Abstract
The great Civil War battlefields were far from Florida. Compared with the Wilderness campaign, the bloody slaughter of Pittsburg Landing or other major conflicts, even Olustee was a minor battle on the margin of the war. Yet in addition to keeping Florida in the Confederacy, it and other lesser encounters revealed social forces which were destined to alter the fabric of Florida’s society, and radically influence the future, of all the South. For with the occupying forces of the Union army came political and economic adventurers, the successors of a few earlier Yankee pioneers in Florida, and the predecessors of a wave of Northern enterprisers eagerly seeking their fortunes in the peninsula during the generation after the close of the war. Usually unsuccessful, and often ridiculous in their dishonesty, these carpetbaggers were encouraged to entertain visions of quick fortunes by a belief that they could arouse strong and widespread Northern interest in the economic development of the South. In that lay their significance: they were only a frothy crest, but they were none the less a part of a gradually swelling tide of Northern influence.
Recommended Citation
Smith, George Winston
(1948)
"Carpetbag Imperialism in Florida 1862-1868,"
Florida Historical Quarterly: Vol. 27:
No.
2, Article 7.
Available at:
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol27/iss2/7
