Explanation:
The return to political power of the Bourbon Democrats did not mean the overnight destruction of reforms of Reconstruction. Governor George F. Drew was an old-timer Whig, a native of New Hampshire, and a lumber man with Northern contacts. Drew supported closer contact with Northern investors and a new diverse economy.
Florida's backwardness and the need to rebuild the state economy were major considerations which even the agrarian interests could not overlook. The cotton kingdom was declining as new cotton fields opened in Texas. The Bourbon Democrats were still politically conservative, but they weren't ignorant of the realities of Gilded America.
They were also the major party in Florida as their Black Codes systematically eliminated most of the African-American vote, essential to the survival of a statewide Republican Party. Only in Jacksonville and Pensacola were blacks still in public office by 1880, thanks to Democratic gerrymandering. The Bourbon plan for a new state constitution in 1885 to oust the Reconstruction Constitution was the final legal nail on the coffin of politics.
The Civil War had not ended the status of the agrarian classes. Most rural African-Americans and poor whites found sharecropping and tenant farming the only routes to survival in much of Panhandle Florida. Others choose to vote with their feet by leaving rural Florida. However, until most of the Deep South, many Floridians headed southward rather than to the North due to the development of peninsular Florida. Florida was the only Southern state in the South who gained black people in the migration between states.
FLORIDA
FEARS AND REACTIONS IN GILDED ERA FLORIDA
Rapid changes and a greatly restrictive political system were bound to create a good many critics. The Constitution of 1885, which would last well into the twentieth century, may have made Cabinet posts, Supreme Court judges, and regulators elected officials for the first time, but it was not a document for reform. The agrarian aristocracy soon allied with the new wealth of railroad men, lumber men, and citrus growers.
A leading spokesman for the small farmers against the railroads was Wilkinson Call, a colorful Populist who got the State of Florida to establish a Florida Railroad Commission to stop unfair rate practices. Henry Flagler and Henry Plant couldn't silence Call.
Less easily understood by many urban Floridians was the intense development of Nativism in Florida. The continued growth of the Klu Klux Klan and other militant groups was due not just to the demise of black political influence, but due to a fear of the waves of change entering Florida. Northerners were changing old institutions.
By the late 1890's this emotional nativism was also directed at the Roman Catholic Church in Florida. Under the demagoguery of Tom Watson and the Guardians of Liberty, many rural Floridians believed that Catholics were loyal only to the Pope. By 1916, anti-Catholic sentiment helped bolster an obscure Defuniak Springs minister Sydney Catts into the Florida Governorship. Catts never enacted his most serious attempts to close down monasteries and nunneries and a counterattack led by Father Michael Curley changed public opinion in the large cities.
