Liquid Landscape. Michele Currie Navakas
Florida, from coastal homes on stilts built to withstand hurricanes that alter the shoreline to the offshore dwellings of Stiltsville, a group of houses constructed on Biscayne Bay east of Miami in the 1930s, and still standing just above the shallow coastal waters of the Atlantic. These historical examples of living in the absence of solid, stable ground reveal that Florida’s porous landscape has always necessitated modes of settlement, attachment, and belonging that differ from, yet are no less durable than, those that developed on firmer ground.
Recognition that Florida’s unstable land required different modes of use and possession infuses a broad archive of imaginative reflections on root-taking in Florida that circulated widely in North America from the late colonial period through the late nineteenth century. This archive attests that many people living across the continent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were aware of and interested in local, Floridian forms of taking root—forms that did not depend on the stable ground that a Lockean tradition of landed property required. A different narrative of U.S. founding and expansion emerges when we focus on widely read accounts of settling a particularly unsolid part of the continent. Reflections on Florida from Revolution through Reconstruction reveal that, from the moment of founding onward, the United States was a nation deeply interested in imagining roots, and thereby personal and collective identity, in the absence of solid ground.
A large number of early observers of Florida and other southern parts of North America felt these spaces could never be founded, and thus dismissed them as “problems” for an expanding settler empire. Early maps, settlers’ guides, travel narratives, novels, and other texts characterized these spaces as “undeveloped,” “deviant,” “retrograde,” “uncultivable,” “degenerate,” and even “impenetrable.”2 But Florida’s porous foundations frequently elicited another type of response as well. To many early Americans the liquid landscape appeared not as an obstacle to settlement, but rather as a provocation to think beyond more familiar ideals of land and boundaries that made it possible to imagine the United States as settler nation and empire in the first place.
While Florida’s local topographic features have always raised pronounced physical challenges for those who pursued long-term settlement there, this study focuses on the many conceptual possibilities the prospect and process of Florida settlement raised, particularly for those living in other areas of the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sometimes this involved imagining how an individual or community might best take root on Florida’s shifting foundations. At other times, it involved the larger political and cultural task of envisioning unstable Florida’s incorporation into the United States, an event that many struggled to imagine long before Florida’s official annexation in 1821, and struggled to pursue thereafter, during Florida’s long Territorial period (1821–45). But whether personal, national, or imperial in scope, founding Florida challenged fundamental understandings of land and possession. Florida’s founding mattered well beyond its liquid landscape, exposing how some of the nation’s most politically significant concepts of self, nation, and empire rested on assumptions that were as contingent as its topography.
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Florida’s indeterminate, shifting ground contributed to the complex history of U.S. founding by raising large conceptual questions about root-taking that had wide-ranging political and cultural implications for a country seeking to expand over and beyond the continent. First and foremost, for a significant number of U.S. observers more familiar with stable, contiguous, solid ground, Florida proved difficult to imagine as land. This initial difficulty, in turn, frequently prompted a reconsideration of root-taking. And, across a vast time span and many forms of representation, Florida’s shifting ground gave rise to new ways of imagining roots, and thereby personal and national identity, that did not depend on solid ground.
This does not mean that Florida prompted all early observers to ponder the difficulty of settling there personally or incorporating the land and populations politically. After all, some people who reflected on Florida had no difficulty establishing themselves in familiar ways. In fact, a thriving plantation culture developed in certain parts of the panhandle (known then as “Middle Florida”) and the east coast near Jacksonville; during several decades of the antebellum period, these places looked no different from the rest of the U.S. South.3 Furthermore, some who wrote about Florida had no interest in settling there at all—indeed, this study includes many texts by people who had no plans to live in Florida or develop it as an extension of the United States.
Yet this study unearths a widely circulating, though largely unexamined, archive demonstrating that local Floridian features—such as saturated swamps, shifting shorelines, coral reefs, tiny keys, and various native and nonnative populations—frequently provoked people throughout North America to engage with pressing questions about place, personhood, and belonging that animated U.S. culture and literature during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This archive includes settlers’ guides, captivity narratives, military accounts, images such as woodcuts and lithographs, continental maps, natural histories, tales of adventure, and coastal and inland surveys, as well as works by canonical authors such as William Bartram, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Importantly, published texts provide nearly all the evidence for this study’s claims. A number of these texts were extremely popular among their original readers and viewers. Many were reprinted during the period, and many more proved valuable to Americans long after the date of initial publication. In fact a large number of texts about Florida that were published prior to the founding of the United States exerted significant influence in the new nation after the Revolution. Especially during the decades after the 1821 U.S. annexation of Florida, U.S. readers and writers relied on information about Florida from earlier accounts produced for and by naturalists, government officials, explorers, and prospective settlers during Florida’s First Spanish period (1565–1763), its British period (1763–83), and its Second Spanish period (1783–1821). Telling the story of what Florida settlement meant to those living in North America between Revolution and Reconstruction thus requires analysis of the large variety of materials published on both sides of the Revolution that circulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.4 These materials establish that Florida’s local land and populations were more than local in meaning.
Too frequently, Florida remains a topic confined to regional studies because of a persistent notion that it somehow had its own, separate, self-contained history that was only occasionally part of a more familiar national historical narrative or literary history.5 Yet Florida’s fundamental porosity and dispersal made it part of North American thinking about personal, national, and imperial identity even before there was a coherent nation. From the early sixteenth century onward, reflections on Florida capture the region’s resistance to containment, borders, and regulation, and its influence on other places and peoples on and beyond the continent. This historical context is the basis for Liquid Landscape’s central claim that the farthest southern reaches of North America already mattered to people in many other places on the continent at the moment of the founding of the United States, and thus that these seeming peripheries of early America should matter more centrally to our own scholarly understanding of early U.S. literature and culture.6
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The Florida known to North Americans at the time of the nation’s founding had already challenged European and American thinking about the very nature of land, boundaries, and foundations for centuries. From the first Spanish landing on its shores in the sixteenth century, Florida’s topographic, geographic, and demographic indeterminacy shaped maps, travel accounts, surveys, and other texts. Ponce de León, who landed near present-day St. Augustine and claimed “La Florida” for Spain in 1513, recorded his discovery of the “island” of Florida, while immediately subsequent explorers affirmed Florida’s attachment to the continent. These conflicting geographic descriptions confused European mapmakers: some chose to map Florida as an island, and others as a peninsula.
By about 1520 some of the initial geographic uncertainty about Florida’s location and contours gave way. But just as more maps began featuring Florida as a peninsula rather than an island, another spatial discrepancy emerged. Spain began to apply the name “La Florida” to an area that stretched far beyond the peninsula to include much of the present-day southeastern United