Hardy Jackson’s Alabama

The Florida Panhandle: What might have been

Look at a map. ship, for commerce to and from the region flowed north and south,

It doesn’t take a geographer to see how the region known as not east and west. Adding the Florida folks to Alabama would the “Florida Panhandle” could and should be South Alabama. increase the size of Alabama’s congressional delegation, which in

Well, it almost was. turn could do a better job of looking after West Florida’s coastal in-

Back in January 1901, representatives from the seven Florida terests. Pensacola especially liked this, for once the annexation was counties between the Apalachicola and Perdido Rivers met in Jack- complete, Alabama’s steel and iron industries would make good sonville, Florida, “for the purpose of considering ways and means use of that city’s harbor. of effecting the transfer of (that) territory” to Alabama. The article also noted that there were those in East Florida who

The whole thing was reported in the Atlanta Constitution, which would be happy enough to let the Panhandle go, evidence of a feelnoted that if secession and annexation took place, some 194,000 ing that fewer Alabamians would mean a better Florida – an early Floridians would become Alabamians. That would give Alabama a example of the Sunshine State’s look-down-the-nose-at-Alabama population of 1,928,000, while Florida, or what was left of it, would attitude that became more pronounced as time went on. have been reduced to a paltry 434,165. On top of that, by adding There was also talk that if the Panhandle was sent packing, then the Panhandle’s 10,000 square miles to Alabama, it would have be- the rest of Florida could move the capital out of Tallahassee – “a come the largest, territory-wise, east of the Mississippi! small town and not likely to become a large one” – to a more cen-

Apparently sentiment for such a move had been growing in West tral, more promising location. Florida. A few years earlier, a legislator from Escambia County had Meanwhile Alabama interests, aware of the prize that might be drawn up a bill that would allow Panhandle residents to vote on theirs, persuaded their legislature to make “an appropriation for the issue, but East Florida interests killed the plan. Yet the dream the purpose of working up sentiment in the territory affected in did not die. Shortly before the Jacksonville meeting, the Young favor of annexation” – nothing like fishing in troubled waters. Men’s Business League of Pensacola passed a resolution favoring Then what happened? annexation and other groups were joining them. Nothing.

Pro-annexation arguments were simple enough. West Florida Instead of using energy and influence to annex the Panhandle, had been settled by Alabamians, so family and cultural ties be- and all that came with it, Alabama leaders devoted energy and intween the two were strong. Trade connections reinforced this kin- fluence to something else. And today we are left to wonder what might have been.

Harvey H. (Hardy) Jackson is Professor Emeritus at Jacksonville State University. He can be reached at hhjackson43@gmail.com.

Illustration by Dennis Auth

(Ed. note: For an entertaining look at an insider’s history of the Florida-Alabama coast, we recommend Hardy Jackson’s The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera, 2012, University of Georgia Press.)