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Abstract

A hundred yards down a sandy road, erected before a Spanish moss covered live oak tree, is a bronze plaque that recounts a brief story ofJoseph M. White and his political career, and emphasizes his importance in the early history of the Florida Territory as a delegate to Congress. Briefly mentioned is the reason the plaque appears at this location-"[White] became the owner of this site as part of a 3,000 acre plantation," naming his cotton and sugar cane producing estate Casa Bianca. The plantation, about three miles southwest of the town of Monticello in Jefferson County, had a "fine old mansion of lordly portion" with a lawn of fifteen acres surrounding the house. This "handsome home of the old South" had large rooms which "carried out the South's idea of comfort and luxury." Interspersed among these romantic views that mythicize antebellum plantations are overstated and contradicting numbers representing those enslaved at Casa Bianca between its establishment in 1828 and its sale in 1860. At the upper end of the numeric spectrum is the claim by Ernest Dibble, Joseph White's biographer, who asserted that three hundred and fifty enslaved people lived at Casa Bianca on the eve of the Civil War. Another source stated that the plantation "was worked by three hundred negroes," while Margaret Anderson Uhler, a descendant of White's nephew, said two hundred and fifty slaves worked the Casa Bianca fields. The most realistic account of the number of enslaved people at the estate comes from an 1847 advertisement that circulated when White's widow put the plantation up for sale-it's quarters were "capable of accommodating one hundred negroes." Census and county tax records, along with the 1847 advertisement, refute the large numerical claims of other authors, as a few years after its establishment sixty enslaved people called Casa Bianca home, their numbers growing to one hundred and twenty-six individuals in the years before their emancipation.

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