Florida: Difference between revisions

 

In 1850 after years of tension between the Spanish and Dutch, the two empires went to war. This was ended in a humiliating defeat for the Dutch as they lost land in the western united states to New Spain as well as loosing their gulf coast holdings to the newly independent South Tussenland Republic and parts to Spanish Florida. As the Spanish had already abolished slavery after the Latin American Spring of Nations many now freed Afro-Dutch in the now western Florida rejoiced and most of the ethnically Dutch population of the territory left to Tussenland. Immediately after the war the governor of Spanish Florida declared that all lands in the conquered territory to be crown lands and between 1752 and 1765 these lands were doled out to the colonial elites and those with political connections. This angered many of the former slaves in the area who were expecting that the Spanish crown to distribute the land in parcels to them. Between 1850 and 1900 a form of sharecropping developed in western Florida whereas eastern elites would allow poor farmers to farm the land in exchange to upwards of 50% of their harvest. This system had many negative effects such as keeping many poor farmers trapped in perpetual debt and poverty.