By Bob Davidsson
During Florida's "Reconstruction" period (1865-76), the area later known as the Palm Beaches was in the geographic center of a proposed terrritorial homeland for former African slaves called "New Liberia," and a failed transporation network extending from the Georgia border to South America.
Colonel Thomas W. Osborn was the commanding officer of Battery D, First Regiment, New York Light Artillery, during the Civil War. As fate would have it, he served as the chief artillery officer under Gen. Oliver Otis Howard at the Battle of Gettysburg.
General Howard, known as the "Praying General," appraised his artillery commander as "a quiet unobstrusive officer of quick decison and pure life."
Howard remembered Osborn's qualities when he became commissioner of the U.S. Freedmen's Bureau from 1865 until it was disbanded in 1872. He selected Osborn as his assistant commissioner of "Freedmen, Refugees and Abandoned Lands in Florida" in September 1865.
Osborn devised an ambitious plan for the resettlement of Freedmen (emancipated black slaves) in South Florida. It was nothing less than the establishment of a "New Liberia" based on the model of the former U.S. colony created for African-Americans by President James Monroe in 1820.
Osborn presented his proposal to General Howard in January 1866. He recommended the U.S. buy the entire Florida peninsula below the 28th parallel and organize a new territory to be homesteaded by former slaves.
"We shall give (the land) a territorial organization of government," he advocated. "The lands shall be held exclusively as homesteads for freedpeople."
In his written proposal, Osborn estimated there were 14,400 square miles of arable land that could sustain 115,200 farm families if each homestead was limted to 80 acres. He predicted 400 new townships could be created, which would be self-supporting through the production of tropical agricultural crops.
Osborn reported "a home of 80 acres" for each family would allow the resettlement of a total population of 595,000 "freedpeople" on new homesteads in South Florida.
The land south of the 28th parallel included the boundaries for Dade County, redrawn after the Civil War. The thinly settled county, including the Palm Beaches, had a total population of just 85 settlers by 1870.
Osborn organized an expedition, led by Lt. Col George Thompson and Freedmen's Bureau special agent William Gleason, to explore and report on the economic potential of Dade County for his model settlement. Both men were impressed with South Florida.
After a two-month stay in Dade County, Lt. Col. Thompson wrote, "The most promising agricultural lands lay along the Everglades... If the government conducted drainage it would develope into the garden spot of the United States."
In the end it was the high cost of drainage and climate concerns that doomed the project. Freedmen's Bureau resettlement efforts would focus on northern Florida instead.
In place of a territorial homeland south of the 28th parallel, General Howard and Congress supported the "Southern Homestead Act of 1866," opening 19 million acres of federal lands in Florida for use by Freedmen and other Civil War refugees. The Freedmen's Bureau opened land offices to assist the new homesteaders.
Freedmen acquired deeds for 32,000 acres of land by October 1866. One year later, they secured 2,000 homesteads totaling 160,960 acres, and by the year 1870 there were 9,000 African-American landowners in Florida, more than any other public-lands state during Reconstruction.
Palm Beach County pioneers Samuel and Fannie A. James were among the former slaves that became homesteaders in Dade County. They secured a 186-acre section of land in what would later include downtown Lake Worth Beach.
On Nov. 15, 1865, Osborn also issued a written circular ordering that Freedmen were allowed to testify in Florida courts, and restricting the use of corporal punishment - including scourging with a whip. Bureau officials supervised state courts until a new civilian government was estabished in Florida in 1868.
In a May 1866 tribute to Osborn's service with the Freedmen's Bureau, the editor of the "Tallahassee Floridian" wrote, "We doubt whether the duties of the Bureau could have been administered by anyone more acceptably, alike to the blacks and the whites, than they have been by Colonel Osborn."
As for special agent Gleason, the Wisconsin native remained in Dade County, where he established a Republican Party power base from 1866-76 during Florida's Reconstruction. He was elected lieutenant governor of Florida in 1868 and supported Osborn's future political and business ambitions.
Osborn was elected as a delegate in 1868 to the Florida State Constitutional Convention held in Tallahassee. The convention's goal was to reestablish civilian rule in Florida in compliance with federal requirements for readmittance to the Union.
