When PonceÊdeÊLeon sighted Florida in the early spring of 1513, his presence in, what he thought of as a new land, had been preceded by thousands of years of Indian occupancy. At least 100,000 Indians were living there. Those in the north were agriculturalists, while most of those in the south lived off the natural bounty of land and sea. The Indians in the north shared many features with other Indians of the Southeast, including settlement in villages, chief-centered political organization, and elaborate burial rituals.
The First Spanish Period, 1513-1763
By 1500 Spain had achieved political unification. The final reconquest of Spain from the Moors occurred in 1492, the very year Columbus reached the West Indies. Its nobles, their military and crusading goals within Spain accomplished, were now seeking new realms to conquer. For Ponce de Leon and the leaders who followed him to the coasts of Florida:Ayllon, Narvaez, deÊSoto, de Luna, and others, the search for wealth and the fascination of uncharted lands led them and their men to the limits of human endurance. At the beginning of de Soto's march inland from Tampa Bay, when a long procession of mounted knights, foot soldiers, and servants set forth, major Spanish colonial activity in Florida might have seemed assured, but this was not to be; the fortunes in gold and silver that Cortes and Pizarro encountered in Mexico and Peru were not to be found in la Florida.
The failure to find riches dampened Spanish interest in Florida, but French efforts to establish a colony, first under JeanÊRibault at Port Royal Sound in present-day South Carolina in 1562, then under Rene de Laudonniere at the mouth of the St. Johns River in 1564, forced the Spanish emperor Philip II to act. Pedro Menendez de Aviles, Captain General of the Spanish Treasure Fleets, was dispatched to eliminate the French presence and to found a Spanish settlement. Both charges were quickly accomplished in 1565, and the resulting settlement, SanÊAugustin, was to be the primary Spanish settlement in Florida in the following 200 years.
Missionary activity began with the founding of St. Augustine. The first mission field was extended northward along the coast of present-day Georgia and South Carolina, and in the 1600s a second mission chain was established westward as far as the Apalachee Bay region. By 1710, however, virtually all of these thatch-roofed, wattle-and-daub missions had been destroyed by English-led Indian attacks launched from the new English colony of Carolina.
Spain valued Florida for its location. Spanish Florida together with Cuba commanded the vital sea route from the Gulf of Mexico and helped shelter Mexico from potential rival European colonial expansion. Few Spanish colonists came to Florida. Throughout the two centuries of Spanish rule the colony depended on government subsidy. By 1763, when Florida was yielded to Britain in the treaty ending the Seven Years' War, the population of St. Augustine was only about 3,000, that of Pensacola under 800. War, disease, and forced or voluntary migrations out of Florida had virtually eliminated the original Indian tribes in the colony.
British Rule, 1763-1783
Among the first acts of Florida's new rulers was a proclamation creating the two separate colonies of East and West Florida, each with its own seat of government, at St. Augustine and Pensacola respectively. The western boundary of the new colony of West Florida was fixed at the Mississippi River.
With the Spanish and the Indians gone, the British had essentially an empty territory. To encourage settlement, two types of land grants were made: large allotments not requiring homesteading by the recipient and smaller parcels to heads of families stipulating settlement for confirmation of title. A number of plantations based on slave labor and growing primarily indigo and rice appeared especially along the St. Johns River and adjacent coastal areas in East Florida. Creek Indians from Georgia and present-day Alabama filtered into the vacant interior of northern Florida, and began to be called Seminoles.
The Second Spanish Period, 1784-1821
The defeat of Britain by the combination of American, French, and Spanish forces brought Spain back to East and West Florida by the peace treaty of 1783. In the ensuing thirty-five years, however, continuing decline of Spanish power and increasing numbers of Americans north of Florida progressively eroded the viability of the two colonies. By 1819, the western boundary of Spanish political control in West Florida had retracted eastward to the Perdido River.
During the second Spanish term in Florida, additional land grants were made, mainly in northeastern East Florida and contiguous to Pensacola Bay. Sugarcane plantings began in northeastern Florida. Creek Indians continued to move into Florida. American incursions across the border in search of runaway slaves increased, as did attacks on Indians thought to be sheltering slaves. Recognizing its inability to control increasing turbulence in its colonies, Spain ceded East and West Florida to the United States in 1819, with transfer being finalized in 1821.
Territory and Early Statehood, 1821-1876
AndrewÊJackson, nominated by President Monroe and confirmed by the Senate as first governor of the two colonies acquired from Spain, organized a single Territory of Florida with two counties, Escambia and St. Johns. The new legislative council met at Pensacola, the old capital of West Florida, in 1822 and at St. Augustine, the former capital of East Florida, in 1823. These two chief settlements of the new territory were separated by 400 miles of virtual wilderness, rendering desirable a more central site for a capital. Tallahassee was accordingly founded in 1824 midway between the two older settlements, and the territorial council met there for the first time late in that year.
Settlement in the territorial period occurred primarily in the area between the Suwannee and Apalachicola rivers, in what became known as Middle Florida. A government land survey, which had to precede the sale of public lands to settlers, was initiated at Tallahassee in 1824 with the demarcation there of the east-west baseline and north-south meridian from which the rectangular township and range survey system was then extended. Meanwhile, settlement in East Florida and in the Pensacola area was slowed by unclear land titles associated with grants made by previous regimes. Moreover, much of northern peninsular Florida was occupied by Indians until the end of the Second Seminole War (1835-42).
As cotton production expanded westward from the Atlantic seaboard, it largely bypassed Florida, but some planters with their slaves did move into extreme northern Middle Florida in the territorial and early statehood period and an east-west plantation belt centered in Leon County developed along a zone of comparatively fertile loamy soils. One of the earliest railroads in the United States, from Tallahassee to St. Marks, was built to expedite the export of cotton to the textile mills of England and New England.
With the end of the Second Seminole War, the peninsula southward to the Kissimmee valley was opened for settlement. Land title problems in northeast Florida and the Pensacola area were also gradually resolved. Except in the specialized plantation districts, the first wave of frontier settlement generally consisted of woods ranchers who came with their tough, wiry cattle. These cattlemen, gradually displaced over much of northern Florida by small farmers, continued to drift southward into the peninsula. The new small farms, which were forest-girt clearings with patches of corn, sweet potatoes, cotton, and a bit of sugarcane for syrup, became common by 1850. Plantations producing long-staple Sea Island cotton and sugarcane increased in the St. Johns River country, and an isolated sugarcane plantation district emerged along the Manatee River. Apalachicola flourished on the export of Georgia and Alabama cotton. After 1855, railroad construction became significant in northern Florida. Remote from all
