Creating an Old South: The plantation frontier in Jackson and Leon counties, Florida, 1821-1860

Despite the dramatic geographical expansion of the U.S. South after 1800, few historians have included the plantation frontier in narratives of region and nation. Received wisdom about the antebellum South holds that it was old in two senses: that it was a stable society ruled by a confident planter class; and that gentry hegemony stretched unbroken from colonial times into the Civil War. This dissertation examines the plantation frontier at close range by looking at the experience of migration and settlement in two counties of antebellum Florida\u27s cotton belt. In Jackson and Leon counties, the plantation frontier was the site of conflict, crisis, and change: a Southern society disrupted by migration. Using a wide variety of social, political, and cultural sources, this study follows the removals of planters, non-planter or common whites, and enslaved African Americans from long-settled plantation districts of older states to Florida. Migration highlighted incipient conflicts among these three groups. Initially, elite kinship groups fought among themselves to control the frontier\u27s riches. Later they clashed with common whites over access to economic independence, and divergent ideas about masculinity that structured politics and frontier violence. Slaves sought to reconstruct families and communities devastated by master-directed separations, but the chaotic society created by migrant planters hampered African Americans\u27 quest for stability. Responding to their experiences, slaves constructed a critique of slavery that characterized forced migration as one of the institution\u27s worst features. In the early 1840s, an economic crash worsened by local planters\u27 speculation bankrupted Jackson and Leon counties, while a yeoman political revolt changed local politics. Faced by a general crisis of authority, planters were forced to accept yeoman masculinity as equal to their own. Common participation in yeoman-style religion and politics, and the return of strong demand for cotton, brought white classes together. Elite hegemony, destroyed by conflict, was slowly rebuilt. Haunted by their recent crisis, planters developed a new narrative that denied frontier discontinuity and historical change. Yet their stable plantation South was old only in rhetoric. In reality, it was a product of recent changes sparked in the process of migration and settlement