Tallahassee Was Once All Plantations

 Some excellent publications from The John G. Riley Museum 
on Tallahassee's African-American History. 

If these Live Oaks dripping with Spanish Moss

could talk, what tales they could tell.Mrs.Bernice

Walker Ford, a slave descendent recalled: 

"People used to tell stories about slaves being

hung from that tree." 

My sister Andy lives in northeastern Tallahassee in Leon County, Florida. I've learned that almost every inch of Tallahassee was all plantations up to the Civil War, and then tenant farms worked by the former slaves as sharecroppers after that. Leon County as a whole had the greatest cluster of plantations in the State, and the greatest clusters of Black communities from Reconstruction into the 20th century. Black folks outnumbered white folks here. Even smaller and moderate-sized farms had slaves working them.  

In 1860, Leon County's population was 73% black,  all of them slaves. It's no wonder that Tallahassee and Leon County, also the center of the domestic slave trade in Florida, led the state in the production of cotton. It may also have led the state in the selling of children and family members to other planters, one of the most painful terrors endured.  

Photo in Humanities Florida's FORUM magazine, article by 
Larry E. Rivers, Feb. 24, 2020, first published in Spring, 2010. 

Cotton plantations. The words evoke human bondage. White Supremacy, Slave masters, Slave overseers, whips, hard labor, free labor. The historical and literary scholarship on Cotton plantations and how slaves worked them is extensive.  And it is brutal. "African-American oral traditions emphasize the institution's severity," eminent Florida historian Larry Eugene Rivers writes. He is talking about Florida slaves.  They speak of beatings, rape, vicious assaults on women and children; being forced to work when sick, maimed, broken, worked to death; psychological cruelty, severe floggings. When I read slave narratives I flinch at the inhumanity, human beings being held as human chattel, the property of white men.  Property.

And to think that our country was created on this foundation.  America, and surely the Southern states and territories, were built on the backs of slaves from 1619 onward.  Actually, it was before that date in Florida. Historians note that as early as 1539, slavery arrived in Florida when slave trader and Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto attempted to establish a permanent settlement and claim more territory for Spain.  

Various drawings of cotton plantations.
https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/28794

Early Florida history down here in the state Capital, established in 1824 on lands of already-thriving plantations, is basically about  how their owners, masters of their domains, dominated economic, political and social life from the very beginning, and how slaves served them from sunup to sundown. For that matter this history includes moving Native Americans off their land as well, which affected slaves because they often found a safe haven from slave owners among them. 

There were not many safe havens around, but many slaves were driven to run away. Some took the precarious journey on the Underground Railroad to find the freedom for which they longed. Some went searching for children who had been traded away. Some ran away only to be hunted to their death, or tortured if captured. The gritty reality of Fugitive Slave Laws. The newspapers at the time were full of ads for runaway slaves, and Tallahassee was no exception. The plantations harbored brutality, and Tallahassee was once all plantations.

Goodwood,now a museum, is building a memorial

to the slaves listing their names, "a site for sober

reflection, remembrance, teaching, healing."

Many of the plantations, like Goodwood down the street from Andy's, are now tourist attractions selling the beauty of these former sites built by slaves. Over 58 slaves worked this 1,676 acre plantation up to the Civil War, where they were then forced to work as sharecroppers or to take their chances and move on.

On the revisionist side of the scholarship on plantation slavery, which grew during the 1870s and after, are the stories and oral traditions of how slaves and their descendants survived. 

It's the history of how enslaved African Americans created families and kinship networks, sought to reunite with relatives who had been sold, sang about the jubilee in the cotton fields, formed their own religious beliefs and practices; taught each other how to read and write. 

From the Freedmen and
Southern Society Project.  

Most important, the revisionist scholarship, meticulously documented, reveals how slaves and their descendants sought to define "freedom" for themselves. I think of Peter Woods, Herb Gutman, John Blasingame, Ira Berlin. I recall working briefly on The Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, a multi-volume documentary history of the transition from slavery to freedom based on army records in the National Archives. The voices of the slaves rise up and are amplified. If only all Americans heard them.   

For former slaves, freedom was not working for wages for the profit of a boss. They resisted and resented the sharecropping system forced on them after the Civil War. Freedom was being your own boss, farming your own land, choosing your own path. 40 acres and a mule. 

