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 Pulaski for nine months for aiding the escape of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

His father was Moses Elias Levy, a Sephardi Jewish businessman from Morocco who made a fortune in lumber in the British colony.

His grandfather Eliyahu ha-Levy ibn-Yuli served as an undersecretary to Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah while his paternal grandmother Rachel was from Tangiers and was said to have spoken fluent Spanish.

[9] Some later migrated to the Caribbean as English colonists during the British occupation of the Danish West Indies (now the United States Virgin Islands).

[12] After the family immigrated to the United States in the early 1820s, Moses Levy bought 50,000 acres (200 km2) of land near present-day Jacksonville, Florida Territory.

In 1851 Yulee founded a 5,000-acre (20 km2) sugar cane plantation, built and maintained by enslaved African Americans,[15] along the Homosassa River.

The remains of his plantation, which was destroyed during the Civil War, are now the Yulee Sugar Mill Ruins State Historic Site.

Yulee was also business partners with John William Pearson at Orange Springs, Florida, but he abandoned his idea of building a railroad in the area as tensions rose and war seemed imminent.

He became the first Southerner to use state grants under the Florida Internal Improvement Act of 1855, passed to encourage the development of such infrastructure.

Levy (still going by that surname) was elected in 1841 as the delegate from the Florida Territory to the United States House of Representatives and served four years.

[21] Once seated in the House, Levy worked to gain statehood for the territory and to protect the expansion of slavery in other newly admitted states.

[23] Although he frequently denied that he favored secession, Yulee and his colleague, Senator Stephen Mallory, jointly requested from the War Department a statement of munitions and equipment in Florida forts on January 2, 1860.

[25] After the war, Yulee was imprisoned in Fort Pulaski for nine months for treason,[4]: 188  specifically for aiding in the 1865 escape of Jefferson Davis.

[1] His leadership helped increase economic development in the state, including the late nineteenth-century tourist trade.