"No man would immigrate into Florida-no, not from Hell itself," declared the Honorable John Randolph of Roanoke in the United States House of Representatives. The newly annexed territory was, he declared, "a land of swamps, of quagmires, of frogs and alligators and mosquitoes."

Nonetheless, Florida's 1980 census count of 9.7 million would mark it as the nation's seventh most populous state, and by 1987 it ranked fourth. Because native Floridians perpetually seem to be scarce (fewer than a third of the state's current inhabitants were born there), there is a persistent myth that few Americans outside the state today would have had Florida ancestors. Many of the settlers who flooded the state from Georgia and the Carolinas before and especially after 1821, however, eventually fled the swamps, alligators, and mosquitoes to return home or to migrate further west. Numerous "brick walls" in Southern genealogy have toppled when a missing ancestor or family suddenly turned up in Florida, either permanently or en route to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, or gold-rush California.

Many are surprised to learn that numerous living Americans can document their ancestry a full ten generations in Florida. Nearly fifteen hundred Florida pioneer lineages (those pre-dating statehood in 1845) have been identified and documented in the past decade alone.

The early history of Florida falls neatly into the following periods: 1513, discovery; 1565-1763, first Spanish colonial period; 1763-83, British colonial period; 1784-1821, second Spanish period; 1821-45, U.S. territorial period: and 1845, statehood as the twenty-seventh state.

The Spanish colonial presence began with the landing of Juan Ponce de Leon at Eastertide of 1513, ninety-four years before Jamestown, and Spanish Florida ultimately embraced all of the present state and much of the Gulf Coast, including Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

In 1564 French Huguenots settled Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River near present-day Jacksonville. The Spanish reacted immediately, by establishing St. Augustine as the first permanent European settlement in America and immediately destroying Fort Caroline. After further hostilities France soon abandoned designs on peninsular Florida. Elizabethan England, however, was not to be so easily intimidated.

Spain was to spend much of the seventeenth century attempting to dissuade the English by scattering colonists across Florida, and by the 1680s San Marcos de Apalache (now St. Marks) on the Gulf coast had grown to noteworthy proportions. In the final third of the century, pressure from the French to the west and the English and their Native American allies to the north prompted Spain to fortify St. Augustine and to re-establish a former settlement at Pensacola in 1698. In 1702 and 1703 there were numerous British raids. Seventeen years later the French took and briefly held Pensacola before relinquishing the town, joining with Spain against England, and finally retiring further westward along the Gulf Coast.

Following an indecisive treaty in 1748 and a decade of peace with Spain, England was again at war with France. By 1761 Spain, fearful that a French defeat could damage its own colonial interests, finally took sides with France, but it was too late. The Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years' War in 1763, saw Spain cede Florida to England in exchange for the captured city of Havana.

British East Florida reached from the Atlantic to the Apalachicola River; British West Florida ran from the Apalachicola to the Mississippi. In 1765 England sent Surveyor General William Gerard de Brahm and Royal Botanist John Bartram to the new possession and offered bounties, land grants, and other inducements to settlers. Thus East and West Florida remained loyal to Britain during the American Revolution, and St. Augustine became crowded with Tory refugees from Georgia and the Carolinas.

In 1781 Spain captured Pensacola from Britain, which two years later exchanged both Floridas for the Bahama Islands. Between 1785 and 1821 there were sporadic Spanish-American border disputes until the Pinckney Treaty of 1795 at last fixed the 31st parallel as the northern boundary of West Florida and gave the United States undisputed control of an area that now comprises nearly a third of Alabama and Mississippi.

Spain supported the British in the War of 1812 but never declared war on the United States. Nonetheless, Andrew Jackson seized and then abandoned Spanish Pensacola in 1814 and helped convince Spain of the folly of trying to hold an overseas colony contiguous to a large and unfriendly nation already coveting its lands. Under the terms of the Adams-Onis Treaty, which took effect in 1821, Spain gave up East and West Florida in exchange for American settlement of U. S. citizens' claims against Spain.

In 1821 Congress provided for a territorial governor, territorial courts, and a thirteen-member legislative council. The first two counties were established on 21 July 1821. By its first territorial census in 1830, three years before skeptical John Randolph of Roanoke died, Florida boasted 34,730 inhabitants. By statehood fifteen years later, its population had surpassed 66,500, and by 1990 Florida's "swamps and quagmires" were inhabited by more than thirteen million Americans.

The massacre of Army Major Francis Langhorne Dade and two companies of soldiers in December of 1835 marked the opening hostilities of the Second Seminole War, which would end seven years later after an expenditure of more than $20 million and the loss of 1,500 soldiers. By 1858, 3,824 Native Americans and blacks were relocated to Arkansas; Native American and white civilian casualties and property losses cannot accurately be calculated.

Florida attained statehood on 3 March 1845, first among the Atlantic coast colonies settled but last admitted to the Union. By then her people had lived under the flags of four sovereign nations: Spain, France, Great Britain, and the United States. Since attaining United States territorial status in 1821, Floridians had been "free." Under statehood, at long last they were "equal."