Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

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. This volume presents over seventy of Brown’s previously unpublished letters to illuminate day-to-day life in pre–Civil War Florida. Brown’s personal and business correspondence narrates his daily activities and his views on politics, labor practices, slavery, fundamentalist religion, and local gossip. Having founded a successful mercantile establishment in Newnansville (a former county seat of Alachua County), 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. 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. He also bartered with locals and mingled with the judges, lawyers, and politicians of Alachua County. 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. Brown’s letters offer the first social and economic history of one of the most important yet little-known frontiers in the antebellum South.

James M. Denham

James M. Denham is Professor of History and Director of the Lawton M. Chiles Jr. Center for Florida History at Florida Southern College. A specialist in Southern, Florida, and criminal justice and legal history, Denham received his Ph.D. degree from Florida State University. He is the author of seven books including, Florida Founder William P. DuVal: Frontier Bon Vivant
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015). An award-winning author and speaker, Denham has lectured widely throughout the state for the Florida Humanities Council and other organizations.

Keith L. Huneycutt

Keith L. Huneycutt, Professor of English at Florida Southern College, earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His publications include a book co-authored with James M. Denham, Echoes from a Distant Frontier: The Brown Sisters’ Correspondence from Antebellum Florida, and various articles on Florida literature, history, and culture. A former president of the Florida College English Association, he was awarded that organization’s Distinguished Colleague Award in 2011. He currently serves on the board of trustees for the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society.