Description 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.
A volume in the series Contested Boundaries, edited by Gene Allen Smith.
Brown\'s Letters offer the first social and economic history of one of the most important yet little-known frontiers in the Antebellum South.
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.
He also bartered with locals and mingled with the judges, lawyers, and politicians of Alachua County.
In the decade leading up to the Civil War, Brown married into one of the largest slaveholding families in the area and became involved in the slave trade.
Having founded a successful mercantile establishment in Newnansville, Brown traveled the region as far as Savannah and Charleston, purchasing goods from plantations and strengthening social and economic ties in two of the region\'s most developed cities.
Brown\'s personal and business correspondence narrates his daily activities and his views on politics, labor practices, slavery, fundamentalist religion, and local gossip.
This volume presents over seventy of Brown\'s previously unpublished Letters to illuminate day-to-day life in pre-Civil War Florida.
Description 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
