There was a popular saying, in the early 20th century, when one talked about the geopolitics of the American Union and the regional differences that made the country so diverse and its politics at time so hard to follow:
In the US, there is the North, there is the South, and then there is Florida. Standing as the sole Black-majority State in the Union (and, with Hawai'i, one of the two minority-majority States), Florida is a land that differs greatly from the rest of her sister States, from music, to gastronomy, religion, language and politics. The sunniest State, launched onto the sea, it is a remarkable particularity among the American Union; from all of the federal states, it is the single one who can best lay claim to the idea of being a Nation-State.
For any serious historian, the modern chapter of the history of Florida begins in 1865, with the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of her slaves from the bondage of slavery. After great decades of oppression, against Indian and African alike, the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, and its execution by the occupation of Florida by the Union forces and the defeat of the Confederacy in the field of battle, brought for the first time genuine freedom and equality to all of its inhabitants.
Among the former slave population, there was a strong belief that a new Florida was being born, one in which they would no longer be ruled by the white men, but be citizens of their own account, equal before the law. The question remained on whether that was a promise that the federal government was willing and capable of fulfilling to a people whose sufferings, bravery and contribution towards the victory over the South could not be numbered.
The early days of the postbellum period in Florida were times of large movements by the people who had once been shackled. Freed from servitude to their masters, many of the African Americans of the State tasted freedom and moved away from the lands they had cultivated for so long. Their reasons for moving away were simple – freed or not, the slave population was constantly harassed by their former masters who hoped to return them to servitude. In fact, many still hoped for a reversal of the Emancipation Proclamation and a resuming of their traditional economic status. Meanwhile, having heard of Sherman’s promise of redistribution of the masters’ lands for the freedmen and the slogan of ‘forty acres and a mule’, the hope to one day hold their own lands and toil their own fields kept the slave population waiting for the fulfilment of the northern promises.
Seeing the lands untended, the Northerners came to believe that white supervision was necessary for the prosperity of Florida, and began punishing those former slaves that wouldn’t return to work. Any attempt at seeking better conditions by the freedmen was crushed by the occupying force that was meant to help them, seen as sabotage against the healing national economy.
Regardless of who had fought who during the war, now that peace returned the truth was the Northern white occupiers had more in common with the similarly white plantation class than to their black freedmen allies. Upon witnessing their conflict, they had greater compassion of the dispossessed plantation owners, true Southern gentlemen, than to the uneducated, care-needing freedmen. By 1866, nine in ten of the former slaves were back at the plantations. The jubilee of liberation hadn’t lasted long, and the times during which the slaves took the streets, chanting of victory and of executing the treasonous leaders of the Confederacy were over. Slavery had returned.
It seems that, as the Confederate government had predicted, cotton was king, and recovering its production was more important than ensuring the fulfilment of laws in the State of Florida, or any other Southern state by that matter. In fact, there was a fear that the free African Americans would prefer to plant sustenance crops, such as corn and potatoes, rather than the cash crops like cotton that both enriched the white plantation owners and the northern capitalists to whom they sold it. Those very northern capitalists themselves were quite favourable to keeping the wages low and the freedmen working, for cheap and abundant cotton was necessary for raw-material for the Northern textile industry that employed and enriched many.
The establishment of a free labourer class in Florida under a state of servitude and serving as a cheap workforce was very attractive to the northern industrialists and the southern plantation owners alike; they hoped to make Florida a utopia for investors and wealthy white migrants who could use its cheap labour to enrich themselves further.
What the forces of the ruling classes failed to account for was that, after having experienced freedom from the lash, the African American people of Florida would not be so compliant in returning to their chains and in, while standing free, being enslaved. Demands were made to install proceedings of sharecropping, which were supposed to give the freedmen greater power over the land; but even those were heavily moderated and did not give out as much freedom as they had hoped. The white landowning class still ruled mightily over their tenants, and obliged them to also put labour into their plantations, while supervising their work closely, and taking hold of most of its profits, keeping their subordinates down in a state of wealth closer to slavery than true freedom.
In Middle Florida, the region with greatest concentration of freedmen, mass meetings of the former slaves were held by 1867. The contracts they had signed with the former masters were showing how little they yielded and the promises of empowerment by the federal government had proven themselves hollow. There was a great feeling of dissatisfaction against what had been done to ensure their liberty was more than a written word. Rallies and protests were held, and greatly criticised by white society, in hopes of peacefully bringing a fairer regime to power, one that would treat blacks as full citizens of society.
After two years of military occupation, calls were made for the federal government to help organise a constitutional convention in the State, one that would allow for the drafting of a new constitution, one that rid itself of slavery and racial inequality, and conformed itself to the new land of the land - emancipation. General John Pope assigned districts to the territory of Florida, and representatives were elected from each district to come and attend a constitutional convention in Tallahassee, to finally bring law and order back to the State. The elections happened during the fall of 1867; of the forty-six elected representatives, only three were not Republicans, and a full eighteen of them were African Americans, giving the freedmen community a great weight in the convention.
