“The Letters of George Long Brown” – Season 1, Episode 6

George Long Brown was no Harriet Beecher Stowe. I mean, he bought slaves when he settled in Florida after emigrating from New England, and Stowe was a fervent abolitionist. But like her, he left us a document of Florida frontier life in the 1800s – and Newnansville, Florida, was indeed frontier back then. I’m joined by Keith Huneycutt, professor of English at Florida Southern College and editor of The Letters of George Long Brown, to discuss the book and Brown’s life.

“There is a theme that runs through these letters, and it is basically a man adapting to his new environment.”

Keith Huneycutt

Further Reading

• Buy “The Letters of George Long Brown” from University Press of Florida

Episode Transcript

Christopher Nank: People moved to Florida from the Northeast U.S. even in the early 1800s, when a lot of the state was un-air conditioned, raw wilderness and embroiled in the Seminole Wars and even financial success couldn’t protect you from raids or disease. George Long Brown, brother of artist, men of Alette Brown left us a record of those harsh years in a trove of letters. He wrote to his siblings while establishing himself in Florida has transplanted northerner. Join me, Christopher Nick, on this episode, Florida book club, as I discussed Brown’s life, keep Honeycutt professor of English at Florida. Southern college was curated and compiled bronze letters from the Florida frontier, the 1840s and fifties. I’m here with Keith Honeycutt, professor of English at Florida Southern College and co-editor of The Letters of George Long Brown, published in 2019 by the university of Florida press. He’s also the author of the man in George Brown’s letters, masculinity on the Florida frontier published in the 2020 issue of journalist sort of literature. Welcome Keith.

Keith Huneycutt: Oh, thank you, Chris. Glad to be here.

CN: So first off, tell us about George Long Brown. Like if there’s a capsule biography, I mean, was he famous for anything or is it just because so many of his letters exist that he gives us kind of a window into this time and place?

KH: No, he was not famous. Um, he’s not famous at all. The closest to fame that anybody in his family achieved was his brother, man of a layer, the oldest of his, siblings and man of lit, uh, was a pretty well-known artist in Utica, New York. And he worked with Currier of Currier and Ives. So that’s about as famous as any of them were, but no he’s just sort of a regular guy. He moved to Florida from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1832. He was 16 years old. His parents had died. His mother lived up until about that time. His father died when he was just two. His older siblings, several of them had moved to Florida. And so, he left Portsmouth, went to Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Charleston, and worked for various businesses on his way down and finally joined them in 1840. So he was unremarkable, um, to most of the people who knew that knew him at the time. So when he got to Florida, uh, he met his sister Corina and Ellen in a place called Newnansville. Ellen, um, was the younger of the two. She ended up in 1840 marrying a captain, or at the time he was a Lieutenant James Anderson in the U S army station at Fort Harley, I believe near Newnansville, and Corina, the older sister married Edward Aldrich, who was a physician who worked with the army. And so, um, they invited George to come and work with them and an older brother, Charles who died almost immediately after George got there. And so George went into business with Edward, uh, he took the place of Charles, basically. So, so that’s how you got established in Florida. So the sisters, as I say, I’ve moved to a Mandarin in 1835, uh, to join their aunt Delia who lived there, who married a rich planter basically. And then, um, they moved around to various places, including St. Augustine, Jacksonville, then Newnansville and later on Pensacola, Key West, almost every every settled place in Florida. Almost every place where people could live in Florida, they lived. But once he got to Florida, he just settled right in at Noonan’s Phil. And he married, um, a woman named Matilda Stewart at 1850. Uh, she was the daughter of, um, rich plantation owners. Um, and so he got quite a bit of, uh, wealth and status for marrying her. They had several children, he died in 1857 on a business trip to Charleston.

CN: Would you say that his life was in any way, typical of most Southern white men at that time? I mean, of his class?

