Alachua County history
Antebellum South
biography
business
Category=DND
Category=NHK
correspondence
economic history
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Florida History
frontiers
George Long Brown
letters
memoir
merchant
Second Seminole War
slavery
social history
Product details
- ISBN 9780813056388
- Weight: 515g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jul 2019
- Publisher: University Press of Florida
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In 1840, twenty-three-year-old George Long Brown migrated from New Hampshire to north Florida, a region just emerging from the devastating effects of the Second Seminole War. This volume presents over seventy of Brown’s previously unpublished letters to illuminate day-to-day life in pre?Civil War Florida.
Brown’s personal and business correspondence narrates his daily activities and his views on politics, labor practices, slavery, fundamentalist religion, and the local gossip. Having founded a successful mercantile establishment in Newnansville, Brown traveled the region as far as Savannah and Charleston, purchasing sea island cotton and other goods from plantations. He also bartered with locals and circulated among the judges, lawyers, and politicians of Alachua County.
The Letters of George Long Brown provides an important eyewitness view of north Florida’s transformation from a subsistence and herding community to a market economy based on cotton, timber, and other crops, showing that these changes came about in part due to an increased reliance on slavery. Brown’s letters offer the first social and economic history of one of the most important yet little-known frontiers in the antebellum South.
A volume in the series Contested Boundaries, edited by Gene Allen Smith.
Brown’s personal and business correspondence narrates his daily activities and his views on politics, labor practices, slavery, fundamentalist religion, and the local gossip. Having founded a successful mercantile establishment in Newnansville, Brown traveled the region as far as Savannah and Charleston, purchasing sea island cotton and other goods from plantations. He also bartered with locals and circulated among the judges, lawyers, and politicians of Alachua County.
The Letters of George Long Brown provides an important eyewitness view of north Florida’s transformation from a subsistence and herding community to a market economy based on cotton, timber, and other crops, showing that these changes came about in part due to an increased reliance on slavery. Brown’s letters offer the first social and economic history of one of the most important yet little-known frontiers in the antebellum South.
A volume in the series Contested Boundaries, edited by Gene Allen Smith.
James M. Denham is professor of history and director of the Lawton M. Chiles Jr. Center for Florida History at Florida Southern College. He is the author or editor of several books, including Fifty Years of Justice: A History of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
