Figure 2. Emanuel Bowen, An Accurate Map of North America (1755), detail. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
American Husbandry (1775), published in London “By an American” and purporting to offer objective evaluations of each American colony’s agricultural capacity, is an especially memorable example of a popular text that casts Florida as a hopeless deviation from the rest of North America in its total resistance to improvement.9 The author blithely approves of New England: “cultivated, inclosed, and cheerful,” the place so greatly resembles Old England that, “In the best cultivated parts of it, you would not … know … that you were from home” (46). “The Floridas,” however, are unique, even among southern colonies, for their hostility to the transformative power of the plow. All southern colonies have some section of uncultivable land, typically in the form of a “flat sandy coast, full of swamps and marshes.” Florida, however, is “nothing else but the flat sandy country”; it is all “maritime”—all coast (363–64). There is no “back country” to cultivate, no “proper soil” to enclose and plant with the useful crops that other colonies produce (364, 365). And Florida’s geography enhances its fruitlessness: because Florida both “extends much to the south of any of our other colonies” and “forms a peninsula” that juts into the sea, “The rains … are almost incessant,” making it “very unhealthy” indeed (363). “Fact, and not opinion,” declares that Floridian soil is “such as no person would move to, from the worst of our colonies, in order to cultivate” (365). In Florida the plain facts of topography and geography combine, as they do nowhere else in the actual or prospective American colonies, to preclude cultivation, the basis of settler imperialism. At best, Florida may serve England as an outpost of empire where the “proper accommodations for shipping” may be stored; but “as to planting, none should be encouraged” (373). This description, though probably at least partly politically motivated, nonetheless accurately conveys a widespread British perception of Florida as a tropical backwater, topographically and geographically unfit for British citizens.10
Figure 3. Emanuel Bowen, An Accurate Map of North America (1772), detail. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
Emanuel Bowen’s maps and American Husbandry concisely capture both sides of a major debate about Floridian ground in the wake of Great Britain’s acquisition of Florida from Spain: while some British observers championed the peninsula’s capacity for improvement, others denigrated it as hopelessly retrograde. Yet it is important to recognize that a common perspective on land underpins and motivates both ways of responding to Florida: defenders and deniers of Florida’s potential for cultivation alike idealize solid, stable, contiguous land as the only acceptable basis of a settler empire. This is not surprising, considering the ideologies of landed possession that were most familiar during the eighteenth century.
Some of the period’s most highly regarded philosophical discussions of property and possession held that unvarying, solid, and divisible ground necessarily stabilized a polity, for such ground was the only kind that could be “subdued” and “improved,” acts that were critical to demonstrating and sustaining possession. An especially influential formulation of this idea may be found in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), in which Locke famously declares that “Whatsoever then [man] removes out of the state that nature hath provided … he hath mixed his labour with … and thereby makes it his property.”11 Through labor we “inclose [property] from the common,” for otherwise land would remain as subject to ingress and egress as the sea, “that great and still remaining common of mankind.”12 Drawing on Locke, philosophers of the Enlightenment such as David Hume also rule out the possibility of possessing the sea, which is “incapable of becoming the property of any nation” because we cannot “form any … distinct relation with it, as may be the foundation of property.”13 Locke, Hume, and other well-known philosophers of landed possession prioritize subdivision, demarcation, and enclosure, pursuits that would be impossible in the absence of solid ground.
Within a context of thinking about land as the opposite of sea, which by nature prevents the “distinct relation” that permits property, it is no wonder that fluid ground appears inimical to settler imperialism: this project depends on a genealogy of land and settlement that excluded shifting foundations. It is instructive to keep this fact in mind as we read late eighteenth-century reflections on North American ground, particularly in texts that circulated widely in North America before, during, and after the Revolution. At the earliest moments of the founding of the United States, readers across North America were steeped in an intellectual tradition that could not accommodate unfirm ground. For example, in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James envisions British North America as a polity of autonomous and independent yeomen achieving “ample subsistence” by dividing and laboring on the land.14 Letters is an idealized version of the agrarianism Jefferson espouses in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), for Jefferson’s own notion of the emergent United States as an expanding “empire of liberty” involves more mobility, exchange, and commerce than Farmer James endorses; yet even visions of a republic only partly sustained by small farmers still require a substantial amount of cultivable ground.15 While of course North Americans always debated the importance and role of agriculture in the ideal political economy, it is safe to say that, well into the nineteenth century, unvarying, solid, divisible ground remained important to the political “stability” of the republic at large.16
This is not to say that North Americans were unfamiliar with ways to improve and profit from watery land. After all, roughly 41.3 million acres of wetland stretched from New England to Georgia, and North American colonists could easily find instructions for enclosing and draining swamps, such as those in Book III of Thomas Hale’s Compleat Body of Husbandry (1756).17 Southeastern swamps in particular provided resources including beaver and timber, and proved ideal ground for rice cultivation. Many swamps and wetlands were “redeemed”: some of the earliest European settlers of North America transformed wetlands through agriculture, and tidewater planters learned to use tidal ebbs and flows to drain and irrigate fields.18 Even surveying the swamp was sometimes possible, at least if we believe William Byrd of Westover, who conducted a party of surveyors through the Great Dismal in 1728 in order to mark the colonial boundary between Virginia and North Carolina. Although Byrd declares that “we found the ground moist and trembling under our feet like a quagmire,” and that “every step made a deep impression, which was instantly filled with water,” he reports that his surveyors carried the surveying chain “right forward, without suffering themselves to be turned out of the way by any obstacle whatever,” successfully completing what Byrd has no trouble imagining as a line that “shall hereafter stand as the true boundary.”19
Yet these instances of swamp survey and cultivation took place on parts of the continent that, for all their fluidity, were more solid than most of Florida. We need only turn to the environmental history of the Everglades to perceive that eighteenth-century British and North American impressions of Florida as a liquid landscape, differing fundamentally from the rest of the continent, are based in reality. More than half of the peninsula’s 20.3 million acres was once swampland.20 While twentieth- and twenty-first-century developers have drained and filled in significant swaths of South Florida, prior to reclamation efforts the Everglades more or less began where water “overspilled [Lake Okeechobee’s]