David Levy Yulee - Flight of a Favorite Son

He was almost too late. Union gunboats had cruised through the inlet and were closing in on the train. From the Amelia River they began shelling the bridge to the mainland. The last car was hit, but Yulee escaped harm - barely. The man sitting next to him was killed.

After the train cleared the bridge, Confederate soldiers wrecked the trestle. Yulee had left behind his home, his town and the headquarters of his railroad.

Also left behind in the records of the Florida Railroad Company was a letter Yulee had written as a U.S. senator on Jan. 5, 1861. What were its contents? It would later become grounds for a charge of treason.

THAT YULEE'S LIFE would be a stormy one is hardly surprising. Achievements, disasters, confusion, contradictions, danger - all seemed to blend in the saga of this remarkable scion of a remarkable scion of a colorful family.

Yulee's father was born in a Moroccan harem. His grandfather, Jacoub Ben Youle, a descendant of Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain, attained the lofty position of grand vizier (a high administrative officer in various Muslim countries) of Morocco, a high governmental position in Moslem society. His grandmother, the English-born Rachel Levy, was captured by Barbary pirates, paraded naked before Arab slave dealers and then bought by one of Jacoub's trusted eunuchs for the harem of the grand vizier.

Rachel bore Jacoub a son, Moses, and was pregnant with a second child when the sultan was overthrown. Rachel and Moses fled to Gibraltar, and the grand vizier met an unknown fate.

At Gibraltar, Rachel gave birth to a daughter, then took her family name of Levy, apparently to make it more difficult for anyone to trace her and the children. Moses and his sister, Rachel, were reared in the Jewish faith.

As a young man, Moses moved to Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas in the West Indies and became a successful lumber merchant. The youngest of his four children, David Yulee Levy, was born there in 1810. 

David was only 5 when his parents divorced, disrupting the boy's early years and loosening his bonds to his father. Moses, meanwhile, bought land in Florida, hoping to establish a Jewish colony.

In due course, Moses enrolled David in the Norfolk Academy in Virginia. David was so strongly influenced by the school's principal, a Presbyterian clergyman, that Moses ceased all funding to this prodigal son.  At 17, David was cut adrift.

He found temporary work on one of his father's plantations in the wild frontier country near Micanopy in North Florida, then moved to St. Augustine, where he studied law. After being admitted to the East District of Florida Bar at the age of 22, David gravitated toward politics, assuming the post of clerk of the territorial legislature.

STATEHOOD CARRIED WITH it the right to send two senators to Congress. Elected to represent Florida were David and his friend, James D. Westcott, Jr., who had been the territorial secretary. In 1845 David became the first Jew ever to serve in the U.S. Senate.

Levy County was promptly named in his honor, but that same year, 1845, he had Florida's General Assembly ratify the change of his name from David Yulee Levy to David Levy Yulee.

In her book, David Levy Yulee: A Man and His Vision, writer Celeste Kavanaugh suggested the reason for the name change:

"In all probability, David himself out of his deep devotion to his fiancée Nannie Wickliffe and the prospect of unborn children, took the name Yulee in order to protect them as much as possible from the anti-Jewish prejudice he himself had endured."

On April 7, 1846, David and Nannie were married at Wickland, the home of her family, built in 1817 at Bardstown, KY., where they would live for part of each year, heading down to Florida in the cooler months.

When the Yulee’s were in Florida, they lived on a plantation near the mouth of the Homosassa River. Their home, Marguerita, was built on Tiger Tail Island. More than 100 slaves worked the land, which was planted with cotton, corn and sugar cane. 

Meanwhile, Yulee was making a name for himself in the Senate. Twice he introduced bills calling for the annexation of Cuba. These received little support. But his most passionate cause was state sovereignty. As the chasm between free states and slave-holding states widened, he became an increasingly active spokesman for the slave states. As early as 1849 he suggested that the South leave the Union. The proposal earned him the nickname "Florida Fire Eater."

In 1850 Yulee was narrowly defeated for reelection to the Senate, but it proved a fortunate break for him.

Back in the private sector, he turned to his dream of a cross-state railroad. He saw a fleet of ships carrying goods from all over the world connecting with terminal on the east and west coasts of Florida. The railroad would eliminate the treacherous trip past the coral reefs of the Florida Straits.

