The Threshold of Manifest Destiny. Laurel Clark Shire
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increased very quickly, from $1.25 per acre in 1828 to $5.00 per acre in 1830.29 Their investments in land, combined with the large numbers of slaves they brought with them, mirrored the movement of many of their neighbors, who all hoped to become wealthy planters. As Americans streamed into Middle Florida, they overwhelmed the indigenous communities there. By 1840, 50.58 percent of the total American population of Florida lived in Middle Florida’s six counties. In Jefferson County, where the Randalls bought land, enslaved people outnumbered free whites (62 percent of total population). The enslaved people on Jefferson County plantations produced 4,639 bales of cotton (15.32 percent of all the cotton grown in Florida in that year). By 1860 enslaved people made up 64.5 percent of the population in Jefferson County, where they toiled in the fields and at the gins that produced 10,847 bales (16.64 percent of Florida’s cotton crop in that year). Jefferson County quickly turned from Native ground to a white plantation agricultural colony.30
As white demand made the land more valuable, and as the population of whites and enslaved blacks became denser, Americans applied increasing pressure on indigenous peoples to leave. Americans wanted the land for growing cotton and feared that Native Americans would offer freedom to enslaved blacks and attack white settler families in retaliation for white encroachment and theft. As a result, some Apalachicola and Miccosukee people voluntarily relocated. In 1833 Apalachicola bands led by John Blount, Davy Elliott, and Yellow Hair (not the Cheyenne warrior famously battled by Buffalo Bill Cody) departed for Texas. Those who remained suffered continued violence and raids from whites. To secure their own protection, they aided the U.S. government during the Second U.S.-Seminole War and even surrendered their guns, which left them defenseless against white attackers and other Native Americans whom they had angered by aiding the Americans. By 1838 the Apalachicolas were in a desperate situation; starving and facing indigenous enemies, they were also denied aid by their white allies. With no other choice available, the remaining Apalachicolas departed for the West in October.31
Laura Randall’s separate estate, along with the property that other white wives used to expand slavery and white settlement in Florida, had far-reaching consequences for peoples throughout the American Southeast. The ambitions of whites such as the Randalls resulted in the loss of Native American land and autonomy, which forced indigenous groups to relinquish key parts of their subsistence and identity. In addition, enslaved black men and women lost their health, their spouses and children, and their ties to former homes in other states. The opportunities that whites found in the southern borderlands relied upon the racial ideologies that undergirded Indian removal and racial slavery.
At the same time, while she was privileged by her wealth, Laura Wirt Randall was not empowered by it. Although her decisions had terrible consequences for nonwhites in Florida, her husband and uncles controlled her estate, and her wealth did not grant her the freedom to do as she liked. She reluctantly married at age twenty-four (practically a spinster in that time), and was never happy about moving to Florida. Raised and educated among the Washington, D.C., elite in the early nineteenth century, she tried to settle into housekeeping and motherhood on an isolated frontier but longed to see her friends and family. Depressed and exhausted after a miscarriage, she became dependent on laudanum (a narcotic frequently prescribed to white women for “female complaints” in the nineteenth century). After four pregnancies between 1828 and 1832, Laura Wirt Randall died in 1833 at age thirty after a lingering postpartum illness. Her unhappiness was in no way commensurate with that of the enslaved families or indigenous people her estate helped to displace, but in contrast to the white men of her class, Laura Wirt Randall was hardly an independent citizen with property. She was the carrier of wealth between men: her father, her husband, and her hypothetical sons. Judge Thomas Randall benefited most from her wealth, for his marriage to Laura Wirt garnered him a state Supreme Court appointment and an entrée into the planter elite. The Randalls illustrate that separate property rights accrued to Florida wives because they were white bearers of domesticity and because white wives’ estates generally reinforced the race and gender norms of patriarchy and slavery, not because lawmakers or judges intended to make them the equals of white men.32
Though it rarely facilitated their liberation, white wives’ property did promote and support white settlement and supremacy in Florida. Enslaved people and domestic property were, like women, mobile. As frontiers expanded seemingly infinitely, women followed, with the things they used to carve “civilization” out of the wilderness. In addition to the material property they brought with them, white women brought domesticity, the cultural ideology that reproduced what Americans believed were white homes superior to the former residences of Native Americans and free blacks. On a frontier, white women’s domestic work acquired nationalist consequences. Expansionist domesticity established and policed the boundary between the “civilizing” culture of the colonizers and the “barbaric” culture of those displaced or colonized.33
Free People of Color in Court
Enslaved blacks and Native Americans in Florida were not the only people for whom U.S. expansion spelled misfortune. In the territorial period, even as white women’s property rights expanded, U.S. law eroded the civil and property rights of free blacks. Many of them were the wives, consorts, or descendants of prominent white patriarchs and had owned property in Florida before 1821. However, in spite of two articles in the Adams-Onís Treaty that might have protected their rights, over the next four decades the very same courts that upheld the rights of married white women under that treaty eroded the rights of free “Spanish inhabitants” of African or mixed racial descent. Article 8 (mentioned above) protected the property rights of Florida’s Spanish inhabitants (which turned out to include married women), while Article 6 stipulated that “the Inhabitants” of Florida “shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States … and admitted to the enjoyment of all the privileges, rights, and immunities of the Citizens of the United States.” While U.S. officials might have interpreted this to include free blacks, who had enjoyed many civil rights in Spanish Florida, they did not. When it came to the rights of free black Spanish colonists in Florida, U.S. courts almost never fulfilled any of these promises of the treaty. This inconsistency reveals that while U.S. courts and legislators cited the requirements of international treaty law when they granted separate property rights to married white women, race deeply influenced their decision to do so.34
“White” Spanish wives (those not of African descent) were not denied citizenship rights and retained their rights to separate property. As historians David Weber and Frank Marotti have noted, Americans greeted Spanish inhabitants of European descent who remained after the change of flags as allies rather than rivals because they were few in number, there was a desperate need for “civilized” settlers, and they were united against common enemies: Seminoles and Black Seminoles. This aspect of Florida’s transition to U.S. rule illustrates the historical and contingent ways in which race is socially constructed. In the racial landscape of territorial Florida, those who might not have been considered white elsewhere were incorporated into white society because Americans were far more concerned about distinguishing “civilized” whites from blacks and Indians than they were with making distinctions among European Protestants and Catholics. While cultural distinctions remained significant to individual identity, they did not matter structurally.35
This was not the case for Floridians of non-European descent, especially those with darker skin. Local and territorial laws quickly limited the right of free blacks in Florida to assemble, bear arms, serve on juries, testify against whites in court, or marry across the color line. By the 1840s, localities unfairly taxed free blacks and required them to have white guardians. Sheriffs coerced them into manual labor projects, whipped them for misdemeanors, and subjected them to curfews. Free blacks did petition or sue for their rights under Article 6, but U.S. courts did not always uphold their rights, unlike white married women’s property rights, violating the treaty provisions in law and in practice.36
In an increasingly hostile racial environment, many free people of color fought to retain the nearly equal rights and property the Spanish Crown had granted them. Very few of them were successful in court. Women of wealth and status, kin to prominent white men or to powerful Creek or Seminole leaders, met with some success. With the help of several trusted friends and lawyers, Anna Kingsley, the African-born first wife of Scottish land baron Zephaniah