KH: Well, he was not typical in, in many ways. First of all, since he was a transplanted Yankee, as he called himself, he had a different background for most of the people that he encountered though. Um, my historian colleague, like denim tells me that there were quite a few Yankees who moved to Florida at the time to set up businesses. So in that sense, he wasn’t unusual, but in his community, he would have been a different sort of person for most of those that he met. He even would have had a different accent from the local people. Um, but he was typical and that he accepted things as they were around him. He seemed to have gotten along with everybody, um, as a business person he dealt with and met just about everybody in the area and everybody passing through. So he was typical in a lot of ways. He accepted community values though. Sometimes in his letters, he makes fun of, um, the crackers as the local people call themselves. And eventually he called them and himself, um, just sort of in fun, but yeah, he got, he got along with everybody and everybody apparently liked him and he fit right in, so, so strange sort, but he did up becoming more like the people that surrounded him.

CN: I would say, I guess that night I would ask what, what, what is interesting to you about his life? Like what was like maybe the most intriguing or notable thing that you’ve learned from studying his letters or from, or what, what interested you in, in his life or in these letters?

KH: Okay. Well, the most intriguing thing, I guess at first, was that he did adapt so quickly and easily to his surroundings. Um, I mean, he was a pretty well bred northerner with, um, Northern outlooks on things like masculinity. Um, sort of the masculine achiever attitude, uh, was pretty, pretty strong in him. He was a hard worker and he defined himself by his business achievements. So that came down South with him, but sort of the laid back relaxed, put your feet up on the stool and sit back and talk to your pet parakeets and raccoons, that sort of attitude, um, did, uh, ease its way into his life. I would say, as he, as he stayed longer, longer, I think he got more and more relaxed or he seemed to be, and I associate ease and relaxation with a Southern style, as opposed to a, um, a Yankee business go get him sort of attitude that he probably brought with him from that background that he had.

CN: I mean, I can’t even imagine, like we talk about transplants and snowbirds and people relocating here today, but I mean, the distinction must have been jarring back then.

KH: Um, yeah, cause he, he went from, um, those pretty heavily populated Northern cities, um, which I think we could say were, uh, cultured, sophisticated civilized places to the Florida frontier. Um, when he got there in 1840, it was like the second year of the second seminal war. So, uh, I mean he was on the frontier. Uh, there were four army forts that surrounded Noonan’s Vil. Um, they were active. Um, the, the troops went through Noonans, but that actually one of the forks wasn’t Nunez full. They went through all the time. Um, he and Edward had a lot of contact with them. Uh, so whatever roughness, um, might’ve been associated with army life, he saw a lot of that. Um, skirmishes with Seminoles took place all the time. He writes about those in his letters, his sisters write about them and they just sort of take it in stride. You know, this is what happens. There are skirmishes out in the woods nearby people get shot and houses get burned and we just wake up and go to work in the morning. So it was a different sort of place from, from new, from New York where he spent a little time, Boston, Philadelphia, even Charleston, which was, you know, it had that, um, veneer that Southern cultural veneer on it, along with the Seminoles and the soldiers who were there to harass and chase them and fight them and kill them if they could, there were some rough locals. Um, he reports things like, um, shootings, hangings, um, drunken, brawls, uh, stuff like that. One of his, um, brothers in law, uh, in his wife’s brothers was shot to death and, um, um, uh, gun gunfight and street, apparently just up the road from his store. So there was a lot going on that was not like sophisticated Eastern seaboard and Northern life at all. Wow. To follow that up. Um, is, is that a sense that you get from the letters, like, do you think, like what would a casual reader, would they get a picture of what it was like to live in the Florida frontier at this time from reading the letters? Yeah. Well, I think that’s the most interesting thing about, um, the letters is it’s such an alien place. Um, you know, before I got into this project with, with Mike denim ages ago, I had no idea that there was a Florida frontier. I mean, I’m, I’m, I’m from North Carolina. Uh, I didn’t know much about Florida. It was just a territory when George got here. So it was a wild place. Um, but reading these letters, you get the sense that there was a real community of, of people. Um, George knew most of the, well, most of the adults, most of the white adults anyway, there were, there were a lot of enslaved people also, but in 1840, all of Florida had 54,000 white people, 25,000 enslaved persons. Yeah. Most of the inhabited land was above, um, like a pot. So there was less of Florida to know. Um, so, and fewer people and George, same to know just about everybody through, through his business dealings, through his sisters who were really sociable people. Um, and through his physician brother-in-law and his brother-in-law military soldier, soldier with the army, he knew all the people who were notable in Florida. So, so you get a sense of what Florida was like from his dealings, with these people all over the state and you get a good sense of what Noonan’s Phil was and how different it was from the more settled places like St Augustine’s, especially which that’s on the East coast and then where he is. Um, George is living in a log cabin basically. So it’s just, it’s quite a different place. Um, and that’s what I’ll most appreciated and enjoyed about the book was just, um, getting the experience of what it was like to live there. Uh, the most surprising thing in the book, I’m not going to tell you all about it, but is, was a George’s manner of death. That, to me, that was the only really shocking thing was to find out how he died. And I’ll tell you that. Yeah, well, you gotta read the book to get that, but it’s, it’s full of interesting details. His letters are, you know, what’s the, as someone in his station, his position where he lived, like, what’s the greatest level of comfort you could obtain, you know, as a slave owning white male, even, you know, like given there’s no electricity, no cars, no mass transit, no plumbing.

