Battle for Olustee

Greetings, this week we will continue exploring race relations and black labor during Florida's reconstruction period, the use of convict labor in southern states, and segregation.  The attitudes of Southerners would be a determining factor in a successful relationship between white men and freedmen (Day 2004, 3). Ultimately, the end of slavery caused numerous problems both for former confederates, as well as freedmen and abolitionists. Initially, the maintenance of status was of key importance to race relations in Florida: the dominant class did not want to relinquish control over resources, of which one was slavery (Ibid, 8).  In Florida, white businesses and landowners sought to maintain the pre-War status quo and were the dominant enactors of legislation. Dr. Christopher Day describes this as the "Holy Trinity" of race relations: political control, labor [and] property control, and violence (Ibid, 9).  The legalization of race relations may have been a result of fear-...

Greetings, this week we examine the Federal government's role in Reconstruction, how embittered Southerners resisted, and the implications of "ending" Reconstruction.   By April of 1865, many remaining Confederate forces under the direction of General. Robert E. Lee surrendered at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia; although occasional cells of white rebels would continue to resist Union occupation, the Confederacy had essentially exhausted its wartime capabilities. General Lee's surrender staunched the hemorrhaging of raw materials and men from the South. Nonetheless, those disgruntled Confederate veterans survived and returned home. Frequently these officers and veterans became statesmen, lawyers, plantation owners, and farmers after returning home.  Before the Civil War, Florida was on a trajectory to have booming cotton, lumber, and meat markets; all supported with the use of slaves as laborers. Union efforts to recruit Africans and sympathetic Whites were only...