page_title: History of Pensacola, Florida
section_title: Postwar 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: History of Pensacola, Florida / Postwar 19th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Aerial View of Pensacola. Does anyone recognize the type of airplanes? Perhaps that could provide a better date estimate. -- Infrogmation 06:47 21 Jul 2003 (UTC) Possibly FF-1, mid to late 1930s; see talk page discussion (on enwiki)
context_page_description: The history of Pensacola, Florida, begins long before the Spanish claimed founding of the modern city in 1698. The area around present-day Pensacola was inhabited by Native American peoples thousands of years before the historical era.
  The historical era begins with the arrival of Spanish explorers in the 16th century. In 1559 Tristan de Luna established a short-lived settlement at Pensacola Bay; it was the first multi-year European settlement in what is now the continental United States but was abandoned after two years. In the late 17th century the Spanish returned to the area to found the modern Pensacola as an outpost from which to defend their claims to Spanish Florida. The city's strategic but isolated position, combined with continued European rivalries played out in North America, led to it changing hands among different Western powers a number of times. At different times it was held by the Spanish, the French, the British, the United States, and the Confederate States of America.
context_section_description: Emancipation and the conclusion of the War were followed throughout the plantation districts of the South by a period of tumultuous struggle over the rights of black laborers, the political rights of African Americans generally and, temporarily, the political rights of those who took up arms against the Union.  While devastating for many former white Confederate veterans, newly emancipated African Americans saw more political freedoms than ever. Pensacola and Escambia County had more African-American political representation than ever before or since. Florida was readmitted to the Union on 25 June 1868. In the late 19th century, Florida, like other southern states, passed a new constitution and other laws that disfranchised most African Americans, using tools like poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses, totally closing them out of the political system.
  Cotton, worked largely by the sharecropper descendants of freedmen, remained crucial to the economy, but the South's reliance on agriculture slowed its progress. In the early 20th century, crops were destroyed by boll weevil infestation that moved throughout the South. Slowly economic diversification and urbanization reached the region. Vast pine forests, their wood used to produce paper, became an economic basis. A brickmaking industry thrived at the turn of the twentieth century.
  Shipping declined in importance, but the military and manufacturing became prominent. Harvesting of fish and other seafood are also vital. Aside from cotton and pine trees, major crops include peanuts, soybeans, and corn. The Historic Pensacola Museum of Industry gives a detailed account of these turn-of-the-century foundations of the local economy.
caption: Aerial cartoon view of Pensacola ca. mid-1930s
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