A Tentative Start: Animal Rights in Florida During Reconstruction

Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Florida wrote a new state constitution and held elections to seat a legislature. Tasked with handling the issues that arose in postbellum Florida society, the legislators interestingly took time to enact a law that addressed an unusual topic – animal protection. Influenced by anti-cruelty laws in other states, Florida passed an 1866 law that established legal penalties for the abuse of animals. Although the anti-cruelty movement was encouraged by the Civil War’s success in ending slavery, in Florida it was operating in an environment that was generally hostile to reform efforts, especially those interfering with attempts to control freedmen. While an imperfect, tentative step, the law’s passage would set the stage for the further advancement of Florida animal rights that took place in later.

 

Cattle Drive at Bartow, 1890, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

 

Although scholars have made extensive studies on the origins of the anti-cruelty movement in the nineteenth century, few have analyzed the important connection between the Reconstruction of the South and the evolution of the region’s animal protection laws.[1] None of those that did, however, gave particular emphasis to the changes in Florida animal protection law after the Civil War.  Similarly, Florida historians have also largely ignored this topic. This short article attempts to address that omission and recover the important connection between Reconstruction and the origin for the modern animal rights movement.

At the start of the nineteenth century, animals had essentially no statutory protection from mistreatment in any state in the country. Legally, domestic animals were considered the same as any other type of property. This began to change, especially with the rise of the social reform movements of the early nineteenth century. Advocacy against animal cruelty became more prominent and was tied to other causes such as campaigns for better care of children, the incarcerated and the insane, and the abolition of slavery, as these issues had the common thread of dealing with vulnerable parts of society that needed more protection, and shared the goal of moving America toward an ideal “reign of a Christian-inspired kindness toward man and beast alike.” [2]

The New York law was followed by similarly-worded laws  in other states, primarily in the antebellum North. Some of the laws were more conservatively-worded and protected animals only if they were the property of another [3]; others, like Vermont’s 1854 law, forbid anyone to “cruelly beat or torture any horse or ox, or other animal, whether belonging to himself or not,” expanding both the types of creatures involved as well as eliminating the ownership limitation, a significant change making the scope no longer one purely of property right infringement but rather of cruelty in and of itself to any animal.[4]

Of the twenty states that had enacted animal protection laws by 1865, only six were states that allowed slavery, reflecting the South’s more agricultural and conservative bent. Texas, for example, passed an 1856 law that largely followed the Vermont 1854 model; on the other hand, South Carolina declined to pass any anti-cruelty laws and instead relied on existing laws that protected property from damage by others.[6] When Florida became part of the United States in 1821, its laws as both a territory and a state made little to no mention of animal welfare.

After the war, this silence on animal cruelty began to change in Florida. As part of a larger endeavor to update Florida statutory law after the war – except where it conflicted with efforts to control the formerly enslaved, state legislators emulated legal changes on animal protection in other states.  On December 21, 1865,  Representative Anderson J. Peeler introduced a bill in the Florida House of Representatives entitled “An act prescribing additional penalties for the commission of offences against the State and for other purposes.”[7] Dealing with a variety of issues, the proposed legislation contained the following language concerning the treatment of animals, clearly influenced by the similar laws enacted earlier in other states:

That if any person shall willfully and maliciously kill by poison or otherwise any horse,
mare, gelding, filly, foal, mule, ass, or any other beast or animal belonging to another, or
cut off the ear or tail, put out the eye, or otherwise dismember, disfigure or wound any
beast or animal belonging to another, or maliciously administer poison to any such animal,
or offer or expose to such animal any poisonous substance with intent that the same be taken,
he or she shall be deemed to be guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction shall be punished
by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or be imprisoned not exceeding six months, or
be put in the pillory for one hour and be whipped not exceeding thirty-nine stripes, at the
discretion of the jury.[8]

The bill passed the House of Representatives on January 4, 1866, with a vote of 43 to 2.[9] While Peeler could be construed as embracing a liberalization of Florida law on animal cruelty, he was not a reformer in other areas, as shown by fact the same bill also introduced a harsh code for postwar treatment of the newly freed.

Florida’s governor David Shelby Walker, 1865-1868, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

 

After passing the House, the bill went to the Florida Senate for consideration. While deliberating over the measure on January 8, Senator William Henry Rosseau proposed that dogs be excepted from the list of protected animals; his motion did not garner any support.[10] The measure passed the Senate on the same day by a 17 to 5 margin.[11] It was then sent to newly-elected Governor David S. Walker who signed it into law on January 15, 1866.