The moderate faction attempted to bribe their way to power, cooperating with even Confederate loyalists to fulfil their goals of bringing forward a Constitution that kept the balance of power in the State, and of overrepresenting the white counties in the legislature. But, as they saw that their efforts didn’t pay off, they decided to follow the example of their Confederate allies and secede from the Convention, adjourning to the nearby town of Monticello to write their own constitution.
Upon taking this blow, the remaining Radical majority continued their work in Tallahassee, finishing their legitimate Constitution and sending it for review to General Pope, together with a complaint over the behaviour of their fellow members. On February 10, however, one of the most infamous nights in Floridian history would occur, as the Monticello delegates returned to Tallahassee in secret and invaded the convention hall; to acquire a majority that would confer legitimacy, they dragged two Radical delegates out of bed and proceeded to form their own convention, guarded by the military guard. It was an unashamed coup by the moderates and conservatives to retain their power.
In the morning, the Radical delegates found out about the invasion and proceeded to protest before General Pope, holding their meetings, defiantly, on the public square. They sent their constitution to him for recommendation, while the occupying convention also sent their own moderate terms. Upon receiving the two documents, and having been informed of the circumstances on how the schism had come to be, however, General Pope was quite clear – he refused to even acknowledge the moderate document, burning the paper it was written on before reading it entirely, and declared the delegates from Monticello as impeached.
The Constitution of Florida of 1868 that the Radicals had agreed upon was sent, with recommendation from General Pope, to the Committee on Reconstruction, and approved by them, becoming the official legislative document of the State of Florida, being quickly ratified overwhelmingly by the Floridian people as well. The Florida Constitution of 1868 was one of the greatest triumphs of Radical Republicanism in the South – the only lasting one, perhaps, ultimately. Under it, the State of Florida as it exists was truly established and its legacy, in forming not only the legal basis of its government, but the moral and cultural basis of its people, lasts to our days.
The first days of the rest of the history of Florida were followed with excitement and ambition by many around the nation, from the Radical Republicans in the North and the freedmen in the South, while there were concerns and ill-wishes from moderates and ex-Confederates alike – as, by the new Constitution, and owing to the weight of democracy, Florida became, by all accounts, a Negro State, also known as the worst nightmare of the entire Southern aristocracy.
Throughout August, an extensive work of legislation, supervised by Governor Gibbs, was pushed forward, guaranteeing African Americans equal rights to public transportation and fully integrating public education, while moves were beginning to be made, legislatively, to bring forward two of the main goals of the freedmen in Florida – the promised redistribution of lands, under the slogan of “40 acres and a mule” – and the confiscation and overall disempowerment of the planter class that had fought such a tough war to keep them in chains.
Under the radar of the Assembly fell, in particular, the operations of David Levy Yulee, the railroad owner who had conspired in the escape of Jefferson Davis. A symbol of all things Confederate, they detested him, his wealth and his power. His ownership of vast tracts of railways made him a powerful magnate, however, and not an easy one to uproot. It would be in their fight against him that the State would manage one of its most important victories - the full expropriation of his railways, which would be nationalised and become State property, and eventually became an essential public service in the State. All Floridian railroads would eventually be nationalised and afterwards built vastly by the State government, in one of America's finest public services, connecting its various communities to this day.
Another marking legislative action during the early months of the new Constitution was the decision to change the State capital of Florida. Tallahassee, the heart of the Florida Cotton Belt, had been a fitting capital for slaveowner Florida – for Confederate Florida. It was, in fact, the only Confederate state capital east of the Mississippi not to have fallen during the war. But for freed Florida, dominated by its more southern population, a new, larger Capitol, open for more of its citizens, was believed to be in order. After some debate, the Assembly voted to change the state capital to Key West, a city that fell only behind Jacksonville in terms of size within the State, with large salt production and whose federal Fort Zachary Taylor had always been, throughout the war, a steadfast ally of the runaway slaves helping to sabotage the Confederate economy.
Its southern position, away from the whiter communities and, perhaps as vital, from the Southern States, from where many foes came, fearing the rising Negro power on the doorsteps and wanting to curb it before their own African American populations got any ideas of improving their lot; conflicts had been arising and the northern region of Florida, including some suburbs of Tallahassee, were no longer safe for all peoples. The existence of federal forces, meaning federal protection, and its privileged position, might also have played a role in the choice of Capitol. Northern Florida would, through the early decades, lose population dramatically; plagued by raids by Klansmen from Southern States, it would be hellish living for the black population, while white flight by the no longer dominant planter class would diminish their population in the State. Even to this day, the Panhandle is riddled with ghost towns from before the Civil War.
