Congress admitted Florida to the Union in 1845 as a slave state together with Iowa, a free territory, maintaining the balance between slave and free states. The United States acquired Florida in 1821 following Spain's concession, under the Adams-Onis Treaty (1819), of its colonies East and West Florida in lieu of a five-million-dollar debt to American citizens. Spain had controlled Florida from the settlement of St. Augustine in 1565 until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, when Britain took possession. The British occupation ended with the American Revolution and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which returned Florida to the Spanish. The War of 1812, the Florida campaigns of General Andrew Jackson, and the First Seminole War (1817-1818) convinced Spain that it could no longer protect its Florida possessions.
The initial boundary of West Florida extended from the Apalachicola River in the east to the Mississippi River in the west, north approximately to present-day Vicksburg (Mississippi), and east to the Chattahoochee River. It included the cities of Mobile, Natchez, and, serving as its capital, Pensacola. Americans claimed that the territory above the northern border of present-day Florida at the thirty-first parallel belonged to the United States. Under the 1795 treaty negotiated by Thomas Pinckney, U.S. envoy to Spain, a militarily weak Spain ceded this territory, which included the lower parts of present-day Mississippi and Alabama, to the United States.
Spanish records indicate that the nonwhite population in 1795 was 8,390, among which were Spanish, English, French, and Americans. The colony recognized the Roman Catholic faith as the official religion, but perhaps 15 percent of the population was Protestant. The mainstays of the economy were timber, indigo, and tobacco, although competition from Mexico significantly reduced tobacco's economic potential. Probably the most lucrative endeavor was trading British-manufactured products with Indians in return for land.
Historians argue that the conflict in West Florida was an early expression of Manifest Destiny, the belief, which became widespread in the 1840s, that the United States was destined to expand across the continent. Spain maintained a generous land-grant policy that brought large numbers of Americans into the colony, mostly to the Baton Rouge area; eventually this policy led to Spain's loss of territory that came to be known as the Florida Parishes of Louisiana. In 1810 American insurgents captured Baton Rouge, declared it independent, and created the Republic of West Florida; under a flag bearing a single star, it be-came—before Texas—the first lone-star republic. At the insurgents' urging and despite Spanish opposition, the United States annexed the territory (now part of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi) along the Gulf Coast between the Mississippi and Perdido Rivers (the present-day western boundary of Florida) into the Territory of Orleans.
East Florida included most of present-day Florida, with St. Augustine as its capital and only significant city. Following Spanish acquisition, the non-Indian population of East Florida dropped to below two thousand from a peak of approximately twelve thousand during British occupation. Yet with Minorcans, Greeks, Italians (all of whom the English had imported as laborers), British, Americans, Spanish, and Africans, the population remained diverse. A continually unstable economy revolved around timber, cattle, rice, and increasingly cotton. Seeking to end its financial dependence on Spain, East Florida instituted a liberal land-grant policy like that in West Florida, only to suffer similar consequences.
Encouraged by West Florida insurgents, selfprofessed East Florida patriots—Americans living in the colony and others who came down from Georgia—staged their own insurgency. They managed to seize Amelia Island, but when the United States declared war on Britain in 1812, it withdrew its support of the patriots. Seminoles, including many fugitive slaves, then allied with the Spanish and helped defeat the patriots.
Americans found Florida Indians an especial irritant because among them lived so-called black Seminoles, fugitive slaves from the British colonies and later the southern U.S. states. Beginning in 1693 Spanish Florida offered freedom to runaway slaves from the British colonies who pledged their loyalty to Spain and converted to Catholicism. That policy continued into the second Spanish period over the protests of American slaveholders, eventually strengthening congressional support for the acquisition of the two Floridas.
The climax in the struggle over Florida came during and after the War of 1812. During the war Jackson conducted forays against the British (allies of Spain) in Florida, capturing fortifications in Mobile, Pensacola, and St. Marks. When British forces withdrew after the war, they left Seminoles and blacks with provisions at a fort on the Apalachicola River just south of the Georgia border. Jackson ordered the destruction of the so-called Negro Fort for security reasons. Its demolition was soon followed by the Seminole War and the Spanish cession of its Florida provinces.
The first territorial census in 1825, which is incomplete, counted less than 15,000 slave and free people living in Florida, almost all in the northern section and representing to a large degree the remnants, though culturally diverse, of the Spanish period. During the four decades following U.S. acquisition, Florida became increasingly Anglo and African as settlers and slaves, mainly from Georgia and South Carolina, flooded into the region. The census recorded 34,730 people living in Florida in 1830, 54,477 in 1840, 87,445 in 1850, and 140,424 in 1860. The slave population continually hovered around 40 percent, which in 1860 belonged to 5,152 slaveholders. Free blacks were legally prohibited from relocating to Florida, which kept their population below 1,000. Representing approximately one-half the total population and the majority of the slave population, middle Florida, between the Apalachicola and Suwanee Rivers, grew into the wealthiest and most politically powerful region.
The territorial capital was built in 1824 on the Indian fields of Tallahassee in middle Florida, which dominated Florida's agrarian economy. Although farmers grew rice, corn, and later sugarcane, the staples of a robust economy were cotton and timber. Middle Florida yeomen farmers (known as Crackers) and planters with their slaves produced 80 percent of the territory's cotton. By the 1850s, Florida's annual cotton crop represented the highest per-capita yield in the South with the highest dollar value. Timber—pine and oak—was extracted mainly from northeast Florida and shipped out of Jacksonville, the territory's largest city and busiest port. With more than twenty sawmills in operation along the St. Johns River in the 1850s, Jacksonville claimed to be the largest timber market in the South. Cattle raising by that time had emerged as a third major industry, with the export trade passing mainly through the port of Tampa.
An estimated five thousand Indians occupied the territory at the time of U.S. acquisition. By the middle of the eighteenth century, disease and warfare had wiped out the original native population. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, continuing conflicts between whites and Yamasee, Cherokee, and Creek peoples in South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama forced a fresh influx of Indians into Florida, where the Spanish generally welcomed them as allies and trading partners. Beginning with the British, they became collectively known as Seminoles. In contrast to the expanding general population, wars with the United States would nearly eliminate their numbers.
White Americans generally regarded Indians as a threat to their safety and property. To that end, the First Seminole War followed after Secretary of War John C. Calhoun dispatched General Jackson to Florida to prevent Seminoles from conducting raids on homesteads in southern Georgia and providing sanctuary to runaway slaves. Lasting from 1835 to 1842, the Second Seminole War was the longest sustained conflict between the United States and a single Indian group. The war broke out after a treaty forced Indians out of middle Florida and other areas of white settlement and onto a reservation north of Tampa. Approximately three hundred Seminoles survived the war and evaded relocation to the Oklahoma territory, where nearly four thousand Seminoles had been sent. Minor conflicts continued between the remaining Seminoles and Florida whites, who demanded the Indians' execution or removal. War erupted again in 1855, lasting two years. About two hundred Seminoles escaped to the Everglades and the Big Cypress Swamp, where their descendants remain today.