The Old Country
1843
David and Moes Levy
After his first two year term, David Levy ran for a second term in 1843 and was re-elected by an even greater majority than in his first race in spite of renewed attacks upon him about being and alien and Jewish. Despite his estrangement from his son and disdain for politics, his father Moses Levy defended David’s character is a series of articles in the St. Augustine papers The News, and the Florida Herald and Southern Democrat. Moses considered the campaign against David and himself as a campaign of character assassination, smearing both David and his reputation at the hands of men serving the national government. Moses wrote to the Florida Herald on Jan. 23, 1843 about the "abuse heaped upon David Levy."
At the time, Moses Levy lived alone in what he referred to as the “obscure village” of St. Augustine on fourteen dollars per month. After twenty years of continual disappointment, burdened by legal fees and taxes on land he could not sell, he felt oppressed “beyond endurance.”
David Levy was a proponent of Florida becoming a state in which the state would receive 500,000 acres of public land and $400,000 per year from the Federal Government for internal improvements. He pointed out these lands would allow a railroad to be built from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, which could be operated as a public project with the railroad yielding enough profits to cover the cost to the state government.