'

They persisted in this pursuit in the face of ruthless white supremacy and racism: Black Codes, terror and lynching, cruel and inhumane violence beyond endurance. They had to.  After the horrors of Reconstruction, the ongoing virulent Black Codes followed by merciless "Jim Crow" laws, they organized, advocated and fought for their own dreams of freedom. They fought for the right to own land, to learn, to vote. They fought for political and civil rights up through the 1960s Civil Rights Movement to the present. It's a centuries-long history of persistence, courage, and achievement against insurmountable odds.

John G. Riley Museum for African-American History is near the Capital,
 where former slaves built communities like Frenchtown after the Civil War. John Riley,
born in 1857, determined to educate himself when education for slaves was illegal.
He became a teacher, principal of Lincoln High School, and community leader. The House he built in the 1890s stands as a testament to the persistence and contributions of African Americans.

                                                                                                                                                                   

When the Civil War ended in 1865, Tallahassee's slaves were ready for the Jubilee, the promise of freedom that had sustained them for hundreds of years. What plantation owners and city officials had kept hidden from the slaves was that they were already free. Had been for two years. The cruelty was in the deception.

                                                                                                                    
They were freed when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, proclaiming “That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be thenceforward, and forever free...."  

The Knott House, built by George Proctor,
a black builder. Photo taken while 
 on a plantation tour with Andy.

It was more than two years later, on May 20, 1865, that Union Brigadier General Edward M. McCook arrived in Tallahassee, stood on the steps of the Knott house, and read that Proclamation. He had taken possession of the city from Southern forces, establishing his headquarters at the Knott House, located four blocks from the State Capitol. He declared the Emancipation Proclamation in effect.  A freedman remembered: 

"I remember that day, when word came, that word that made free men and women of our black people" (notes 4 and 18 below). 

Could this be a rendering of Emancipation
Day 1865? from FORUM, Feb.2020.

An announcement also arrived that day from Major General Quincy A. Gillmore via train from Jacksonville that confirmed the news.  General Gillmore's Special Order Number 63 proclaimed that "the people of the black race are free citizens of the United States."  

"Free citizens of the United States!" Over 2,000 former slaves had gathered to hear the news, and they rejoiced. "It was that day when us black men an' women and lil' chillun crowded roun' each other, cryin' for joy, shouting we's free, we's  free! Glory! Glory! We's free."

The newly freed slaves celebrated all day at a picnic at Bull's Pond, which is today called Lake Ella, just north of downtown. It seemed fitting they would celebrate at the place where Black churches had held baptisms and slaves had prayed for freedom. 

Since that first celebration in 1865, communities in Tallahassee have annually celebrated May 20th as Emancipation Day, and today activities are still held throughout the city. The freedpeople turned that day into what Larry Rivers calls "a sacred moment of popular celebration."  And that it was.  

May 20, 1930, celebrated on former
Horseshoe Plantation.

Local newspapers often reported the event in their "colored sections."  Here's a news item from the Weekly Floridian on May 20, 1884, for example, almost 20 years later, reporting that "A large number of colored excursionists [travelers from plantations outside of Leon County] arrived from the east last night for the purpose of today's participation in the celebration of the emancipation of their race. The exercises of the day will consist of a grand parade in which all the colored lodges and societies will join, decoration of graves of Federal soldiers, addresses, etc." (Colored News of Tallahassee, p.9). 

Of course, not all the celebrants that day were "excursionists," but exuberant freedmen and freedwomen who had worked the plantations of Tallahassee and Leon county. It was a day when former slaves and their descendants got together with old friends, shared stories, took up collections to benefit the community. It was noted that during one of these celebrations "the money collected was enough to extend the school term of the public school (note 4).

Emancipation Day 2015.Tallahassee.
 Historical re-enactment, 
Sara Brockman photo.

"African Americans stayed alert to the ways that past struggle was related to current strivings." wrote Rivers (note 4 below).

This is the heart of the matter. This is what inspired Tallahassee and Leon County African Americans to keep up the freedom struggle in the face of  such relentless hostility and formidable odds. It's what inspired activists like Althemese Pemberton Barnes to preserve the past for the present. It's what motivated her and fellow Tallahasseans to restore an old house built by a former slave and turn it into the Riley Museum of African-American History.    

