David Levy Yulee

David Levy Yulee (born David Levy; June 12, 1810 – October 10, 1886) was an American politician and attorney who served as the senator from Florida immediately before the American Civil War. He also founded the Florida Railroad Company and served as president of several other rail companies, earning him the nickname of "Father of Florida Railroads." Yulee was born on the island of St. Thomas, then under British control, to a Sephardic Jewish family; his father was a trader from Morocco and his mother, also of Sephardi descent, was born in Sint Eustatius and raised in St. Thomas. The family moved to Florida when he was a child. He later served as Florida's territorial delegate to Congress. Yulee was the first person of Jewish ancestry elected to the United States House of Representatives as well as the first elected to the United States Senate. His historic status as the first Jewish senator is complicated by his extensive slaveholding and his conversion to Christianity, which many historians view as a form of assimilation intended to gain acceptance in the Southern planter elite. His conversion did not, however, insulate him from antisemitic attacks throughout his career. He added Yulee, the name of a Moroccan ancestor, to his name soon after his 1846 marriage to Nancy Christian Wickliffe, daughter of ex-Governor Charles A. Wickliffe of Kentucky. Though Yulee converted to Christianity, became an Episcopalian, and raised his children as Christian, he encountered antisemitism throughout his career. Yulee was an enslaver who owned over 1,000 people on his Florida plantation, and he was a leading advocate for slavery and the secession of Florida. His fortune came from a sugarcane plantation on the Homosassa River, and his antebellum railroads were largely built by slave labor. After the Civil War, he was imprisoned at Fort...