| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers: The Transformation of Florida. By John T. Foster Jr. and Sarah Whitmer Foster. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. xxii, 158 pp. $24.95, isbn 0-8130-1646-0.)

This slim, unabashedly (and refreshingly) celebratory contribution to the Florida History and Culture series offers a revisionist account of Reconstruction-era Florida. John T. Foster Jr. and Sarah Whitmer Foster's lively narrative of Yankee strangers in post–Civil War Florida contains some surprises for historians. 1

The Fosters locate the formation of modern Florida, "the world of tourists, northern immigrants, and citrus groves," in the decade immediately following the Civil War rather than in the 1880s. They focus on a small community of progressive northerners in north Florida that included Harriet Beecher Stowe and her brother, Charles Beecher. Stowe, who purchased an orange grove after the war, lent her considerable influence to promoting tourism and recruiting northern immigrants as investors in agricultural experimentation. John Swaim, a Methodist minister from New Jersey, hoping to attract northerners whose presence—and votes—could transform the state, became an indefatigable publicist for Florida. The New Yorker Chloe Merrick worked for the National Freedmen's Relief Association in the Jacksonville area from 1862 to 1866. She returned as the influential wife of Harrison Reed, the Wisconsin journalist elected governor in 1868. These central figures recruited friends and family. . . .

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