Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers: The Transformation of Florida (review)

The authors offer a friendly study of "Yankee strangers" (less fondly called "carpetbaggers") and their contribution to the development of modern Florida. The story begins with idealistic young women like Chloe Merrick, who in 1862 answered calls for teachers willing to go to Florida to teach the children of slaves newly freed by the Union armies. Merrick and her fellow teachers were soon joined in the state by other Yankees eager to foster black education. The Reverend John Swaim, a Methodist Episcopal clergyman from New Jersey, found resistance in Jacksonville to the integrated worship services he tried to institute when he went there to preach to Federal troops and freed slaves. He became convinced that the only way to assure the civil rights of African Americans in Florida was to encourage Yankees to migrate to Florida in large numbers. They could construct the educational system the state lacked, and their presence in a state whose population was 47 percent African American could decide crucial elections. In order to encourage immigration, Swaim wrote articles for the Northern press extolling the state's climate and potential wealth. The new steamships could carry early spring produce and citrus fruit to lucrative Northern markets; the state's natural beauty would attract tourists.

This vision of the state's future appealed to Swaim's friend, Colonel James Chapman Beecher, a half-brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe and the leader of a black regiment, the First Northern Carolina Volunteers. James Beecher had been stationed near Jacksonville during the war and had sometimes preached in Swaim's church. After the war, he suggested that Stowe's son Fred recuperate from his war wounds by joining him in the rental of a Florida cotton plantation. In 1867, Stowe herself traveled to Florida with her brother Charles Beecher. She bought property on which she hoped to raise export crops, avoid the Northern winter, and write books. Although Stowe's early agricultural efforts were failures, she learned with experience, and her articles about Florida were collected into a book, Palmetto-Leaves, in 1873. In 1871 Charles Beecher accepted an appointment as state superintendent of public instruction, helping to expand and modernize Florida's educational system. Swaim helped found the Cookman Institute, a church-sponsored black college. Although the visions that "Yankee strangers" entertained of an integrated society were frustrated by the resistance of white Floridians during Reconstruction, their contributions to education, agriculture, and tourism helped shape the modern State.

If the authors' powers of organization and narrative arrangement had matched their enthusiasm for the subject, Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers might have been much easier to follow. As it is, the reader is sometimes bewildered by names whose significance is made clear only several chapters later or is left to search out in Florida state histories such important facts as the winner of the Battle of Olustee (the Confederates). The narrative is most successful when it tackles relatively uncomplicated themes. Still, native Floridians may take comfort from knowing that Harriet Beecher Stowe, like other citrus growers before her, had to discover the hard way that many years of abundant harvests offer no insurance against a catastrophic freeze.