What Florida can teach America

AFTER SHE published her anti-slavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and watched the country wage a civil war, Harriet Beecher Stowe became a snowbird, spending winters in the Jacksonville area. She was enchanted by the state but enraged by visitors’ exploitation of it, as they slaughtered wild birds to use their feathers in fashionable hats. “Florida has been considered in all respects as a prey and a spoil to all comers,” she wrote in “Protect the Birds”, published in 1877. She complained that Florida’s “splendid flowers and trees, its rare and curious animals have been looked upon as made and created only to please the fancy of tourists”.