CN: It’s I, you know, and that was something I found myself wondering about, like, why would you know, why would an area like that appeal to someone, you know, that attained his, you know, relative station.

KH: Yeah. It’s hard to figure. Um, he doesn’t give us a lot of details about his personal living conditions. Mike and I’ve tried to figure that out. Did he live in the back of the store? What, you know, which was basically a log cabin store. Um, did he have a bachelors? He describes his bachelors establishment, but he doesn’t say much about it. He had a roommate before he got married. Uh, but it sounds like really primitive conditions, not many luxuries. And then when he met Matilda Stewart, um, and, uh, would travel to her plantation, I imagined that he saw a really high, much higher level of comfort, um, in the big house where they would have lived. They were the wealthiest people in whatever the County is that’s North of that was North of Alachua County. They lived at a place called Liberty bluff, which was about 40 miles North of Newnansville. So, uh, it wouldn’t have been, um, very luxurious ever for him.

CN: One thing I was curious about was like, just about the process of, of, of archiving going through the letters, editing the book. I mean, what was that like, I know that’s kind of switching gears to something more procedural, but I mean, like having all this revealed to you and then getting that and deciding, you know, how you were going to organize and arrange them.

KH: So let me put George’s letters in context in our book. I think that we ended up with around 70 some letters that were, we either, um, edited and published in their entirety somewhere, something like that, um, or large pieces of them, they’re part of a family collection of letters around 900 that have been saved and passed down through the family. Most of them are at, um, the United States military Academy at West point New York. Um, and then, um, about 200 of them are at the big Cyprus Seminole reservation in their archives, uh, which, which we only recently discovered. So what happened, um, was that Mike denim, my historian colleague was at West point, uh, just, he was on some other military history project that he was working on, uh, and was just messing around the archives. The archivist said, Hey, you’re from Florida. Let me show you something. And we have, and so he pulled out this box of letters, which Mike was somehow familiar with from his graduate research, where he had seen some transcripts, some photographs of some photocopies, and then they disappeared because at one time they were in Gainesville, uh, us and, um, it locked away in a safe, this is such a long story and I’m really keeping it short. That’s fine. Okay. So, um, so the guy at, um, West point showed him these and he just, he started copying them and then he hired a photographer to come in and start taking a full permission to take pictures of as many as he could. And so he brought him to me and said, look, I need some help editing these. Do you want, you want to help me out? And I said, no, there’s no way I’m not getting involved in this mess. And then he showed me a few of the letters that said, okay, I’ll do this. This looks really good. So that’s how it started. That’s the short version. Um, but the process of, um, going from manuscripts to the book, um, is pretty long. Uh, I had to go back to West point and take another look at some of the letters that didn’t come through very well. We’re talking about in the 1990s, said the technology was much inferior to what it is now. And, um, took a lot of notes, uh, filled in some gaps, uh, took some photographs of letters that didn’t come through clearly. So we had to get them all and it started just to ranging the raw material that we had and then trying to figure out what we wanted to do. And we decided to focus on Corina and Ellen, the two sisters who lived in Florida because Mike said, look, you know, I’m a Florida historian. I can put this stuff in context. And I say, well, heck yeah, let’s do that. Let’s just talk about them because they spent so much time here. And then we started noticing George. Uh, they started referring to him and some of his letters were in the mix. And we said, you know what, let’s save these letters. Maybe later we can do something with this. So we did their book first. Um, and then, so back to the letters, what you do, or what we did is we got, um, they weren’t even a digital form at first. They were on this old micro forms, that microfilm stuff that people used to use.

