The Threshold of Manifest Destiny. Laurel Clark Shire
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high demand in territorial Florida. The material value of a slave was not only what he or she would bring at the slave market but also the financial benefits he or she brought an owner when mortgaged or hired out. This practice enabled aspiring planters to clear fields and build homes much faster than they could have using only family labor, or if they had to wait for human property purchased from the Upper South. Rented enslaved people helped build Florida’s infrastructure as they labored in sawmills, turpentine camps, and on the railroad. Those hired by the U.S. military during the Second U.S.-Seminole War were even more directly deployed in service to territorial expansion.19
Whites benefited from their property rights in enslaved people, but the consequences for enslaved people were dire. Their “natural increase”—children—enhanced the value of a woman’s slaveholding over time, but this resulted in the traumatic division of many enslaved families by sale or in wills. While land was static, household and slave property were dynamic and able to literally move with the changing boundaries of U.S. territory. Some wives’ enslaved property was the only wealth that enabled their husbands to reach planter status, which was often the goal that prompted migration. Enslaved people suffered, however, when taken away from families and communities to new frontiers. In myriad ways, slaves were vital to expansion and settlement in Florida, but the enslaved people whom whites bought, sold, and hired suffered due to their value and mobility. Florida’s enslaved men, women, and children faced harsh working conditions, many were sent or sold away from kin in the Upper South, and all experienced the privations of the frontier and the dangers of U.S.-Indian warfare.20
The court records reflect white women’s material, and perhaps ideological, investment in slavery. When their enslaved property was threatened or damaged, they actively sought protection or redress in the courts. In a survey of county and circuit civil court records in Escambia County, Florida, between 1821 and 1845, eighty-eight cases involved either a female defendant or plaintiff (or both), and forty-five of these cases also concerned an enslaved person or persons. One-third of seventy-eight cases involving a woman and her property in St. Johns County between 1821 and 1845 included enslaved human property.21
For reasons related to their value and mobility, some white women preferred enslaved human property. They often specifically asked for their inheritance portion in enslaved people, or to sell land rather than enslaved persons to satisfy debts against an estate, even though by law enslaved human property was supposed to be sold before land in settling an intestate estate. In Gadsden County in 1833 Sarah Stone petitioned the court to settle her deceased husband’s debts through the sale of land rather than enslaved people, as the money she made renting the enslaved people out supported her family. When Margarita Bonifay married John de la Rua, her mother gave her $1,100 in separate property in the form of town lots in Pensacola. In 1832 Bonifay de la Rua became concerned about the depreciation of real estate in Pensacola, so she asked her husband to sell the lots and use the money to purchase an enslaved woman and her four children for her separate estate. He complied.22
In the context of national and slavery expansion in the South, white wives’ ownership of enslaved people and household property points to their role in the creation of southern households. Such households were rural and patriarchal and were the location of production and reproduction. They required the presence and labor of white women and children and often, enslaved blacks, to produce white mastery and the means of subsistence and profit.23 Creating such households was directly related to the nationalist project of expansion, as their construction one by one on the Florida frontier eventually created permanent white American settlements.
The separate property of a Middle Florida resident, Laura Wirt Randall, illustrates how white women’s property aided white settler colonialism at the expense of enslaved blacks and indigenous people. Randall moved to Florida in 1827, following her new husband, Thomas, the son of an Annapolis, Maryland, merchant who had studied law and served during the War of 1812. The educated daughter of U.S. Attorney General William Wirt, Laura had family wealth and connections that enabled the newlyweds to enter frontier Florida as elite planters. Laura’s dowry, set aside in a separate estate entrusted to her maternal uncles, included land, furniture, food, china, crystal, and enslaved people worth $5,000. Furthermore, her father worked his Washington connections to get Randall appointed as a judge to the Florida Supreme Court.24
Laura Wirt Randall’s parents were careful to legally protect her separate property. In December 1827, her father wrote to her:
I enclose you the promised deed for the land and negroes, which will have to be executed by your two uncles, the trustees, and then recorded in the court of Leon County, and the sooner you have it attended to, the better. The Judge [her husband, Thomas Randall] will observe that I am guided by a Territorial law of Florida in the form of acknowledgement by your mother and myself, that law adopting the form in use where the parties reside. If there has been any later law which changes the formalities on this subject the Judge will apprise me of it and return the deed for execution anew. If it is desirable for you to have the patents for the land and Tilghman’s Bill of Sale for the negroes, these also will be sent…. instead of having the thirteen negroes mentioned in the original bill of sale you have only eleven: the remaining five hundred dollars which represented the other two negroes, I sent you by the last mail. The negroes I hope will arrive shortly after your receipt of this letter. Your two thousand dollars worth of furniture and provisions will I hope reach you before this letter and put you in better spirits than when you wrote last.25
Her father instructed Laura to protect her new property because as a post-treaty (post-1818) wife in Florida, she fell under common law rules, which allowed her parents to settle a separate estate upon her at the time of her marriage by filing an inventory of her property in a Chancery Court (her property was in Jefferson County, which had just been carved out of Leon County in January 1827).
Laura Wirt Randall’s separate estate had absolutely disastrous consequences for enslaved people and for Native Americans in the region. Laura and her trustees made decisions about her estate in 1827 that uprooted eleven enslaved people from Maryland and relocated them, against their will, to the Randalls’ new plantation, Belmont. When they arrived, the slaves were all sick, a result of their exposure and exhaustion from the long trek to Florida. Many of them were probably also heartbroken. David had been forcibly separated from his wife, Sophy, and their children when Randall purchased him in Maryland. He missed them so intensely that Randall, fearing David “would infest the whole body of the black community with his despondency,” asked William Wirt to purchase Sophy and the children and send them to Belmont in 1828. He did so. One of their children, Sally, was so desperately unhappy at Belmont that she attempted to poison the overseer. Laura Wirt Randall’s “separate property” included at least a dozen people who suffered physically and emotionally as a result of her power to buy them and move them hundreds of miles to labor for the benefit of her new family.26
Belmont’s location in Jefferson County also connects Randall’s property to indigenous dispossession. Middle Florida was not uninhabited virgin forest when the Randalls relocated there in the 1820s. Lower Creeks from Georgia had migrated into the area around 1715 and founded settlements along the Apalachicola River and around Lake Miccosukee (which was just a few miles north of the Randall plantation in Jefferson County; Thomas Randall purchased corn from “Micausukees” in the late 1820s).27 The Apalachicolas and Miccosukees were two of three main indigenous political entities in Florida in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As the conflicts of the 1810s in West and Middle Florida revealed, control over land in Middle Florida had important geopolitical significance. Americans believed these autonomous Native American peoples, once the allies of British and Spanish foes, now posed a threat to the dominance and safety of Middle Florida’s planters. The 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek, made before the Americans had the power to completely displace them, had established small reserves for the Apalachicola chiefs on the lands they already inhabited along the rivers, as well as a reserve further east for Miccosukees and recent Creek refugees from the Red Stick War. Soon, however, the desires for that land expressed by whites like Thomas and Laura Randall would challenge these arrangements.28
Caught up in what Laura called a “mania” for Florida land, her husband, father, and uncles contributed to a