Bibliography
Baptist, Edward. “The Migration of Planters to Antebellum Florida: Kinship and Power.” The Journal of Southern History 62, no. 3 (1996): 527-554.
This work follows the migration of planters from the Upper South to Leon County, Florida in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Edward Baptist focuses primarily on the five Bradford brothers, who transferred their large slave plantations from Halifax County, North Carolina, to the shores of Lake Iamonia in northern Leon County in the 1820s and 1830s. Baptist traces the bonds of kinship that connected the Bradford’s to other members of Leon County’s planter aristocracy, including Francis Eppes. Baptist contends that these bonds of kinship were the foundations of power on the Florida frontier, and enabled newly transplanted slaveholders to establish their political and social dominance in the new territory.
“The Migration of Planters to Antebellum Florida” provides important information on the Bradford family and their extensive slaveholdings, and contextualized Tallahassee’s early history. As a result, this work serves as background information for the project Generations of Change.
- Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
In the same way that “The Migration of Planters to Antebellum Florida” traces the establishment and growth of slavery in Leon County, Baptist’s book Creating an Old South highlights the centrality of slavery to the region’s early economy. As Baptist demonstrates, early farming by Anglo-American immigrants in North Florida was quickly supplanted by large-scale slave labor throughout the 1820s and 1830s. The rapid rate at which this transformation took place precluded free labor in the region for decades to come. As a result, the planting class gained complete political and social dominance in Leon County.
Creating an Old South is important to this digital project because it demonstrates the important role slavery played in the economy of Florida throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. This, in turn, provides important context for the African American experience during Reconstruction, and into the early-twentieth century.
Eppes, Susan Bradford. The Negro of the Old South. Chicago: Joseph G. Branch Publishing Company, circa 1925.
Susan Bradford Eppes was the daughter of prominent Leon County planter Edward Bradford. She grew up on Pine Hill plantation, several miles north of Tallahassee. In the Negro of the Old South, Susan Bradford recalls her childhood on the plantation, as well as her memories of the slaves that surrounded her. Throughout the book, she contends that slavery was not cruel, but rather a benevolent institution that benefitted both slave and master.
Despite Susan Bradford’s racist assumptions and distorted view of slavery, her work provides many important insights into the lives of slaves and slave communities. Through her descriptions of life on Pine Hill plantation, Susan Bradford unintentionally brings life to vibrant, tightly knit, multi-generation slave communities. In the years following emancipation, these communities would serve as the foundation for collective political action.
Gannon, Michael. A New History of Florida. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996.
This compilation of scholarly articles of Florida history provides important background information for the digital exhibit Generations of Change. Two articles are of particular importance to this digital project. The first is “Free and Slave” by Jane Landers, which highlights the role of Africans and African Americans, both enslaved and free, in the economy and society of early Florida. The second article is “U.S. Territory and State” by Daniel L. Schafer. Schafer examines early American settlement in Middle Florida and Leon County, as well as the development of a slave based economy in the territory’s earliest years. While the subject matter of these articles is not directly connected to Generations of Change, they offer important contextual information that strengthen the exhibit’s narrative.
Hahn, Steven, et. al. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 series 3 vol. 1. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
This digital project aims to demonstrate the importance of place in the formation of African American communities in Leon County, Florida in the years after emancipation. Thus, background information on Reconstruction and the Florida Freedmen’s Bureau is of significant importance. Hahn’s volume contains many Freedmen’s Bureau documents from 1865-1875, including a considerable number of primary sources from the Florida Freedman’s Bureau. While these primary sources are important to this digital project, Hahn’s analysis of these documents, as well as the successes and failures of Reconstruction more generally, contextualize many of the photographs included in the collection. As a result, his scholarship will anchor many aspects of this digital project.
- A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Steven Hahn’s seminal work A Nation Under Our Feet is an expansive and in-depth examination of African American agency during and after slavery. Hahn contends that the roots of African American communities that sprouted in the years after emancipation were planted during slavery. These communities were formed in response to oppression, and served as a way for enslaved African Americans to ameliorate many of the harshest aspects of slavery, and maintain a degree of autonomy. Furthermore, these communities enabled slaves to act in politically impactful ways, despite being denied legal rights. Thus, after emancipation, freedmen and women were already enmeshed in multi-generational, politically conscious and active communities. This digital project aims to uncover the story of these communities in Leon County, and connect these stories to images.
Hare, Julianne. Historic Frenchtown: Heart and Heritage in Tallahassee. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2006.
Historic Frenchtown by Julianne Hare is an in-depth local history of Tallahassee’s Frenchtown neighborhood. Hare traces the development of Frenchtown from a small, multiethnic enclave in the 1840s and 1850s, to the vibrant African American neighborhood that it is today. Hare draws upon many primary sources, and makes connections between Frenchtown’s growth and development, and other important historical events such as the Civil War and emancipation.
This work is important to the digital project Generations of Change because it captures the evolution of the African American community in Tallahassee throughout the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, Historic Frenchtown will provide invaluable background information for this project.
Koslow, Jennifer, and Anthony Dixon. Historic American Landscape Survey: Smokey Hollow. National Parks Service, 2014. Accessed October 11, 2016. http://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/habshaer/fl/fl0700/fl0781/data/fl0781data.pdf.
Koslow and Dixon’s survey of Tallahassee’s Smokey Hollow community offers a clear glimpse into the lives of African Americans in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their study traces the history of Smokey Hollow from its establishment in the decades after emancipation, to its ultimate demolition in the 1960s. Koslow and Dixon utilize a breadth of primary and secondary sources in their study, and give voice to the vibrant African American community that existed in Smokey Hollow for almost a century.
Generations of Change draws heavily from Koslow and Dixon’s work. Furthermore, many of the historical resources they utilize are foundational to this digital exhibit’s interpretation and presentation of the African American experience in Leon County.
Litwack, Leon. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1980.
Leon Litwack’s book Been in the Storm So Long provides examines the African American experience in the years following emancipation, and reevaluates long standing interpretations of African American agency during Reconstruction. The arguments Litwack presents in this volume are foundational to the ways in which Generations of Change interprets the African American experience in Leon County.
Litwack contends that historians have traditionally measured the significance of emancipation by comparing the “material rewards of freedom and slavery,” which in turn has contributed to a shallow understanding of the nature and course of emancipation during Reconstruction. It was this unit of measurement that led many white southerners to conclude that emancipation had been an abject failure. In order to correct this distorted view, Litwack challenges historians to focus not on the material progress freedpeople made in the years after the Civil War, but rather the “many and varied ways in which the newly freed moved to reorder their lives and priorities and the new assumptions upon which they acted” (xiv). Doing so more fully illuminates the struggles of freedmen and women to find inclusion in a political system that excluded them, an economic system that exploited them, and a social system built upon their backs.
Torrey, Bradford. A Florida Sketch-Book. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Comany, 1894.
Torrey's book provides many in-depth descriptions of Tallahassee, including some of the first written references to Smokey Hollow. In addition to his descriptions of the built environment, Torrey also noted the lifestyles and customs of Tallahassee's African American population, as well as the conditions in which they lived. As a result, Torrey's work is very important to this project.