Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation.

By Larry Eugene Rivers. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2000. Pp. xvi, 369. $29.95, ISBN 0-8130-1813-7.)

Historians have dedicated hundreds of monographs to the subject of slavery in the American South, yet until very recently Florida's experience with the peculiar institution, particularly in the antebellum period, has remained largely unexamined. Larry Rivers aims to fill some of that historiographical gap with a study that focuses on the years between 1821 (when the United States formally took control of the Florida territory from Spain) and 1865. Much of the material in chapters dedicated to slave family life, religion, community, and resistance in Florida will seem familiar to scholars of slavery, as will those about material conditions and relations between blacks and whites. Rivers does an admirable job at offering generalizations without losing sight of variation and particularity.

Slavery in Florida is at its strongest, however, when Rivers addresses how Florida's history and geography produced conditions unlike those elsewhere in the American South. There were three different antebellum Floridas. Seventy percent of Florida's slaves lived in the cotton plantation belt of Middle Florida, the area south of Georgia between the Apalachicola and Suwannee Rivers. Here, both the economy and the social order resembled those of cotton-producing regions in neighboring states. The slave regimes of peninsular East Florida and the West Florida panhandle, however, looked quite different. There were several large cotton and sugar plantations in East Florida, but by comparison to Middle Florida, slaveholdings tended to be smaller, slaves grew a wider array of agricultural products, and they were more likely to work under the task system or outside the agricultural economy altogether. The economy of West Florida, meanwhile, was hardly grounded in agriculture at all, and most owners hired out their slaves to work in lumber companies, textile mills, and in military facilities in and around Pensacola. Both the terrain and the demography of East Florida presented special problems for Florida's slaveholders. Peninsular Florida served as a haven for runaway slaves dating back to the years of Spanish occupation, and the relationships that developed between slave runaways and the large numbers of Seminole Indians who lived in East Florida ensured that it would remain so long after the United States took control. Rivers sees a "triracial Florida world" (p. 189) in which slaves frequently escaped into Seminole country and formed maroon communities. Despite often living in separate villages, Indians and African Americans formed important cultural, political, and economic alliances across racial lines.

These alliances were crucial to the outbreak of the Second Seminole War in 1835, which Rivers argues was as much about slaves rebelling against the imposition of harsh slave codes and free blacks protesting restrictions of their rights as it was about Indian resistance to removal pressures. In the early phases of the war, Rivers suggests, as many as a thousand slaves, following the military leadership of several "Black Seminoles" (p. 192), attacked plantations, burned crops, and murdered white inhabitants. All the while, they encouraged other slaves to join the fighting, making the Second Seminole War, in Rivers's account, "quite possibly the largest slave rebellion in United States history" (p. 203). Rivers indicates that the Second Seminole War, which only ended in 1842, had important consequences for the slave regime and the general political environment of Florida, including the divisions that emerged over the question of secession. Unfortunately, for the most part, Rivers does not pursue this point beyond stating it to be so and suggesting that "[f]uture research" (p. 219) may prove to illuminate these issues.

When the Civil War came, nearly 45 percent of Floridians were enslaved, and as was the case elsewhere in the South, the institution crumbled due to pressures from within as much as it did from the fortunes of Confederate armies on the battlefield. We now have a more thorough understanding of the experiences and history with which Florida's freedpeople confronted emancipation.

JOSHUA ROTHMAN
University of Alabama