When Florida Breezes, or Florida New and Old was first published in 1882, residents of the state, and Tallahassee in particular, were not happy. Many of them bought the book by Ellen Call Long, just so they could burn it, reducing the number of copies in existence.

Ellen Call Long was an historian, historic preservationist, writer, and silkworm cultivator.

Florida Breezes is her fictionalized but accurate account of the planter lifestyle in nineteenth-century Florida, which she experienced first-hand. In the book, Long advocates for the rights of African Americans at a time when laws were being passed in the New South to limit the freedom of formerly enslaved people.

As eminent Florida historian Rembert W. Patrick wrote about Florida Breezes, “Perhaps these attitudes of hers caused residents of Florida to buy and burn her book, and thereby make it a rare item of Americana.” Patrick, editor of the Florida Historical Society’s academic journal the Florida Historical Quarterly from 1954 through 1961, oversaw a reproduction of the 1883 version of Florida Breezes for University of Florida Press in 1962.

Ellen Call Long was the daughter of Richard Keith Call, who served as the third Territorial Governor of Florida from 1836-1839, and the fifth Territorial Governor of Florida from 1841-1844. Call was a protégé of Andrew Jackson, who Ellen Call Long grew acquainted with as a child. When Florida was named a state in 1845, Call ran for President of the United States, but lost to William Dunn Moseley. He was loyal to the Union, and argued against the secession of Florida in 1861.

The Richard Keith Call Papers are archived at the Florida Historical Society’s Library of Florida History in Cocoa. They include correspondence between Ellen Call Long and railroad magnate Henry Flagler, and popular writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. There is also in the collection a handwritten article by Long on Florida in the Civil War, intended to be part of a larger book project.

As an appendix to this reproduction of Ellen Call Long’s Florida Breezes, we have added a transcription of her commentary on Florida in the Civil War.

Also new to this edition of Florida Breezes in an introduction by Tracy J. Revels, the Laura and Winston Hoy Professor of Humanities at Wafford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Her book Grander in Her Daughters: Florida’s Women During the Civil War earned the 2005 Rembert Patrick Award from the Florida Historical Society for the most outstanding book on a Florida history topic.

Two centuries after her birth in 1825, Ellen Call Long’s Florida Breezes remains an important primary source account of antebellum life in Florida.