Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas
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Government officials believed that Florida’s settlement by a landholding populace loyal to the United States would peacefully expel maroon communities, discourage additional Africans from arriving, and guard the coast from imperial opponents and independent profiteers.
Yet Florida’s populations and landscape continued to complicate efforts at U.S. settlement and sovereignty. A territorial survey, required for public land sales, began in the mid-1820s, though it was delayed for decades by bad weather, swampy ground, preexisting Spanish land grants, and conflicts with the Seminole. A reliable map including the Florida interior south of Lake Okeechobee was not available until the mid-nineteenth century.27 Military officials began surveying the Florida Reef and Keys during the 1820s, and plans for lighthouses and coastal fortifications soon developed, but difficulties of weather and topography stalled these projects also. Although some lighthouses appeared along the reef during the 1830s, there was no complete reef survey until 1851, and coastal forts proved altogether impractical. In fact, on tiny Florida islands that were supposed to become the U.S. “Gibraltar of the Gulf,” the remnants of one partially built fort still stand. The construction begun by slaves in the 1840s was abandoned after four decades of struggle during which hurricanes, waves, and sinking sands continually undermined the fort’s foundations.28 Plans to drain Florida’s interior swamps also ran aground. This initiative garnered national interest and funding on a number of occasions, beginning when Congress sponsored an expedition to the Everglades for reclamation in the late 1840s. But the sponge-like flatlands repeatedly confounded such projects.29
While federally funded initiatives propelled Florida’s swamps, shores, reefs, and keys into national discussion and debate, the most costly and galvanizing issue during this period was war. The United States waged a series of military conflicts with Florida’s populations of Africans and Seminoles that erupted into war on three separate occasions between 1818 and 1858. The second of these wars—the Florida War, or Second Seminole War (1835–42)—was the nation’s longest and most expensive Indian war. It drew thousands of American troops into the swamp, where they battled Seminoles and Africans in an effort to establish U.S. control over Florida, for sovereignty over this contested space had become essential to the preservation of plantation slavery throughout the South. Not all inhabitants of the United States supported the war, which prompted debates about the use of federal funding to sustain slavery and pursue Indian removal.30 In the end, the Florida War exterminated or expelled thousands of Africans and Seminoles. Yet it also pushed many maroon communities farther south onto the peninsula, where their justified hostility to encroaching American settlements initiated the Third Seminole War in 1855—a full ten years after Florida had become the nation’s twenty-seventh state.31 While all three Indian wars drastically reduced Florida’s populations of Africans and Seminoles, many members of both groups remained, and their descendants continue to live in Florida today.
During the post-Civil War period, when this study concludes, Florida’s porosity and dispersal continued to challenge key understandings of ground and founding that made it possible to imagine the country as a single entity that could continually expand, yet still cohere. Florida differed dramatically from other parts of the U.S. South. It was the region’s poorest and most sparsely populated state, and the only area where plantation culture had never flourished on a large scale.32 Decades of war against Seminoles and Africans had disrupted U.S. settlement and, while no decisive Civil War battles were fought there, Union troops repeatedly occupied and ravaged several cities after Florida seceded in 1861.33 It was difficult to travel in and to Florida as well, for public roads were in deplorable condition, and an extensive railroad would not exist until the 1890s.
Nonetheless, post-Civil War Florida’s lack of traditional foundations gave many populations a home in the post-slavery United States. Freedmen came south to live as squatters on unoccupied lands or purchase farms cooperatively. Poor white Southerners became owners of Florida’s inexpensive, abandoned lands. And well-established white Northerners, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and her extended family, pulled up stakes and came to Florida by steamboat to found farms, churches, and schools.34 As a place without a traditional plantation past, postbellum Florida accommodated Americans both black and white who could not manage—or did not desire—to belong in traditional ways on other parts of the continent. Even after Reconstruction, Florida’s unfounded ground gave many people from other parts of the nation new and necessary ways to pursue and imagine roots.
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The value of attending carefully to the large and largely underexamined variety of early American writings about Florida is twofold. From local surveys to classic works of literature, reflections on Florida offer new understandings of both the conceptual history of U.S. incorporation and the roots and routes of U.S. writing.35 The case of William Bartram in eighteenth-century Florida provides a useful illustration of how this study’s consideration of Florida simultaneously enriches the conceptual history of belonging in North America and U.S. literary history. Bartram’s Travels (1791), a natural history of the Southeast, portrays Florida as a place where land and water continually combine and trade places with little warning, dissolving property lines and even geographic boundaries: “porous rocks” channel waters “by gradual but constant percolation” through “innumerable doublings, windings, and secret labyrinths” just beneath one’s feet.36 Fish “descend into the earth through wells and cavities or vast perforations of the rocks, and from thence are conducted or carried away, by secret subterranean conduits and gloomy vaults, to other distant lakes and rivers” (206); “vast reservoirs” of water “suddenly break through [the] perforated fluted rocks … flooding large districts of land” (226); “floods of rain” drive lake waters over their usual bounds and creeks “contrary” to their “natural course” (142); and “old habitations … [moulder] to earth” (95). There is a “deserted” British plantation, the “ruins of ancient French plantations,” the “vestiges” of Spanish ones, and a functioning plantation that disintegrates when a hurricane flattens buildings and destroys fields of indigo and sugar cane (253, 407, 233, 143).37
Yet Bartram’s Floridian ground fosters and rewards a model of permanent inhabitance nonetheless. Sailing along Florida’s St. Johns River on “a fine cool morning,” Bartram finds his small boat surrounded by “vast quantities of the Pistia stratiotes, a very singular aquatic plant” (88). This plant—commonly known as water lettuce—displays remarkable resilience in a volatile and watery landscape, a capacity for endurance that Bartram credits to its unusual roots. He writes that the water lettuce “associates in large communities, or floating islands” that, though tossed about by the wind and waves, remain “in their proper horizontal situation, by means of long fibrous roots, which descend from the nether center, downwards.” Thus, in great storms, “when the river is suddenly raised” and “large masses of these floating plains are broken loose,” “driven from the shores,” and even “broken to pieces,” the plant “communities” always “find footing” once more and, “forming new colonies, spread and extend themselves again” (89). In a place given to sudden, unpredictable fluctuations in the water level, rooting firmly to the earth is perilous; floating or moving continually best achieves stability.
Upon first consideration, the relevance of Bartram’s liquid landscape to early debates about U.S. identity seems unclear. Yet for Bartram—as I show in Chapter 1—this land raised conceptual questions about human belonging that were politically significant to his North American readers, many of whom were members of a new nation seeking to establish itself and expand over new and untested ground. Implicitly, Bartram’s reflections on Florida raise several pertinent questions. How can one imagine or pursue long-term settlement in the absence of solid ground? And how can one take root permanently on a foundation that seeps and shifts both endlessly and unpredictably? First and foremost, such questions expose the limits of a prevailing ideal of land as firm and divisible. To post-Revolutionary Americans familiar with founding documents that describe a nation of small farmers achieving political belonging by demarcating, cultivating, and remaining on a single plot of ground, these questions expose additional limits. They suggest that this founding version of the emerging republic—and the Lockean account of the subject subtending it—is