“No Rights That White Men Were Bound to Respect:” Reconstruction and Political Violence in Jackson County, Florida Main Menu

Gaining the Franchise

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In the Antebellum South, Florida had some of the most highly restrictive laws surrounding free blacks and enslaved people in the United States, but with emancipation and the Fifteenth amendment, black men gained first-class citizenship and the right to vote. For the first time, African American men had a political voice. With the added support of federal forces like the Freedmen’s Bureau, African Americans in Florida could get an education, and they finally had opportunities for landownership. Furthermore, organizations, schools, and churches in their communities politically organized individuals and taught them how to be citizens.
 
Voting and participating in politics were the right and privilege of these new citizens, and they became an important marker of equality. In Jackson County, newly emancipated blacks formed the voting majority of the population. Among the voting population of 2100 people who were registered to vote, voting African Americans numbered between 1200 and 1400, while whites were divided between two hundred white republicans and about seven hundred democrats. With the power of the vote, African American men were able to exercise their rights as citizens. Not only were African Americans free, but by claiming citizenship through the franchise, black men were also claiming equality with white men, some of whom had enslaved them only a few years before.
 
Emanuel Fortune lost no time in exercising his newly found right to vote. Though he described himself as a “common laborer, not much more,” Fortune emerged out of Jackson County as the most enduring political voice of Reconstruction-era Jackson County. Having received a marginal amount of education and training in skilled trades, Fortune set up shop as a tanner and cobbler, serving people throughout the community. Despite his humble protestations, he was one of the few indigenous black leaders in Florida during Reconstruction. Along with other African American leaders like Josiah T. Walls and Jonathan Gibbs, Fortune’s role in the Reconstruction politics of Florida would prove invaluable. In 1868, Fortune was a part of the constitutional convention to rejoin Florida with the Union, and that same year, he was voted into the state legislature. Along with northern Republican politicians, he began a Freedmen’s school to teach other black citizens basic education like reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with civic duties.

This page has paths:

  1. Introduction: Understanding Jackson County, Florida, from 1865-1871 Annemarie Nichols