For Sale —American Paradise (4 page)

Instead of a lair for loathsome reptiles, it was the habitat “for the genii of those unearthly regions, which come nearest the description of that fabulous place, that we read of, which was neither land, water, nor air,” Motte wrote.

The deeper the soldiers went into the wilderness, the more rhapsodic Motte's descriptions became. “Nothing, however, can be imagined more lovely and picturesque than the thousand little isolated spots, scattered in all directions over the surface of this immense sheet of water, which seemed like a placid inland sea shining under a bright sun,” he wrote. “Every possible variety of shape, colour, contour, and size were exhibited in the arrangement of the trees and moss upon these islets, which, reflected from the limpid and sunny depths of the transparent water overshadowed by them, brought home to the imagination all the enchanting visions of Oriental description.”

Motte “felt the most intense admiration, and gazed with a mingled emotion of delight and awe” at the ethereal landscape.

Florida became the twenty-seventh state in March 1845. It is a quirky state geographically, simultaneously the southernmost continental state and yet, in some ways, it was only marginally a part of the antebellum Old South that bordered it to the north. It is the only state that both touches the Atlantic Ocean and sprawls across two time zones. Its easternmost city, Palm Beach, overlooks the Atlantic, but if you head due north from Florida's westernmost city, Pensacola, you will eventually arrive in Chicago. It's a 540-mile trip down the state's eastern coastline from Fernandina Beach near the Georgia border to Key West, only ninety miles from Havana, Cuba.

Only a few white settlers lived between Tampa and Key West before the Civil War. But Fort Dallas, an outpost of the US military from the Seminole Wars, which were fought sporadically between 1816 and 1858, remained as a settlement near the shores of the Biscayne Bay after the struggle ended. The Everglades covered most of southern Florida, and the Glades were inhabited by the handful of Seminoles who had eluded US troops sent to subdue them or drive them out.

The Civil War could easily have started in Florida several months before Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1861.

By 1860, the long-
simmering dispute about the extension of slavery into US territories had become unresolvable. South Carolina furiously severed its political connection with the United States government on December 20, 1860.

Mississippi left the Union on January 9, 1861, and Florida seceded on January 10. That same day, Lieutenant Adam Slemmer, in charge of US forces in Pensacola, moved his federal troops into Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island, a barrier island just offshore from the city.

Colonel William Chase, a West Point–educated army engineer who had decided to cast his lot with the Confederacy, led troops to Fort Pickens and demanded that Slemmer surrender. Slemmer refused, and Chase contemplated storming the fort, an act that surely would have sparked war. But he decided against it, and Fort Pickens became one of the few US forts in the Confederacy to remain in Union hands for the entire war.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the reunited nation—or at least the victors—got down to the serious business of becoming wealthy. Ulysses S. Grant, the former Union general who finally figured out a way to beat Confederate general Robert E. Lee, was elected president in 1868—although Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia had not been readmitted to the Union and did not vote in that presidential election.

Author Oliver Carlson noted that President Grant “ushered in that hustling period of the 1870s, when the dominant dream of America was to get rich.”

The Reconstruction era gave rise to “new Americans” who were “primitive” and “ruthless” souls who didn't trouble themselves with scruples. They were “a race of buccaneers,” Carlson said.

While the Old South languished in poverty, mythologized its bloodily defeated “Lost Cause,” and endured military occupation by US troops, men such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, and “a tribe of other swindlers and railroad wreckers, rascals one and all,” amassed huge fortunes in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

“But to the man in the street, these were heroes to be cheered for their audacity,” Carlson wrote. “Those who grumbled at their ways were told, ‘You'd do the same thing if you only had the chance.'”

In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, and the former Confederate States were occupied by Union troops and placed under military rule. That same year, author Harriet Beecher Stowe—whose book,
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, supposedly was cited by President Abraham Lincoln as the cause of the Civil War—bought property on the St. Johns River near Jacksonville and built a winter home there. Her twofold purpose was to build a school for African Americans and allow her son to take advantage of the Florida climate to recover from severe wounds he'd suffered as a Union soldier during the war.

Stowe also wrote a book about Florida called
Palmetto-Leaves
. She echoed Jacob Motte's rhapsodic description of Florida. “No dreamland on earth can be more unearthly in its beauty and glory than the St. Johns in April,” she wrote.

But she also was aware of Florida's faults, comparing its climate to “an easy, demoralized, indulgent old grandmother, who has no particular time for anything, and does everything when she happens to feel like it.”

Stowe cautioned newcomers to Florida. “Don't hope for too much,” she warned, and don't expect “an eternal summer.”

“For ourselves,” she wrote, “we are getting reconciled to a sort of tumble-down, wild, picknicky kind of life—this general happy-go-luckiness which Florida inculcates.”

If Florida was a woman, Stowe wrote, she would be what today would be called a “hot mess”—a brunette, dark and attractive, with beautiful skin and “a general disarray and dazzle, and with a sort of jolly untidiness, free, easy, and joyous.”

Florida tourism got another boost in 1869 when Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, who had served as a surgeon in the Union Army of the Potomac during the Civil War, wrote
A Guide-Book of Florida and the South for Tourists, Invalids and Emigrants
. Brinton praised Florida's winter climate, saying it was “in some respects unsurpassed by any portion of the United States.”

He was effusive in his praise of Fort Dallas and Biscayne Bay.

“Undoubtedly the finest winter climate in the United States,” Brinton wrote, “both in point of temperature and health, is to be found on the south-
eastern coast of Florida. It is earnestly to be hoped, for the sake of invalids, that accommodations along the shore of Key Biscayne and the mouth of the Miami [River], will, before long, be provided, and that a weekly or semi-
weekly steamer be run
from Key West thither.”