CN: Oh, I did a lot of my doctoral research looking through old 1920s issues of Colliers.

KH: And I’m not talking about students. All right. So it’ll have to describe this stuff to you.

CN: It was fun. It was kind of neat. It’s like going back in time, almost looking at the ads.

KH: Oh yeah. It’s so much fun, but, and there’s a lot of fun involved in those. So we had to make certain that we had the manuscripts, uh, in the best condition that we could get them best photocopies of them. Um, because of course we couldn’t bring them back from West point, you know, we couldn’t carry them back. Uh, and, and then Mike also went and talked to some of the family members to get permission to do this, um, you know, to edit them and make a book out of them. And they were just wonderful. They were so helpful and gave us so much information and showed us some goodies that we never would have found on our own, like some, some photographs. Uh, so the Garrett types of, um, James Anderson, Ellen’s husband, um, plates and knives and forks and spoons, and just a little family, uh, memorabilia that, you know, really sort of brought them to life. So anyway, after, after we had the manuscripts, we started transcribing them. Uh, and that was fun. That was satisfying. Uh, but at times it was really frustrating. And at other times it was impossible. Uh, there were a few places where passages have been snipped out, you know, obviously some really juicy ones were afraid and yeah, that’s what we’d lost. Uh, there were others that were deteriorated. Um, there would be like on the fold of a letter and, you know, we could not work them out or they’re just chipped off. And even though it was high quality paper acid free, it just under the conditions of going from a front humid, hot frontier, Florida to Paris, France, to Rome, to, um, you, to New York. These are places where their older brother lived the artists. And so they would send them overseas to him. And then they, he saved them and they came back to the States and all so that we were able to have any letters at all, is a miracle in that they were in such good condition. Also is the second miracle. So we would do our best transcribing them. Um, Mike and I were always, both of us had to look at every letter to make certain, we would compare to make sure that we agreed on stuff. Sometimes we would call in other people to get a third or fourth opinion. And then when it got worse, we would just settle. Well, no ellipsis, you know, can’t, can’t decide for this, but, uh, we, we spent a lot of time doing that. So that’s, that’s part of the process. So then we have good, uh, type scripts of, um, all of the ones that we want to use and we keep them all in separate files. And then we started trying to figure how we were going to organize them into a coherent units. And, uh, we kind of settled on a chronological order that we felt well, that’s the easiest probably, and is most coherent, um, easiest to follow. And then we’ll try to put that in context and we’ll select the ones that we think are going to be, um, most representative of what was going on in their lives. That was what the sister same process. When we finally got around to George, we, we did that first book. I think it was 2004 or five. And then we let George to sit for a number of years cause we couldn’t, um, couldn’t come up with a unifying theme to, for the book. And we just weren’t sure if we had enough letters and then we found some more letters which helped us fill that out. So that’s how we got it into the book. And by the way, the fame, I guess, was, um, George Brown as, um, a transplanted Yankee doing business in an alien Southern territory. And, uh, it was alien to him and his, his way of life,

CN: Hey, I can relate. I moved to Tallahassee in 1998 from Ohio. And that seemed like an alien experience coming from, living in Ohio my whole life. So yeah, I can only imagine, like I said earlier, how dissonant that experience must have been to someone.

