Abstract
This study performs statistical analyses of anti-black violence in antebellum Florida between statehood and secession, by comparing and contrasting episodes of violence against blacks in the Western, Eastern, Middle and Southern judicial districts of this time period. This violence was due, in part, to a barely-functioning legal system, widespread racism, an economic depression, and a series of open conflicts between blacks, Seminole tribes-people, white settlers, and the Union military. By using accounts of violence from court records, newspapers, and oral histories, statistical models may be constructed to answer in the affirmative that while blacks faced violence almost everywhere in the state, the chances for violence grew worse on the open frontier than the plantations.