He backed up his praise of the healthful winters with a quote from Dr. R. F. Simpson, an army surgeon who had served at most of the antebellum military bases in Florida. Simpson said Biscayne Bay “has a climate, in every respect, perhaps, unsurpassed by any in the world.”

In 1873, another New England Yankee came to Florida and was enthralled. Massachusetts-born author and journalist Edward King took an extended tour of the old Confederacy and wrote a series of stories about each Southern state for
Scribner's Magazine
. The stories later were collected into a book,
The Great South: A Record of Journeys
, published in 1875.

In his essay about Florida, King praised the climate and tropical beauty of “our new winter paradise.”

“In the winter months, soft breezes come caressingly; the whole peninsula is carpeted with blossoms, and the birds sing sweetly in the untrodden thickets,” he wrote. “It has the charm of wildness, of mystery; it is untamed; civilization has not stained it.”

In the eight years since the Civil War had ended, King noted, Florida had become a haven for winter-weary Northerners and those suffering from tuberculosis and other debilitating diseases.

King noted that Florida's Silver Spring, south of Gainesville, was attracting fifty thousand tourists a year in the early 1870s. And he was charmed by Palatka, a “cheery, neat” town on the St. Johns River south of Gainesville and about thirty miles inland from St. Augustine.

King drew a languid, lyrical sketch of Palatka and its waterfront.

“Little parties lazily bestow themselves along the river bank, with books or sketching materials, and alternately work, doze or gossip, until the whistles of the ascending or descending steamers are heard, when everybody flocks to the wharves,” he wrote. “At evening a splendid white moonlight transfigures all the leaves and trees and flowers; the banjo and guitar, accompanying [N]egro melodies, are heard in the streets; a heavy tropical repose falls over the little town, its wharves and rivers.”

George Colby, a twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker, was a different kind of restless dreamer who came to Florida in 1875. He was not drawn by Florida's mild winter climate or sent there to recover from illness. Colby claimed to have been led there by a spirit guide he called Seneca, who wanted him to establish a community of like-minded spiritualists in the Florida wilderness.

Seneca was quite specific about where he wanted Colby to establish this community: It would be near a spring that discharges into the St. Johns River and seven pine-
covered hills overlooking a group of lakes.

In early November 1875, Colby, supposedly following Seneca's instructions, set out in a mule-
drawn wagon through the woods of interior Florida. Soon he found seven pine-covered hills overlooking some lakes near Blue Spring. He chose this spot to establish Cassadaga, a small village of spiritualists near DeLand.

Ulysses Grant left the White House in 1877 after serving two terms; however, his staunchest supporters wanted him to seek a third term in 1880, after his Republican successor, President Rutherford B. Hayes, announced he would not seek reelection. Despite the fact that serving a third term would break George Washington's sacred precedent of serving only two terms, Grant did not discourage the idea.

But Grant's supporters started worrying that voters would tire of the former and possibly future president as he made a cross-country trip in 1879. They
convinced him to get out of the country for a while. Grant set off for Cuba and Mexico.

In early January 1880, Grant and his family reached Florida, en route to Havana. He was impressed, and realized that Florida had great potential.

“I am very much pleased with Florida,” he wrote in a January 18, 1880, letter to a friend. “The winter climate is perfection, and, I am told by Northern men settled here, that the summers are not near so hot as in the North, though of longer continuance. This state has a great future before it.”

A month later in Havana, he complained about the “sultry” weather in Cuba, “just such as we run from at home in the Dog Days.” Florida was a much better winter resort than muggy Havana, he wrote.

Florida appealed to different passions in politicians and businessmen. Their dreams focused on figuring out a way to package and sell the state's most abundant asset—lots and lots of undeveloped land—for huge profits.

Florida's leaders thought they could pull the state out of the postwar wreckage and political chaos in the former Confederate States by giving twenty-two million acres—more than half the state—to railroad companies and then issuing state bonds to pay for laying track. They assumed that railroads would lure business investments that would in turn create jobs and prosperity. But industry wasn't interested, and the money to pay off the bonds didn't come.

Desperate to prevent the state from defaulting on its ill-
conceived bonds,
Governor William Bloxham made one of history's biggest land deals. He persuaded wealthy Philadelphia industrialist Hamilton Disston to buy four million acres—an area larger than the state of Connecticut—at 25 cents an acre. Disston's first payment of $500,000 in May 1881 kept the state solvent.

Disston boasted that he'd turn Kissimmee, a scrubby little cattle town in central Florida near Orlando, into a “magic city.” He also expected to greatly increase his wealth in the process.

But Disston badly miscalculated the amount of money, work, and plain old good luck he'd need to make his venture pay off. He struggled for more than a decade, but the deep economic depression that followed the Panic of 1893 finally put him under. Despondent because of his huge losses, Disston shot himself.

He had no way of knowing, however, that his huge land purchase had laid the foundation for Florida's economic salvation, because it did eventually attract the railroads, and they were willing to lay their own tracks. A few years after the unhappy, unlucky Disston was laid to rest, there were five thousand miles of rails in the state.

Thanks to the railroads, Dr. Brinton's guidebook, and Yankee writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edward King, northern physicians were prescribing winter trips to Florida for their patients who suffered from lingering, debilitating diseases. In 1878, a plutocrat who was amassing one of the great fortunes of the nineteenth century took his ailing wife to St. Augustine, hoping the gentle climate there would restore her frail health.