and eight thousand Negro slaves had fled to Florida by the close of
the Revolution to escape the penalties of their pro-British sympa-
thies.

Unlike the Spanish period, Florida under English colonization was
relatively self-sufficient. The British government offered bounties
for indigo and naval stores and these soon became the principal
staples of the region. The progress of agriculture and slavery in
British Florida was to be temporary. At the close of the Revolu-
tionary War in 1783, Florida was re-ceded to Spain and most of the
British inhabitants, with their slaves, left the country. Under this
period of Spanish control, from 1783 to 1821, Florida relapsed into
the economic stalemate of her earlier days under Spanish rule. Such
were the conditions when Florida was acquired from Spain by the
United States in 1821 to become a frontier development for slave-
holding cotton planters from the older states of the South.

It was already known that the lands called Middle Florida,
lying just below the thirty-first parallel of latitude between the
Apalachicola and Suwannee rivers, and the lands bordering these
rivers were extremely fertile and desirable for growing cotton. As
early as 1773, the botanist William Bartram described the country as
exceptionally fertile for the cultivation of cotton and other agri-
cultural products. ¹. The area is well defined geographically, as its
soil type differs from that of the rest of the state. In this relatively
small and isolated region, there came into being between 1821 and
1860 a cotton economy which compared favorably in output with
that of the Georgia Piedmont or the Black Belt of Alabama and
Mississippi. ².

The rapid expansion and increase of cotton culture in Florida
would not have happened without slavery. Without the use of
abundant cheap labor, the process of winning new lands from a
wilderness could never have been achieved. The plantation was a
frontier institution and its development in Florida exemplified the
manner in which settlers pushed into virgin lands to create new
slaveholding societies based upon an enforced labor system. The
cotton belt in Florida, when it became fully developed, extended
from Jackson County, west of the Apalachicola River, into Alachua
and Marion counties, southeast of the Suwannee River. The heaviest
concentrations of plantations, slave populations, and cotton produc-

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