Finding Florida

by T.D. Allman

To explore Florida’s past is to make many discoveries. The first is how systematically “history” diverges from fact. The second is how deeply ingrained the role of violence is. The third, and certainly the least expected, is how extraordinarily decisive the tales of Washington Irving have been in sustaining false beliefs about Florida’s past.

The problem was that the Americans could not be satisfied with most of everything, or the best of everything. They wanted everything, even when taking everything destroyed whole peoples, along with (as we would note today) ecosystems and other species.

“It seems that the white people will not rest, nor suffer us to do so, till they have got all the property belonging to us.”

“The Seminoles were drawn at last into a collision with the United States by a chain of circumstances with which they had little to do, and the responsibility of which belongs not to them.”