South of a line from Fort Myers to Fort Pierce Inlet, the soils are all of wet types. Prior to the development of modern clearing and drainage methods, this area was covered with wet pine savannahs with marshes (along the northern edge), cypress swamps, and saw-grass and other marshes. Tropical hardwoods grow where hammocks rise above this wet environment. Archaeological research indicates that the line from Fort Myers to Fort Pierce marks the apparent southern limit, about 1500, of maize cultivation on naturally higher, drained soils and on man-made ridges.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Florida's Frontiers by Paul E. Hoffman. Copyright © 2002 Paul E. Hoffman. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Table of Contents:

List of Figures
List of Tables

Introduction by Walter Nugent and Malcolm Rohrbough
Preface

1. The Secrets of the Land
2. Discovering the Secrets
3. The Spanish Tidewater Frontier, Part I, 1562-1586
4. The Tidewater Frontier, Second Phase, 1586-1608
5. The Inland Frontier, 1608-1650
6. Death, Rebellion, A New Accommodation, and New Defenses: La Florida's Frontiers, 1650-1680
7. The First Contests with the English, 1680-1702
8. The Military Frontier At Last
9. New Tidewater Frontiers, 1763-1790
10. The American Frontier Envelopes East Florida, 1790-1821
11. The American Frontiers, 1821-1860

Appendix: U.S. Confirmed British and Spanish Land Grants, 1764-1820

Notes
Bibliography
Index

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