The first decade of Floridian emancipation was very difficult; the State suffered through political and less-than-political attacks by their neighbours, it had to rebuild its economy sans the plantations, changing the agricultural production from cotton to fruit and vegetables, and to deal with the industries in the hands of white men who would rather enslave the African Americans than work with them as equals. The homesteads, with "40 acres and a mule", failed to turn profits more often than not, and white capitalists attempted to lure the black owners to sell their lands for cheap, leading the State government to pass legislation making the sell of homestead land to anyone other than the State government illegal. Eventually, the system of personal homesteads would be replaced by large cooperative farms, made on a larger scale from the properties of several settlers, owned by the original owners and, later, by the farmers employed there as well, with those cooperative farms forming the backbone of Florida's economy.
On a national level, Florida was staunchly Republican. The GOP was, after all, the Party of Lincoln, of Emancipation. The one that had helped free them. All its Senators and Representatives were Republicans, and the Governor was a Republican too. A good number of them were African American too, among the first African Americans in Congress. And they were not only Republicans, but Radical Republicans, fierce supporters of black rights and racial equality, a view that wasn't exactly the most popular, even among the Republican Party. The Floridian policies of expropriation, land redistribution and nationalisation weren't particular popular either. The South was in uproar, fearing a freedmen revolution any day now, while even the North wasn't thrilled with the idea of a revolutionary black State in Congress.
The loyalty to the Republican Party by the Floridian people would be broken abruptly with the dirty Compromise of 1877 when, for the sake of winning the Presidency, Rutherford B Hayes, the Republican candidate, agreed to withdraw Federal forces from the South, something the free Black community had been fearing for a while. And their worst fears were proven true when, no longer restrained by the Army, white militias rose to take control, lynching prominent black leaders and forcing the rest to submission, taking out black elected officers throughout the South and replacing the laws favouring equality for laws that favoured white supremacy. Only Florida was spared; by then, marked by more than a decade of experience, the black community was able to withstand and take down the white insurgency, forcing many white supremacists to flee the State and retaining control over the State government. A lot of suffering happened over that, even so, with many crops burned and many communities attacked, a suffering that embittered the Floridian people to the Party that had betrayed them. As oppression returned to the South, many African Americans would also flee to Florida, increasing its black population, and increasing it with others who had every reason to be upset at the Republicans.
This would lead to a general schism between the Republican Party and its Florida members, who would break with their hitherto comrades, a break that was made solid by, in 1880, the Floridian Senators attending and endorsing the Greenback Party ticket, and helping push off the party Confederate leaders, replacing them with support for black rights. In that election, the Greenback ticket won Florida's electoral votes, and all of its Republican congressmembers became Greenbacks. In 1882, sponsored by the Floridian Party, the Greenbacks would convene with various small parties to form an united Labor Party, which would compete in the following elections and, each time, win the votes of Florida alone, even though their popularity steadily rose in other states. In 1890, the Labor Party and several Farmers' Movements throughout the country would meet in Ocali, Florida, and there draft the Ocali Demands, which would become the manifesto for their new coalition - the People's Party, which would become the standard that Florida would follow religiously until the present day. With the first Populist President elected in 1924 and the first African American (and Populist) President elected in 1968, the legacy of the Compromise of 1877 remains strong in the Nation, if not in the way its plotters might have intended, considering how no Republican has been elected to the Presidency since 1920.
And that is the history of Florida - liberated in 1865 to become what it is today. A country of free people living in accordance to their own will. A country of the unredeemed, who, facing broken promises, struggled for themselves to keep that greatest of all gifts a human soul can attain - emancipation.
_________________________________________________________
Well, this took a while. I'm glad I did it, but damn, it was a lot of work. I went through researching through every Florida town I could find, try to understand why it'd come to be and especially why it had been named and then root out names that wouldn't make sense or, if they did, would probably be retired, from names of Confederate heroes (a lot of those, to be honest, it disgusted me a bit) to names given by white settlers for their hometowns or loved ones that ITTL, simply wouldn't be there. It's more than likely I repeated a few names, if you spot such occurences please do notify me. I've probably also done some stupid mistakes, like putting towns slightly off, putting towns that don't really make sense or names that are inappropriate for some reason, so do notify me of those as well.
I actually started this idea as a TL once, and did some thorough research, but it's a really difficult story to tell in TL format and, although I might one day try to do it again, I think this format is more than appropriate for it. I also stole much of the text I wrote above from the TL, cutting it up to be shorter, so if I say something strange it's probably due to that.
I hope you like it, for, although very tiring, this was an incredibly fun map to make, and led me to research a lot, both about the region and about the people who could be involved in creating it, which, considering it is Florida, led me to a mountain of quirky historical facts and anomalies.
