1763-1789 AMERICAN REVOLUTION

While the morality of slavery had been debated for some time, abolition remained a fringe movement in The South. The American Revolution represented one of the first major changes in the colonial economy. The high taxes and tariffs on European goods, manufactured with supplies from the thirteen colonies, were no longer tolerated by entrepreneurs in the north. After the American Revolution, many of the northern industrialists and intellectuals of the time began to shift their thoughts on how African Americans should be treated. Unfortunately, many wealthy landowners had built their wealth and power through manipulative labor schemes and the Black Codes, limiting southern abolition society. Though this did not dissuade large publications of abolitionist writings and policies. Unfortunately, the idea of freeing one’s "property" was particularly "difficult for the clergy to defend, not only in relation to others, but especially for those clergy who owned slaves" (McCarthy, 2007).

While the north debated the morality of slavery, the cotton empire of the south was only growing. The south now had to increase the production of cash crops, to supply northern industries and Europeans who became reliant on their cheap raw materials. This increased the southern economy’s reliance on slave labor.

The post 1840 AnteBELLum plantation was designed as a "frontier institution" and its development in new Florida exemplified the manner in which settlers pushed into unfamiliar territory that evolved into slaveholding societies based on forced labor in the lumber, indigo, tobacco, cotton and turpentine industry. As shown in the map above, the cotton belt in Florida extended from Jackson County, west of the Apalachicola River, into Alachua and Marion counties, and southeast of the Suwannee River and further along the sea coast islands. The heaviest concentrations of plantations, slave populations, and cotton production were centered in Jackson, Gadsden, Leon, Jefferson, and Madison counties (Smith 2017).