Expansionist Domesticity and Settler Colonialism in Florida

      In 1841 a young widow named Elizabeth Berry joined a group of white settlers that the U.S. Army deployed to recolonize north Florida. On August 17, Berry and her children, along with three other families and five single men, moved into blockhouses at Fort White. The U.S. military had constructed the fort in 1836 to protect a nearby settlement from Seminole attacks. By August 1841 the army had abandoned it, but military leaders hoped that installing white families there—the same kind of people the fort had been constructed to protect—would similarly discourage Seminole resistance. It was one of a dozen sites targeted by the army for reoccupation in the winter of 1841. By early 1842, however, the settlers had also deserted Fort White (one army officer blamed the whiskey trade), so Elizabeth Berry and her children moved again. For the second time, she found an opportunity for her family that also served national interests, and they settled near a former Seminole town at Chucochatti, where white settlers had made a successful colony with U.S. military support in February 1842.¹ Elizabeth Berry’s story illustrates that making homes in Florida was a political act carried out by white families supported by federal policies, and that white women were key actors in settler colonialism.

      Prior to U.S. colonization, Florida was not an uninhabited frontier; it was a prosperous agricultural region where five thousand Native Americans and hundreds of Africans and their descendants lived. In 1823, an American trader visited Chucochatti and several other towns in the region northeast of Tampa Bay, where autonomous Seminoles and Black Seminoles (a group whose status varied from freedom to a form of slavery) had flourished since the mid-eighteenth century. They raised livestock, planted crops in the region’s fertile savannahs, and sold their excess produce on the Spanish colonial market. Two turbulent decades later, white families had taken over Chucochatti and much of the rest of Florida. Early in the Second U.S.-Seminole War, American forces burned it along with many other Seminole towns. Several years later soldiers escorted white settlers there, including a handful of widowed or single women like Elizabeth Berry. Many of these early settlers (male and female) filed for free land just after the war under a new homestead law called the Armed Occupation Act (AOA). By 1850 there were 604 whites and 324 enslaved blacks living at Chucochatti, and the region had been renamed Benton County in honor of pro-expansion Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, who had championed the new land law. Several waves of U.S. military, Indian, and welfare policies had wrested this productive corner of the continent from Native peoples and installed