The freedpeople who celebrated Emancipation Day were survivors of slavery, and they "lived with the consequences of human bondage for the rest of their lives," Larry Rivers poignantly reminds us.  Many had the scars to show for it, more bore the emotional scars. In 1900, Mary Ann Harris was still searching for her mother. The pain of it. Thirty-five years after emancipation. 

Former slaves carried that pain to their deaths, and they didn't want us to forget. 

My sister and I have driven around the city and its environs for years, with Andy telling me stories of old plantations and the free black communities that grew out of them. This trip it became more real as I donned my historian's hat and did a little research to gather some basic facts. I look at the landmarks, the former plantations, the African-American historic trail, the buildings, homes, institutions and historical markers, the names of streets and roads, with fresh eyes, and more understanding. 

Andy recalled a story about an African-American women realtor who sold land in the area around her neighborhood to the descendants of former slaves and free blacks. She wasn't sure of the details. Some of these landowners still own the land they farmed and the houses they built on it. Many others have sold their holdings. They are now worth a lot of money. "A lot of money," Andy emphasizes.

About 250 slave descendants are
buried here, most in unmarked graves.

Lucrative housing developments and PUDs, office buildings, medical complexes, and malls have grown on the old plantations. The construction is constant, full speed ahead, and the developments are massive. Andy and I marvel at their size and the speed at which they go up, changing the landscape forever, like the old Lonnie Road developments on lands that free men and women built and farmed, like Welaunee Estates less than a mile from Andy's house, built on the large Fleischmann plantation, which was built in the early 1900s on the lands of several former cotton plantations.

Now when we make a right from Miccosukee onto Fleischmann Road, I'll think of the plantations that once flourished here. I'll know that Udu Fleischmann, a New York banker, built a quail hunting plantation in 1919 that employed former slaves who once worked the cotton fields and served as domestic servants for their antebellum-era owners. Other northern  industrialists joined him in buying up former plantations. It was entertainment, but I can't help but realize that these new owners were dancing on sacred ground, on lands worked by enslaved people, on African-American burial grounds. 

This morning we drove along Lonnie and Dempsey Mayo on the way to Walmart's, passing a few of the old houses and shacks still extant on parts of the land, small clusters here and there, until we hit Mahan Drive, which is Route 90. "Pretty soon these will be gone too," Andy comments, "and the areas along Route 319, Thomasville Road, which takes you to Thomasville, Georgia, once a Plantation alley extraordinaire. Today it's a builder's dream extraordinaire."  

The stories of slaves, free blacks and their descendants touch me deeply. If ever there were lessons in determination, perseverance and courage, it lies with the African-American people of Tallahassee who built the Capital city and made it their home.                                      

SOURCES/NOTES: 

1.   Althemese Barnes and Ann Roberts, Tallahassee, Florida: Black America Series (Arcadia Publishing, 2000).

2.  "In Their Own Words,"  nd,  a booklet relating some of the oral histories preserved by the John Riley Museum (www.rileymuseum.org). 

3, "Colored News of Tallahassee: A Walk through Time, 1855-1995," nd,  collected by the Riley Museum with thanks to Claude Kennison, Devon Johnson, an FSU student, and Mary Headly for typesetting the contents.  This booklet contains articles from Tallahassee newspapers, "when colored news occupied a separate section."

4.  https://floridahumanities.org/floridas-culture-of-slavery/  "Florida's Culture of Slavery," an article by Florida historian Larry Eugene Rivers in Humanities Florida's award winning FORUM magazine, February 24, 2020. It was originally published in The FORUM, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, Spring 2010. I'm searching for Larry E. Rivers, "Slavery in Microcosm: Leon County, Florida, 1820-1860," Journal of Negro History, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 235-245. 

Another excellent source, brilliantly researched and written, full of detail, every one documented, is Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821-1860, (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1973. ISBN 0813003237). I was moved to read that Smith worked under David Colburn, her dissertation advisor. 

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Althemese Barnes, founder of Riley
House, "Widens Sense of History with
 Emancipation Conference," Tallahassee
Democrat, Dec. 5, 2021.

