Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers: The Transformation of Florida.

Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers: The Transformation of Florida. By John T. Foster Jr. and Sarah Whitmer Foster. The Florida History and Culture Series. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 1999, Pp. xxii, 158. $24.95, ISBN 0-8130-1646-0.)

Even though it is the site of the oldest permanent European settlement in North America, Florida is still new territory for scholars of the South. Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers, the eighth in a series of monographs on Florida's history and culture, adds to an emerging body of literature on the "Sunshine State." The book chronicles the efforts of northern reformers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, her brothers James and Charles, and her husband Calvin--as well as some lesser-known "Yankee Strangers" like Chloe Merrick Reed, Harrison Reed, and John Swaim--to reconfigure Florida's social, political, educational, and religious institutions to fit the sensibilities of northern migrants who came to the state during and after Reconstruction.

After an initial chapter on the Stowes' and Beechers' sojourns to Florida, the volume offers brief biographies of the other characters, arranged roughly in the same order as these northerners entered Florida. Among the first was Chloe Merrick, an abolitionist and advocate of women's rights, and--beginning in 1862, when she served on Amelia Island, the Union-liberated enclave offshore of Jacksonville--one of the earliest teachers to work with the Freedmen's Bureau. Next to enter the story and the state is Methodist Episcopal clergyman John Swaim, who settled around Jacksonville in 1864. He attempted to forge alliances with other northern newcomers and freed blacks in order to help quell southern Democrats' "imperious voices" (p.37). The next entrant is Harrison Reed, who in 1868 became Florida's first Congressional Reconstruction governor--as well as the husband of Chloe Merrick a year later. She nudged her more conservative husband toward establishing a multiracial political and educational system, most notably advanced by his appointment of Charles Beecher as superintendent of public education. One of Beecher's lasting legacies was the establishment of the Cookman Institute, the first successful school of higher education for African Americans in Florida (p. 80).

These reform-minded persons cross paths throughout the pages of the book. They had more in common than a shared agenda: most also wrote publicity tracts touting the Edenic qualities Florida offered invalids, tourists, and settlers. Their booster literature included Swaim' s articles in a New Jersey magazine, the Newark Sentinel of Freedom, pieces Reed published in his journal The Semi-Tropical, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1873 collection of essays, Palmetto-Leaves, which is perhaps her most overlooked work. Even though their reform efforts failed, the legacy of their booster literature helped lure northern capital to the state. The authors conclude that these "Yankee Strangers" began to transform the state long before Henry Flagler laid down the tracks to Florida's east coast rail system and became in the public's mind the "founder" of modern Florida (p. 115).

Like Reconstruction, this book is just too brief; entire monographs remain to be written on many of these reformers' lives in Florida. Still, the work is a good start for scholars eager to embrace the rich history of "La Florida."

SUSAN A. EACKER Morehead State University