Tallahassee gets no free pass for slavery

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Gerald Ensley
| TLH review

(This column originally published in the Tallahassee Democrat on February 19, 2012.)

I recently wrote a story about the origins of Bannerman Road. It was named after the family of Charles Bannerman, a North Carolina planter who moved to Tallahassee in the 1830s.

The story angered one reader, who said I hadn’t given the whole story: Charles Bannerman was one of the largest slaveholders in Tallahassee before the Civil War.

While the story didn’t deal with such issues, it does remind us of two things: Slavery is still important. And in Leon County, there was a lot of slavery.

“It was a hotbed of slavery,” said historian Larry Rivers. “Tallahassee was the center of the slave trade.”

Rivers is the former Florida A&M professor who has been president of his alma mater, Fort Valley (Ga.) State University, since 2006. His 2000 book, “Slavery in Florida,” is considered the seminal text on the subject and is one of the best-selling books ever published by the University of Florida Press. Rivers’ latest book, “Runaways and Rebels. Slave Resistance in 19th Century Florida,” will be published in May by the prestigious University of Illinois Press.

Most people don’t associate Florida with slavery. They think of cotton plantations in Georgia and South Carolina or tobacco plantations in Virginia and North Carolina.

Even fewer people associate slavery with Tallahassee. They see Tallahassee as a historically sleepy town, founded for government and education.

But it’s worth remembering the reality: Florida was just as much a slave state as the 11 states of the Confederacy that seceded from the Union over the issue of slavery (regardless of what apologists want to believe). And Tallahassee, founded in 1824, was the epicenter of slavery in Florida.

As the capital of the new territory and the largest population center in fertile central Florida, Tallahassee attracted planters from other southern states seeking new opportunities. They had exhausted the soil in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. So they flocked to central Florida to buy land for $1 an acre and start over—with plantations that relied on large numbers of slaves.

In 1830, planters with 20 or more slaves made up 14 percent of Leon County’s population. By 1860, they were 21 percent of the population. Slaveholders included such historical figures as Richard Keith Call, Benjamin Chaires, William Bloxham, and Francis Eppes, each of whom owned anywhere from 30 (Bloxham) to 120 slaves (Call).

In fact, in 1860 Leon County had 2,197 white people—and 8,200 black slaves. And it would be the 1950 census before whites outnumbered blacks in Leon County.

“Florida has always tried to present this sunny image to attract new settlers; we didn’t want to face the darker aspects of our history,” said historian Canter Brown. “Yet Florida was founded to accommodate the development of the cotton plantations and the slaves who worked on them. And Tallahassee was at the heart of that.”

Often overlooked was the slave trade. Slaveholders routinely rented their slaves out as laborers to other slaveholders and to traders or farmers who needed temporary labor. They also sold slaves: in 1830, a slave sold for $500 to $1,000. By 1860, they were selling for as much as $3,000—the equivalent of a fancy car today.

“Tallahassee was the equivalent of New Orleans or Richmond or Washington, D.C., in the slave trade,” Rivers said. “Tallahassee was the place you went to conduct government business, talk about what was happening in the country, and buy a slave.”

One of the persistent debates about slavery concerns the treatment of slaves.

Brown concedes that slaves on the Florida coast and peninsula may have suffered less than others because the threat of escape and associated loss of property was more real.

“We’re talking about slaves running away,” Brown said. “But slaves (on the coast) often just paddled away or got on a ship. If you treated your slave badly (in those locations), chances are you weren’t going to live long there.”

In central Florida, where escape was more difficult, slave owners may not have been so kind. Rivers is reluctant to generalize about the treatment of slaves, since there is little documentation of slaves, most of whom could not read or write. He believes that treatment varied from slave owner to slave owner.

Yet it is not the treatment of slaves that matters today. Rather, it is the long existence of slavery that continues to affect us. To put it bluntly, there are still white people who feel superior to black people because of the conditions in which we once degraded black people—during and after slavery.

“Slavery is still important because vestiges of the institution are still felt,” Rivers said. “It’s the whole opportunity structure. We still have people who believe that there are certain positions in society that blacks don’t need to apply for, don’t need to fill.

“Of course, it’s gotten better. But we still have cases of racism. I think we would have a much more colorblind society today if slavery hadn’t existed in this country.”

Including Tallahassee.

Gerald Ensley was a reporter and columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat from 1980 until his retirement in 2015. He died of a stroke in 2018. The Tallahassee Democrat will publish columns chronicling Tallahassee history from Ensley’s vast archives every Sunday through 2024 in the Opinion section as part of the TLH 200: Gerald Ensley Memorial Bicentennial Project.

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