5.  https://rileymuseum.org/tours/  The John G. Riley House Museum, located near the State Capitol building, is a 126-year old structure that embodies one of Tallahassee’s most influential men of his generation. Principal of the first public high school for blacks, Secretary of the Florida NAACP, member of the Negro Business League and Grand High Priest of the Royal Arch Masons, Mr. Riley made a lasting impact. I also want to mention a good pamphlet on Black soldiers, "Blacks in Blue and Gray, 1861-1865." Here also are some African-American sites that a Riley House tour will take you on: The Union Bank Building, The Old Capitol Building, The Historic Frenchtown Community, Old Lincoln High School, Florida A&M University, Meek-Eaton Black Archives, and the Knott House. Taken together, these sites tell the history of a committed and hard-working Black Community overtime.   

6.  https://www.museumoffloridahistory.com/about/the-knott-house-museum/20th-of-may/ Here on May 20, 1865, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which had freed the slaves in the South on January 1, 1863, was finally read to Tallahassee freedpeople. 

7.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tallahassee,_Fl

8.  https://visittallahassee.com/african-american-history-is-a-vital-part-of-the-tallahassee-story/

9.  https://www.sevenhillssuites.com/post/black-history-in-tallahassee

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welaunee_Plantation,_Florida

11. http://genealogytrails.com/fla/leon/plantations_1860.html  This is a list of plantations and various size farms showing owners, acreage, number of slaves. During the 1820s through 1850s, Leon County attracted planters from Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, and North/South Carolina because it was great for growing cotton. There are maps showing locations and some interesting photos. This is also a good source for some census material, biographies, and plantation history.

12.  https://www.nps.gov/jeff/blogs/Days-of-Jubilee-The-End-of-Slavery-in-the-United-States.htm        

         

13. https://www.museumoffloridahistory.com/about/the-knott-house-museum/20th-of-may/ Here on May 20, 1865, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation issued on January 1, 1863, was finally read to Tallahassee slaves.   Notice in the Floridian and Journal, May 20, 1865 regarding the Emancipation Proclamation: "Newly freed slaves in Tallahassee celebrated this announcement with a picnic at Bull's Pond," now Lake Ella.

14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_A%26M_University. Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) began as a state Normal School for Black students after the Civil War, in October 1887, and evolved into Florida A&M in 1953, when it became a funded historically black college and university (HBCU). An interesting story that belongs in the History books along with the better known Rosa Parks story involves the arrest of Wilhemina Jakes and Carrie Patterson in 1956 by the Tallahassee Police Department for "placing themselves in a position to incite a riot," which led to the Tallahassee Bus Boycott that sought to end racial segregation in the employment and seating arrangements of city buses. In the fall of 1997, Time Magazine selected FAMU as "College of the Year." 

15. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2395019/munree-cemetery . This is one of the thousands of black cemeteries across America that were hidden, neglected, discovered, and restored.  It was used by descendants of slaves, tenant farmers & sharecroppers from nearby plantations in the Welaunee area, purchased by Udo Fleishmann in 1912. It's near my sister Andy's house. The land is now occupied by a huge housing development. I was involved in a history of Black Nantucket when we discovered a black cemetery across from the old Windmill, and found the gravesites of the Absalom F. Boston family and others among the weeds of the hidden and forgotten burial ground.                           

16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenchtown_(Tallahassee)

17.  https://wfsu.org/local-routes/2019-09-26/tallahassees-smokey-hollow-in-the-shadow-of-the-capitol/

This volume was published by 
Applewood Press.

18.Patricia and Frederick McKissak point out in their book Days of Jubilee: The End of Slavery in the United States, that early on there was no single day when slavery ended in the United States. The day a slave was told of his or her freedom was the day of emancipation--their "day of jubilee."  For Former slaves in Florida the day was May 20, 1865, celebrated as "Emancipation Day" thereafter.  For slaves in Texas, it was June 19, 1865, now Juneteenth, a national holiday. 

 Added after posting. Interesting article about George Proctor and his father, free blacks. There were about 4 in Tallahasssee in 1830s: https://www.tallahasseemagazine.com/the-puzzling-story-of-george-proctor-a-free-black-man-during-the-time-of-slavery/