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200 7 FLORIDA AND TEXAS Foreshadowing Failure I believe there is a “God in Israel” & that he [sic] will not abandon us to the tender mercies of vagabond adventurers. —Harrison Reed, Florida’s first Republican governor (1868–73) [T]he present Reconstruction Convention has lost . . . all regard for dignity and honor as a legislative assemblage. . . . [I]ts continued session will only terminate in disgrace to the entire country. I herewith tender my resignation as a member hereof. . . . —George Ruby, black delegate to the Texas convention overview Florida and Texas, the last two of the soon-to-be Confederate states to be admitted to the Union—on March 3 and December 29 of 1845, respectively—were also the last to assemble their Black and Tan conventions. Carved from Spanish and Mexican territories, both states remained in frontier stages of development. In the early 1860s Texas, with about 604,000 residents, ranked ninth in population among Confederate states; Florida, with its minuscule population of around 140,000, ranked eleventh, and among all the states that had not seceded, only Delaware and Oregon had smaller populations. By 1870, however, Florida and Texas led all former Confederate states in population growth—Florida had increased its 1860 population by 33.5%, to 187,748, and Texas had grown by 26.2% since that year, to 818,579. In Florida, this growth was racially disproportionate: blacks increased by 46.3% and whites by about 23.5%. Texas’s growth was much more racially balanced, showing a gain of 38.6% among blacks and 34.2% among whites. Even with such surges, however, vast expanses of both states—South Florida and West Texas especially—still remained virtually unoccupied in 1867 as Congress assumed control of Reconstruction. Dade County, for example, the future home of megalopolis Miami, had a population of only 85.1 With their political destinies controlled by five populous, black-majority, cotton-producing 201 Florida and Texas counties in the northern region of their state, white Floridians had strongly favored secession. John Breckinridge gained their support in the 1860 presidential election, and Florida became the third state to leave the Union prior to president-elect Lincoln’s inauguration. In the Lone Star State, too, the planter-dominated region—relatively populous East Texas—pushed for secession . Here, though, sizable numbers of nonslaveholders—frequently in the state’s northern and western regions—supported secession with less enthusiasm. Nonetheless, in a February 1861 referendum, voters endorsed leaving the Union by a three-to-one majority (46,188 to 15,149). Despite the oft-noted political comeback of avid Unionist Sam Houston in the gubernatorial election of 1859, a substantial majority of white Texans remained unwavering in their support for the southern cause. “Old Sam” refused, however, to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy and as a result was deposed as the state’s chief executive.2 Because of their comparative isolation from the rest of the Confederacy and their relative lack of strategic importance, no major Civil War battles occurred in either state. Florida, nonetheless, suffered considerably from the Union’s naval blockade. While fortifications at Key West and around Pensacola Bay remained in Union hands, Jacksonville was also occupied on several occasions, and northerners—most notably treasury agents and new arrivals such as future governor Harrison Reed—began moving into occupied areas of the state early in 1863. Meanwhile, owing to its ability to trade with neighboring Mexico, Texas suffered less from the blockade, and Union invasion efforts there failed—at the port city of Galveston in October of 1862, at the mouth of the Sabine River in September of 1863, and via the Red River in April of 1864. Even so, Texas suffered as the war progressed. Some 60,000 of its young men served in Confederate ranks, and toward the end of the war, refugees and deserters roamed the state in alarming numbers.3 As will be seen, in a number of respects the Florida and Texas conventions were to be quite different. Delegates assembled in Austin (with median overall assets of $5,665) were the wealthiest among those of all of the conventions; those in Tallahassee (with median overall assets of $800) were the poorest. While southern whites would enjoy an overwhelming majority in Texas, the Florida convention, with more or less equal allotments of black, outside white, and southern white delegates, would be dominated by carpetbaggers. However, these differences would be eclipsed by a common fundamental characteristic: the conventions’ confused and...

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