African-American Population
By 1840 white Floridians were concentrating on developing the territory and gaining statehood. The population had reached 54,477 people, with African American slaves making up almost one-half of the population. Steamboat navigation was well established on the Apalachicola and St. Johns Rivers, and railroads were planned.
There were over 61,000 slaves in Florida in 1861. Their labor accounted for 85 percent of the state’s cotton production. Confederate authorities used slaves as teamsters to transport supplies and as laborers in salt works and fisheries. Many Florida slaves working in these coastal industries escaped to the relative safety of Union controlled enclaves. Beginning in 1862, Union military activity in East and West Florida encouraged slaves in plantation areas to flee their owners in search of freedom. Some worked on Union ships and more than a thousand enlisted as soldiers and sailors in the U.S. military.
Escaped and freed slaves provided Union commanders with valuable intelligence about Confederate troop movements and passed on news of Union advances to the men and women who remained enslaved in Confederate controlled Florida. Planter fears of slave uprisings increased as the war went on.
Read more about this topic: Florida In The American Civil War
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)