KH: You moved to Tallahassee. Right? Yeah, well you didn’t move to Newnansville.

CN: You kind of answered some of my other like things I want to talk about like what this would offer to readers, you know, this, or I know that you’ve also, as you’ve already mentioned edited the sister’s letters too, and then combine those into a book. And, you know, I was just curious, like, what would that, especially to like, non-academic readers, you know, I’m, I’m curious like what they might get out of it, you know, just a lot of historical curiosity and things like that. Some people just like reading history, you know, and so that’s enough, but there is a story, um, in there there’s a narrative thread that runs through all of the letters and it’s basically a, um, a man adapting to his new environment. It’s just, it was so different from what he was accustomed to. And to me, it’s just kind of fascinating to watch him become a southerner in so many ways.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Um, there, you know, there’s some things in there, he has some bad character flaws, which I guess makes him human. The, the one that we’ve taught you and I’ve talked about before, you know, it’s the slavery, which I still have a hard time understanding how he could go along with it and take part in it. But that was the community standard. Um, that was the way men did things back then and women too. Uh, and I think that as a business person, he probably thought, well, this is how things are here. And if I’m going to compete with other people, this free labor market is something I have to take advantage of. So, so he did. And, um, him eventually he owned seven owned imprint C7 in, in quotation marks, seven people. And, um, you know, that we know of that weren’t as records and, uh, apparently didn’t see any, uh, moral contradiction between his upbringing and his current way of, um, dealing with people.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
So that’s a character flaw, a big one. Um, and then, uh, on the other hand, he’s really a sort of an attractive person. He’s a very generous kind and loving with his sisters and his, his wife and his children. Um, he’s witty at times, uh, for someone who died at age 40, he shows a lot of wisdom. He seems really older than he was, but I think it’s his relationship with his sisters that is the most intriguing thing about him, that they were such a tight family, they seem so close. Um, and when, uh, when Helen, when Ellen’s husband, James was killed in the Mexican war, he just went out of his way to help take care of her and her family. Yeah. I remember reading about that in the article. Yeah. So, so he had plenty of good things going for him. Um, but you know, that one bad thing, uh, I just had a hard time dealing with that, but I mean, at one point I thought, do we really want to, you know, sort of, I’m not, I wouldn’t say glorify, but, um, elevate or elevate or validate this, this man who was, uh, you know, a slave owner, but that’s, I guess, part of Southern history and you have to sort of face it.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Uh, so this is the past, let’s learn from our mistakes. So, you know, we went ahead with, with that, but, um, many other things about him, uh, in his community are interesting. He writes about the local people, um, in an almost, um, Marjorie Cunanan, Rawlings methods of, uh, you know, taking down observations of, um, again, what he called crackers, what they called themselves, um, and sort of having fun and laughing at them. I think at times with him, when he writes to his brother and says, well, here I am, I’m finally a Cracker and describes his, you know, his settlements, uh, his surroundings says, yeah, this is what I’ve become. And I’m kind of satisfied with it. So there’s a story there. Yeah. And as you put it, the article from journal Florida literature, uh, that based on the letters immigrating to Florida, sadly degraded this man’s cat, which I thought was a terrific line. Good way of doing that. So, uh, yeah. Well, thank you for talking with us about, uh, towards long Brown and the book, the letters of George Long Brown it’s available from a university press of Florida. And of course, you know, mention the, uh, we, we should mention that. Uh, you’ve also, co-edited the sister’s letters as well. So he funny cut. Thank you for coming aboard. You’re now a member of the Florida book club. Thank you very much, Chris. Thanks for inviting me. And I enjoyed our conversation.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Thanks for attending this meeting of the Florida book. I hope you enjoyed our conversations about this man whose letters paint interesting portrait of being a white middle-class and organ transplant in front of your Florida. There’s a link to purchase the boat from the university press of Florida on our website, and I’ll discuss it with anyone who cares to contact me with any comments reviews of their own suggestions or rebuts. Remember to support your local independent bookstores in public libraries. See you at the next meeting.