Casa Bianca Plantation
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Casa Bianca was an antebellum cotton plantation established in 1828 in Jefferson County, Florida, US. It was created by Joseph Mills White (1781–1839) and his business partner Richard H. Wilde (1789–1847), both delegates of the United States House of Representatives, and was located off of what is today Jefferson County Road 259 southwest of Monticello, Florida. Casa Bianca was originally intended to serve as a sugar cane plantation, but transitioned to cotton production with the rise of cotton as the primary agricultural commodity in Florida in the 1830s.[1] The plantation sourced slaves from New Orleans, brought there aboard a ship naned Antelope,[2] a purchase with the former United States President James Monroe,[3] and from Joseph M. White's brother, Everett White.[3] There were a total of 163 slaves at the Casa Bianca Plantation[1] and at its largest, it spanned 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares).[4]
In 1827, White bought 1,125 acres (455 ha) of land from the Government and ten slaves who were shipped from New Orleans to Pensacola.[1] This group of slaves was mostly mothers and their children who likely worked for White as domestic servants because the sugar cane they were planning to grow and harvest was too labor-intensive for these slaves to work with.[3] The same year, Wilde was representing a party in, US v. The Antelope[5] and used his political power and influence to purchase 37 slaves.[6] In 1828, he made a deal with former president James Monroe who was in debt from his presidency and his own failing plantations. White gave Monroe $5,000 in exchange for three families and one 9-year-old girl[7] named Mary Brown, who were shipped from Monroe's "Highland" plantation in Virginia to Florida. The shipment of these families separated from the connections they made in Virginia and the young Mary Brown was violently seized from her family.[3] In 1835, Joseph White bought 13 slaves from his brother's plantation after his brother's death, further adding to the slave population of Casa Bianca.[3] Joseph M. White died in 1839, leaving his property to his wife Ellen Adair White. She continued her ownership of the land until she sold it in 1860.[3]
Life at Casa Bianca
Research compiled from the Take Them In Families dataset has proven 163 enslaved people to have lived and labored at Casa Bianca, but up to 407 people have found as ancestors of the enslaved at Casa Bianca. The experience of the enslaved who were shipped to Florida against their will is imaginably traumatic, but the conditions they went through during their time at Casa Blanca likely exacerbated this stress. Displaced Indians raided around Monticello, and slaves from Casa Bianca were sent to Monticello for aid. The county suffered malaria and yellow fever outbreaks, affecting the slaves there as well.[1]
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