The Threshold of Manifest Destiny. Laurel Clark Shire
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Indian captivity narratives and highlights the importance of household property in white settler colonies (as does the history of property law). By spotlighting sensational destruction, Florida Indian depredation narratives reveal the central role of white women and expansionist domesticity to the U.S. colonization of Florida.
Reports about Seminole attacks on whites in Florida circulated widely, especially after the United States formally declared a second war on the Seminoles in December 1835. Indian depredation stories, as I refer to these accounts, appeared in private sources such as letters, diaries, and memoirs and in public ones, including newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides. Typical Indian depredation stories from Florida begin with an attack by a small band of Native American men (usually identified as Seminoles, but sometimes called Creeks, Mikasukis, or Apalachicolas) on white settlers. Occasionally, Black Seminoles or enslaved people appear as assailants or victims in these stories. The scene is typically a white homestead or plantation, but sometimes Seminoles assailed travelers on Florida’s rudimentary roadways. Narrators repeated several elements in endless combinations in depredation reports about “the Florida War”: innocent white mothers and children attacked at home by Native American and (sometimes) black men, killed or horribly mutilated with “savage” weapons, and their domestic realms plundered and burned. The consistency, ubiquity, and sensationalism of these stories made them culturally powerful and also responded to and re-created certain expectations in their American audience, predicated on assumptions of white female innocence and nonwhite “savage barbarity.”
The fact that white women were injured or killed in the Second U.S.-Seminole War proved very important to the ways that American citizens, journalists, and politicians framed the war. As with stories from many other settler colonial regimes, these narratives relied upon gender to justify colonial violence. Depredation stories cast white women and children as the “innocents” whom only barbaric savages would attack; but the presence of white families was a real threat to the Seminoles in Florida. As in most settler colonies, conquest and settlement occurred simultaneously in Florida as settlers arrived before and during Indian removal, and armed conflicts over land coincided with settlement. Most white male settlers brought families and, if wealthy enough, enslaved people with them, while others found wives and formed new families once they arrived. Growing white families competed with indigenous peoples for land, food, and resources, and signaled that soon there would be increasing numbers of whites claiming this frontier as their own “native” home. Women’s reproductive and productive labor was indispensable to the creation of new homes and the next generation of Americans on the frontier. The work of enslaved people supported the productive and reproductive work of white women for the benefit of white households.2 Far more than just symbols of “barbaric” indigenous violence or white “civilization,” white women were absolutely vital to white households and growing communities. Since this book aims to clarify white women’s part in Manifest Destiny, it is important to note that Florida Indian depredation accounts were part of the historical process of obscuring the importance of women’s labor to national expansion. In counterpoint to the image of women as innocent victims in Seminole depredation narratives, this chapter highlights white women’s labor as a colonizing force that assisted in Seminole dispossession and in the white settlement of Florida.
Although they deemphasized women’s expansionist work, depredation narratives inadvertently offer evidence of its significance, for they paid special attention to the destruction of the families and the domestic spaces that white women created in Florida. A central component of a cultural campaign that represented Florida as already “home” to American settlers, the narratives represent Indian depredations as attacks on the home in two senses: Native Americans stole or destroyed white settlers’ property, and many whites faced poverty or fled the territory as a result. Along with the material consequences, depredations were also attacks on white mothers and children, the families who transformed property into a “true home.” That cultural labor was significant beyond its sentimental appeal, because it once again framed whites as settlers who had been attacked by a savage enemy rather than as a colonizing force that the Seminoles targeted as a strategy of resistance to removal. This frame presumed, rather than explicitly argued, that whites had a natural claim to their Florida properties as home, and therefore that the Seminoles did not. Sentimental accounts of scorched and plundered frontier cabins had the power to frame Indian removal as the defense of white women and children.
While they gloss white women’s work as colonizers and represent women as innocent victims, Florida Indian depredation narratives do illustrate that white women fought on the front lines of the Second U.S.-Seminole War. Many homesteads became battlegrounds as violence erupted in Florida between 1835 and 1842, and many white women’s domestic realms became central sites of depredation accounts. Neither military nor women’s historians often place nineteenth-century white women on battlefields. Usually they are stoking home fires and observing from the sidelines. This was not the case in Florida (nor was it on most frontiers), because the Seminoles brought this conflict to whites’ doorsteps. They refused removal and, since they had fewer warriors and resources than the U.S. military, waged a guerilla war. Since this was a conflict aimed at ousting them from the territory in order to make Florida safe for white settlement and slavery, and because American troops frequently destroyed Seminole homes and families, they resisted and retaliated by attacking white homesteads and plantations, where white women defended their homes.
Florida Indian depredation stories were propaganda rooted in real events. This chapter examines the ways that they shaped perceptions and policies, but they are also evidence that white Americans and Seminole people terrorized each other between 1835 and 1842. Although widely reported, it is difficult to quantify this violence. The rations program that supported Florida’s “suffering inhabitants” between 1836 and 1842 (described in detail in Chapter 4) furnishes some information about how many white settlers in Florida lost homes and family members to Seminole attacks. In June 1842, as the war was closing, there were 1,795 people on the rolls of suffering inhabitants drawing rations from the U.S. military. They came from eighteen households that had been “broken up by Indians” (some more than once), while another twenty-three households had lost civilian husbands, fathers, or sons (and in one case a wife) who had been “killed by the Indians,” and another fifteen households had lost the support of men who died in military service (from disease, wounds, or in battle). All the ration rolls before 1842 are missing, so it is difficult to estimate exactly how many homes and civilians the Seminoles destroyed, but given the numbers from 1842 the number of households disrupted was probably in the hundreds. In addition to an unknown number of civilian deaths, 1,466 American soldiers died in the Second U.S.-Seminole War (mostly from disease, not combat). The Seminoles suffered even higher losses from whites. Americans burned many villages during the U.S.-Seminole Wars and killed hundreds of Seminole warriors and civilians, although an exact count is unknown. The U.S. removed 4,420 indigenous people and their allies of African descent from Florida during the Second U.S.-Seminole War, and approximately 1,400 died on the journey west.3
As it is hard to determine the frequency of all this violence, it is often impossible to verify whether the precise details of a particular Indian depredation story are historically factual. Did Jane Johns really use her own blood to put out the fire burning her legs? It seems unlikely. More important than the veracity of that sensational detail is that white Americans in 1836 found it credible that Native Americans would shoot, scalp, and set fire to a white woman and leave her for dead in her burning frontier home. They would have taken her innocence (in spite of her presence on a contested frontier) and her attackers’ savagery for granted. While American accounts placed Seminole violence against whites (especially women and children) in the foreground, they consistently ignored or justified the violence that whites perpetrated against Native Americans and blacks, including women and children. No accounts of “white depredations” upon the Seminoles made their way into print (although the oral accounts passed down among Seminole descendants provide some alternative views of the war, as the next chapter recounts). Regardless of the frequency or verity of Seminole attacks on white Florida settlers, the widespread circulation of depredation accounts in private, public, and political discourse about the Second U.S.-Seminole War testifies that they performed a weighty set of cultural and political tasks in narrating this conflict.