Between May 1865 and 1868, Florida was under military control as a defeated supporter of the Confederacy. The "Reconstruction Act of 1866" established military rule over southern states until new civilian governments could be formed to ratify the 14th Amendment (African-American citizenship) and 15th Amendment (voting rights).
After Florida was readmitted to the Union on July 4, 1868, Osborn obtained the support of Republicans, Union Democrats and newly enfranchised Freedmen voters to win election to the U.S. Senate.
However, once elected, Senator Osborn's commitment to public service became secondary to the twin ambitions of political power and economic gain.
He became head of the infamous "Osborn Ring" of northern investors and carpetbaggers seeking quick profits in Florida during the federally mandated Reconstruction period. His pet project was the building of a "Great Southern Railway" from the Georgia border south to Cape Sable with a shipping network to South America.
The 'Great Southern Railway': A Rail to Nowhere
Senator Osborn lobbied Congress for land grants and federal subsidies to finance the project while at the same time purchasing stock in the company. The Great Southern Railway was incorporated by a special act of the Florida Legislature on Feb. 19, 1870.
The Legislature granted the corporation "special powers to construct and operate a railroad from the St. Mary's River, on the northern border of Florida, to the most southerly available harbor of the state, and to own and operate in connection with the rail, and as an integral part of the company's Line, steamships and other sea-going vessels to Cuba and the West Indies Islands and South America."
The company stockholders, including Senator Osborn and political ally Lt. Gov. Gleason, selected the senator's older brother, the Rev. Abraham Coles Osborn, as president of the Great Southern Railway.
This act of political and corporate family incest inspired an editorial writer for the "Brooklyn Eagle" to write, "It seems (Rev. Osborn) spent more time in the secular world than the religious. He was the chaplain to the wealthy, and was married twice, both women of wealthy families."
The State of Florida granted the railroad a right-of-way of 200 feet of land from the rail line, and the "same number of lands known as swamp and overflow" when the railway passed through the Palm Beaches and Dade County.
The Great Southern Railway was authorized to raise $10 million in stock sales. To attract investors, the new railroad company promised "in 10 years each investor would earn $1 million."
His lobbying efforts and political arm-twisting in Congress on the behalf of the Great Southern Railway earned Senator Osborn the nickname of "Railroad Tommy". In April 1871, one Washington, D.C. newspaper recorded his unethical congressional activities as "an extraordinary development of fraud."
The 1874 "Maps of Florida," published by Columbus Drew of Jacksonville, traced the projected route of the unbuilt Great Southern Railway from the Georgia border, passing south through central Florida, then turning southeast from Lake Okeechobee to a destination near Turkey Point in southern Dade County.
Its path through the future Palm Beach County would have placed the proposed rail along the Beeline Highway (S.R. 710), then turning south and following the secondary ridge line used by the U.S. Army to clear the "Military Trail" in 1838. It would have passed a short distance west of Lake Osborne and the county's chain of lakes.
Only 84 miles of new rail tracks were laid during the entire 10-year period of the state's Reconstruction. The Great Southern Railway became a failed business venture due to a lack of investors.
The Great Southern Railway Company remained inactive for 100 years until it was "dissolved by proclamation" by the Florida Division of Corporations on Oct. 21, 1974.
In a rare example of political contriteness, Senator Osborn made the following confession in a May 25, 1871 letter to correspondent Enfant Perdue: "As for myself, I am truly sorry I had anything to do with it (the railroad), for even the boot-blacks at the Capitol, with an indifference to senatorial dignity approaching nearly to the sublime, have dubbed me Railroad Tommy."
Senator Osborn was not nominated by his party to run for a second term in the U.S. Senate. He returned to New York City where he continued his career in government service. The Rev. Abraham Osborn also left Florida and became a noted theologian in New Jersey.
When his bachelor brother died in 1898, the Rev. Osborn made arrangements for his burial in the family plot at the Hillside Cemetery in North Adams, N.J.
(c.) Davidsson. 2021.
*NOTE: Article also was reprinted in the Feb. 9, 2021 editions of the Belle Glade & Pahokee Sun. Additional articles below and archived in Older Posts.
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