According to Cushing, the Calusa eventually built mounds in Florida, and thereafter throughout much of North America, for the same reason that they originally built pile-dwellings on the sea: they needed to maintain stability on radically unstable foundations. Cushing’s “theory of the origin of mound-building” holds that the mounds were built by the descendants of Indians living in “sea environments” to the “far south” of the continent. These Indians transmitted “ancestral ideas of habitation … down from generation to generation, and so, slowly up into the land” (81, 74). Over time, as the Indians moved north to inland Florida, they found that mounds suited Florida’s “peculiarly unstable” ground, which Cushing describes as “soluble,” “pervious limestone” that is “subject to undermining by … corrosive” rain and rivers; pocketed with sinkholes that “[fall] in” to form deep lakes and morasses; threaded by “subterranean rivers”; and ravaged by “the hurricane” that, “in a land so broken and low,” causes “continuous change of shore-line” (67).
But the mound-builders eventually moved farther north than Florida. For “the great and regular mounds and other earth-works occurring in the lowlands of our Southern and Middle Western States, and celebrated as the remains of the so-called mound-builders, may likewise also be traced … to a similar beginning in some seashore and marshland environment” (15). Cushing imagines mounds throughout the continent as “islands … on high land” that prove his topographic theory that, until recently, most of the continent exhibited “conditions like those presented by the southern marshy shorelands” (76). In other words, Florida offers a good approximation of what North America was like: “the whole region”—by which he means most of the continent—was “suited to such modes of life as I have referred to, even well on toward modern times” (78).
Cushing’s observations in the Report amount to the conclusion that mound-builders were the most able claimants of continental ground because of their capacity to remain on changing earth. This conclusion depends in part on Cushing’s reading of Bartram on early Florida’s landscape and the populations who managed to remain there. But even more importantly for our purposes, Cushing’s conclusion elucidates the relevance of Bartram’s mobile roots to later U.S. interpretations of the history and legacy of continental settlement and expansion. By suggesting that Floridian foundations reflect the character of the continent as a whole, Cushing suggests an alternate narrative of North America’s settlement. His work signals that, both during and long after the last quarter of the eighteenth century that has been this chapter’s historical focus, Florida provoked many North Americans to imagine those who managed to establish themselves on shifting ground as the rightful possessors of the continent.
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While all the writers examined above recognize early Florida’s dramatic dissolution, some perceive this solubility as something other than a threat to familiar Anglo-American settlement practices. For Audubon, De Brahm, Bartram, and Cushing, Florida provided useful metaphors for imagining land and inhabitance. Their reflections on mangrove trees, shifting shores, water lettuce roots, Indian mounds, and Calusa dwellings affirm the habitability of Florida’s liquid land, albeit by way of alternate practices of possession according to which mobility secures longevity, stability, and endurance.65 Collectively such work reveals that Florida provided many early Americans with a way to imagine roots that are no less secure for their lack of fixity.
The following chapter continues to chart the influence of Florida’s fluidity on broader narratives of North American settlement, this time by turning to another set of materials: eighteenth-century European and American maps of Florida as islands. Such maps enable us to place Florida’s topographic porosity in a broad geopolitical context, and to see that it disrupted a politically significant visual narrative of North America as a contiguous, self-enclosed, sharply defined landmass. By broadcasting Florida’s soluble, corrosive, hurricane-swept, porous, and fragmented ground, maps of Florida as islands provide us with one way to see beyond the more familiar cartographic discourse of continental integrity that would underpin U.S. nationalism by minimizing or erasing the spatial fluidity and demographic heterogeneity of the early United States.
Chapter 2
Island Nation: Shoal, Isle, Islet
Amos Doolittle’s Map of the United States of America (Figure 6), one of the first maps of North America to be published in the United States, first appeared in 1784 in geographer Jedidiah Morse’s popular textbook, Geography Made Easy, which Morse hoped would inspire young readers to “imbibe an acquaintance with their own country, and an attachment to its interests” during the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War.1 A staunch Federalist, Morse believed that “the United States, and indeed all parts of North-America, seem to have been formed by nature for the most intimate union.”2 Doolittle’s map visually underscores this early precursor of the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny by illustrating the emerging U.S. nation-state as a contiguous territory stretching from British Canada to Spanish Florida, and bordered sharply on the west and east by the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, respectively.
As recent scholarship on the history of cartography has shown, early modern maps frequently “produced” space: by making ideological claims about the areas they represented, rather than reflecting the actual state of geographic knowledge, maps influenced the development of national and imperial identities, boundaries, population patterns, and power relations.3 Doolittle’s map is no exception, for it contributes to a widespread phenomenon in which North Americans of the Revolutionary period proclaimed North America’s “continental status” in a range of texts—including maps, geographies, decorative arts, portraits, classic works of literature, and key political essays and legal documents—as a way of declaring the new country’s independence, sovereignty, and destiny to become a culturally homogeneous nation united under one government.4 The figure of the continent continued to serve a range of nationalist purposes long after the Revolution, a fact prompting literary scholar Myra Jehlen’s memorable claim that “the solid reality, the terra firma” of the continent was “the decisive factor shaping the founding conceptions of ‘America’ and ‘the American’” from the early national period until the mid-nineteenth century.5
Figure 6. Amos Doolittle, A Map of the United States of America (1784). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Figure 7. Amos Doolittle, A Map of the United States of America (1784), detail. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Considering the continent’s ideological significance during the early national period, it seems surprising upon first consideration that Doolittle’s map does not entirely sustain Morse’s claim that “all parts of North-America” encourage “attachment” and “union”: one prominent part of the map does not describe a solid, contiguous, and self-contained landmass. Morse’s claim falters at the lower right corner of the map, where Florida appears dramatically fragmented into islands that constitute a ragged, fractured southeastern edge of North America (Figure 7). The land is indented by vast harbors and gulfs, broken into five or six large landmasses, and scattered in chains of almost innumerable islets that extend into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, almost as though a gigantic wave had swept over the land and left it in shards. Doolittle’s depiction of Florida as islands was not unusual. It conforms to a cartographic convention through which many American and European mapmakers described Florida before, during, and long after the American Revolution.
While
