The Threshold of Manifest Destiny. Laurel Clark Shire
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Resonant with the long-standing genre of Indian captivity narratives, Indian depredation narratives from Florida framed stories about Native American violence on white settlers in the sensationalist language of early nineteenth-century print culture, using a term drawn from federal frontier policy. Under the Indian Depredation Claims system (1796–1920) the U.S. government promised to indemnify all losses that American suffered from “Indian depredations” if the attacks took place outside of Indian territory during a time of peace and if white settlers had not continued the cycle of violence with a revenge attack. In the absence of kidnapping, depredation stories focused on injured white bodies and homes.4
In numerous ways, Florida Indian depredation stories followed the conventions of Indian captivity narratives. Narratives of Indian war and captivity were among the major frontier myths in which American national identity and culture originated, and Americans had been recounting the horrific details of Native American violence against whites for hundreds of years. Authors of such stories sought to explain and justify the violent campaigns they waged to take the lands of Native Americans and to establish their fundamental difference from those they eventually deemed racial inferiors. The depredation stories from Florida, like captivity narratives, featured “savage” violence against white (and sometimes nonwhite) men, women, and children, and highlighted scalping and the use of exotic implements such as “tomahawks” and “scalping knives” (known as axes and knives when wielded by whites). The narrator usually decries the attackers as “indiscriminate” for harming white women and children, a label Americans had long used to establish the uncivilized nature of indigenous warfare (and justify their own violence on Native women and children). “Indiscriminate” Indian depredations were cited as early as 1819 in Florida. The presence of vulnerable white women helped make them more sensational and compelling stories, and so narrators highlighted female victims, as when the editor of Niles’ Weekly Register noted that “these barbarities have been perpetrated chiefly upon females.”5 Following the conventions of antebellum culture, depredation accounts emphasized female passivity, piety, maternity, and domesticity. They invoke particular sympathy for the plight of white mothers who, unable to protect their children, were forced to watch them harmed or killed. Captivity narratives and depredation accounts focused on female victims because this allowed them to invoke emotional, sympathetic responses using gender conventions, which dictated that such victims were innocent and civilized because they were maternal and domestic. The emphasis on domestic spaces and on maternal and infant victims harkened back to captivity narratives even as they made Florida scenes of armed struggle difficult to cast as conventional war zones.6
White gender norms prescribed that dominant white men protect vulnerable and subordinate white women, so when white men appeared in depredation accounts authors tended to glorify the bravery, chivalry, and gallantry of white men, contrasted with descriptions of women’s vulnerability. Many white men were killed in the initial stage of an attack attempting to protect their families, while others (as the narratives often explain) were away fighting this war on other fronts or had already been killed doing so. Even when a man died in an Indian depredation, it was sympathy for the woman and children he left behind that authors expressed. In accounts of the attack on Clement and Jane Johns, for example, narrators always described the murder of Clement Johns but followed that with sympathy for his widow, not for Clement. This made it possible to evacuate all traces of white aggression from the story: the white men who had invaded Florida were framed as the heads of families rather than soldiers or squatters, and they were gone. Left behind were their families—the women and children whom nineteenth-century Americans understood not as invaders of indigenous lands but faithful followers of migrating husbands and fathers. They were innocent victims, then, of their loyalty to men unable to protect them and of the “barbaric” Seminoles.
Alongside white mothers, white children also appear as victims in Florida Indian depredation stories. If these stories are reliable, white parents left many children at home alone (or with other relatives or enslaved black guardians) in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, for in many stories white mothers return home to find their houses in flames and their children endangered. In some cases this was an embellishment that heightened the sentimental and sensational appeal of the tale, although in other instances it appears that the war left white mothers with few alternatives. Faced with fulfilling the duties of the absent male household head as well as their own work, perhaps white women sometimes risked leaving children at home, particularly since Florida’s roads were no safer than their homesteads.
Florida Indian depredation stories also borrowed from the emerging domestic literature and scandalous dime novels of their milieu. The rise of domestic ideology in the northern United States engendered a whole “culture of sentiment.” Authors, artists, journalists, photographers, and educators produced sentimental texts intended to make their consumers feel emotions, especially pity, sympathy, and grief. Sentimental culture also presumed that certain people (whites) were those who felt sympathy, while others (indigenous, enslaved) were the objects and recipients of their pity and sympathy. Tellers of Indian captivity and depredation narratives typically expected their audience to feel horror, fear, sympathy, and solidarity with white victims of violence, and they used sentimental language to achieve this end. Unlike slave narratives, however, they did not as frequently suggest that nonwhites deserved sympathy, and almost none of the Florida narratives do. Early in the war (January 21, 1836), the Jacksonville Courier included this assessment of recent depredations: “None whose hearts are not ice can hear recitals of such dreadful deeds of massacre, without sorrow and grief. We deeply sympathise with afflicted friends in St. Augustine.”7 Only Americans with hearts of ice could resist the affective impact of these stories, which expected them to feel sympathy for the poor residents of Florida who daily faced Seminole “massacres.”8
While the Florida depredation stories invoked sympathy for whites, they were less invested in respectable, virtuous, and socially redemptive lessons than many sentimental novels and captivity narratives were, and typically devoted more of their pages to the shocking and horrific details typical of sensational literature, which emphasized materiality and corporeality. In one frequent element, for example, depredation narrators describe a mother and infant killed by the same bullet or felled by a common stab wound, and then express horror at the barbarity of those who would murder a very young “baby at the breast.” Sentimentalism’s lowbrow cousin, sensational stories filled the story papers, pamphlet novels, and newspapers of the mid-nineteenth century. As innovative publishers and editors capitalized on new technology and began to produce cheaply made texts aimed at the masses, they relied on street sales rather than subscriptions, and so editors chose outrageous headlines full of scandal, crime, violence, and sexuality. The tragic, violent death of a white woman was a favorite sensational subject in the 1830s and 1840s, when the deaths of New Yorkers Helen Jewett and Mary Rogers occupied a great deal of attention. As some readers consumed those dramatic tales, others were reading about the mangled bodies of white mothers left in the wake of depredating Seminoles in Florida. Shelley Streeby argues that U.S. expansionism in the 1840s influenced sensational literature in ways that shaped how Americans constructed norms of class, race, and gender at home and abroad. In the “double vision” of this literature, images of the working-class city and the frontier West colluded to reinforce the boundaries of race, gender, and class that expansion and capitalism sometimes unsettled (and often reproduced) in the nineteenth century. In the sensational story papers and pamphlets, a variety of undesirables populated both seamy urban underworlds and the borderlands of an expanding America: prostitutes, immigrants, Mexicans, Indians, and Cubans, all of them a threat to white women and to (white) “American values.” Against these characters, authors arrayed “real” heroic American men, workers, frontiersmen, even filibusters, consolidating white male citizenship against perceived threats to its continued dominance. Popular cultural representations of urban and frontier spaces and people influenced political culture and vice versa. Nineteenth-century popular fiction reveals how Manifest Destiny offered new backdrops for sensational stories that entertained Americans focused on expanding their nation into former Spanish territories in the Americas.9
Although Florida Indian depredation narratives shared the sensationalism, sentimentalism, gender ideals, and racial assumptions of other narratives of war and captivity, they also differed, primarily