The strong margins in both houses reflected the increasing progress the anti-cruelty movement had made during the conflict. Aided in part by vivid photographs of slaughtered horses and mules on Civil War battlefields, the war helped bring animal suffering to a national audience. It also showed the impact of the war in that merely appealing to public sentiment was not enough – governmental action was sometimes needed to advance reform. Unfortunately, passage of the 1866 Florida bill also reflected that while some social reforms received added support, others did not, especially by the conservative Democrats who supported the same bill’s inclusion of severe treatment for freedmen.  This was typical of the handling of most social reform movements in Florida and other former slaveholding states during Reconstruction – issues like child labor and convict leasing involved practices that were often utilized as instruments of racial control and did not gain traction to the same degree as anti-cruelty measures; for the same reason, the temperance movement had longstanding success in Florida, with alcohol use by the enslaved tightly controlled for decades. [12]

During the New South era, the movement for the humane treatment of animals advanced as the state increased investment in railroads and telegraph lines which stitched the state more closely with Northern money and Northern values. These investments also facilitated new residents arriving from the North who were generally more receptive to animal protection. Additionally, animal protection was particularly advanced by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in New York by Henry Bergh in 1866 to aggressively promote animal suffering prevention to a national audience. By the 1880s, Floridians had begun organizing local cruelty prevention societies, including ones in Pensacola and Tallahassee.[13]

With this change in attitude toward animal suffering, Florida law further advanced on May 30, 1889, when the state approved a new law that completely removed the property aspect of affected animals. Entitled “An Act For the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” the new law forbid mistreatment of domestic animals, whether through active or passive cruelty.[14] Incorporating wording from the Twenty-Eight Hour Law, an 1873 federal bill that set rules for the transport of livestock, the Florida 1889 law extended protection to animals purely to avoid suffering by them.

 

 

Viewed from the present, Florida’s action on animal rights during the early part of Reconstruction appears only a tentative step. Even if a modest measure, the 1866 law paved the way for more substantive change in 1889. Prompted by the social movements of the time and accelerated by the Civil War, it was the start of what would later be a stronger acknowledgment of what nineteenth century social reformers believed – that the humane treatment of animals was a measure of the moral health of society. Like other states in the South during that time, however, the progress in Florida on that issue was not equally shared with the other aspects of reform, especially those involving race. Despite these limitations, the 1866 law was a significant milestone on the road to the proper treatment of animals, a road on which we still have a long way to travel.

 

[1] Numerous historians have examined the rise of animal protection in the nineteenth century. Claire Priest of Yale Law School traced the development of nineteenth century caselaw and statutes and showed how American society came to a “new sensibility of preventing animal suffering and punishing cruel conduct” in “Enforcing Sympathy: Animal Cruelty Doctrine after the Civil War,” Law & Social Inquiry. 2019;44(1):136-169.  Matthew Quallen examined the connection between the efforts against slavery and the campaign for animal protection in his Georgetown University dissertation Making Animals, Making Slaves: Animalization and Slavery in the Antebellum United States, 2016, https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1040660?show=full.  For other relevant studies, see Earl J. Hess, ed. Animal Histories of the Civil War Era (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022); Janet M. Davis, The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Ernest Freeberg, A Traitor to his Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement, (New York: Basic Books, 2020); and Susan J. Pearson. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

[2] Susan J. Pearson, “‘The Rights of the Defenseless:’ Animals, Children, and Sentimental Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century America.” PhD. Diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2004, 202.

[3] New York Revised Statutes 1829: Title 6: Section 26.

[4] 1854 Vermont Acts & Resolves 51.1.

[5] Priest, “Enforcing Sympathy,” 146.

[6] 6^th Leg., Ch. IV, Art. 713-714, 1856 Gen. Texas Laws, 140.

[7] A Journal of the Proceedings of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of Florida at its Fourteenth Session (Tallahassee: Office of the Floridian, 1865) 62.

[8] Ibid., 27.

[9] Ibid., 168.

[10] Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the General Assembly of the State of Florida (Tallahassee: Floridian & Journal) 160.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ann-Marie Szymanski, “Beyond Parochialism: Southern Progressivism, Prohibition, and State-Building.” The Journal of Southern History 69, no. 1 (2003): 108.

[13] Pensacola News, March 20, 1889; Weekly Floridian, July 2, 1889.

[14] The Acts and Resolutions Adopted by the Legislature of Florida at its Second Regular Session under the Constitution of A.D. 1885 (Tallahassee: N.M. Bowen, Printer, 1889) 157-158.