For his Atlantic terminus he picked the deep-water port of Fernandina on Amelia Island. For the Gulf of Mexico terminus, he selected Cedar Key. Its harbor was the deepest of any he had investigated, plus it was close to his plantation home at Homosassa. The Florida Railroad was chartered in 1853 with Yulee as its president.

Five years later, Yulee was reelected to the Senate and helped push through the passage of a federal land-grant bill that provided the Florida Railroad with an additional half-million acres.

In September 1855, construction began from Fernandina. Crews composed of slaves and white laborers took more than five years to complete the 155 miles of track to Cedar Key. Financing the railroad was a constant problem, especially during the "Panic of 1857. "When Florida investors were unable to fund the railroad, Yulee turned to Northern investors.

Meanwhile, Fernandina was booming. Two hotels, railroad shops, wharves and warehouses were built. By 1859 ships were operating between Fernandina, Savannah, and Charleston.

THESE BUSY YEARS WERE happy times for Yulee. Though constantly involved with his railroad, he built a fine home in Fernandina, giving the Presbyterian congregation a lot on which to build a church, and served as vice president of the Historical Society of Florida.

But life outside Fernandina was less joyful. As the nation moved closer to civil war, Yulee, from his seat in the Senate, tried to strengthen Florida's defenses. By early 1861 he was resigned to the inevitability of war. On Jan. 5, he wrote a letter to Joseph Finegan, one of the railroad's builders, urging that the state take over all federal forts and arsenals in Florida and that the Southern states form a confederation as soon as possible. This letter would later fall into the hands of Holt.

On Jan. 11, 1861, 16 years after joining the Union, Florida seceded. Ten days later the state's two senators, Yulee and Stephen Mallory of Key West, withdrew from the Senate.

In early February, Yulee said goodbye to politics. He took no part in the new Confederate government, concentrating his energies on protecting his family and his railroad. When war broke out in April, he moved Nannie and their four children to their home on Tiger Tail Island (Homosassa).

When the word came in March 1862 that a Union fleet was closing in on Fernandina, there was no choice but to abandon the town. Yulee left behind a letter he had dashed off impulsively and had probably forgotten about.  For the rest of the war he concentrated on trying to keep his railroad operating in the central part of the state.

Relentless Union forces tried to hunt him down. An ambush was set up for him on a trip from Gainesville to his Homosassa home. Union troops had been alerted to look for the handsome Yulee carriage drawn by Kentucky bay horses. But one of the horses became sick and Yulee made the trip in a simple wagon drawn by two mules. He passed through the trap undetected.

AFTER THE SOUTH finally admitted defeat in April 1865, Yulee saw as his two main goals Florida's readmission to the Union and restoration of the railroad. But his letter of Jan. 5, 1861, again resurfaced, and he was charged with treason. Yulee was imprisoned at Fort Pulaski in Savannah, where he stayed for more than 10 months until General U.S. Grant set him free.

Yulee's freedom came too late to save his beloved railroad from default. It was seized and sold to some of the Northern investors who had supported it before the war. Among them was Edward N. Nickerson, who became the railroad's new president. Nickerson, recognizing Yulee's commitment to the railroad, made him vice president and manager of the road. By 1869 the railroad was in good shape again, and so was Fernandina.

The town, basking in the prosperity the railroad had brought, became known as the "Newport of the South." Yulee started a newspaper and promoted the construction of luxury hotels.

In 1880 ex-President Grant visited Fernandina. At a gala reception for him, Nannie Yulee and Grant led the first quadrille.

The following year the Yulee’s left Fernandina for Washington. Nannie wanted to spend her last years closer to her family and to old friends. They built a mansion on Connecticut Avenue that later became the Austrian Embassy. Less than two months after its completion, Nannie died.

A year later Yulee contracted a severe cold while visiting his grandchildren in Bar Harbor, Maine. It developed into pneumonia, and he died in the Clarendon Hotel in New York. He was 76. The Yulee’s were buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington.

Yulee's son wrote that with the death of Nannie the "central motive" of his father's life was gone - and now he was too.