The Threshold of Manifest Destiny. Laurel Clark Shire
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to feed captives, there was no longer the incentive of a ransom system, and there was no market for trading captives, since the United States would send captive Seminoles to Oklahoma, not trade them back in exchange for a white captive. With very few exceptions, then, these were tales about depredations upon families and property, not about captivity among the Seminoles.10
The blacks who sometimes appear in Florida depredation narratives also distinguish these stories from other accounts, which rarely featured people of African descent. Unlike the slavery debate in other frontier states, the Florida debate did not turn on whether slavery would expand into Florida, because it already existed there, and no one doubted that it would continue. Rather, slavery shaped expansion into Florida because proslavery Americans wanted to conquer and remove Native Americans and free blacks from Florida in order to prevent any more slave runaways and because they feared a joint rebellion of Seminoles and blacks. As new Florida resident Corinna Brown put it in 1837, “should the slaves rise about this time, it would make glorious work—the horrors of St. Domingo enacted over again in earnest.”11 While the feared slave insurrection never occurred in Florida, the concerns of many slaveholding whites were very real. Some blacks lived and fought with the Seminoles, and some historians classify the Second U.S.-Seminole War as the longest and most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history as well as a war of Seminole resistance. Although they are somewhat rare in depredation accounts, when blacks were present they brought the specter of a slave rebellion clearly into the frame. This heightened the fear of the reader and further justified the war as a necessary defense—in this case, against the implicit threat of a slave rebellion. Judge Robert Reid warned U.S. Secretary of State John Forsyth just before the Second U.S.-Seminole War began that “while we guard ourselves against a savage foe, we should be prepared for an evil—not entirely out of the list of contingencies—yet nearer home.”12 He meant, of course, the slaves.13
Another difference from other narratives is that, in Florida Indian depredation stories, after the attack the narratives return to the scene of destroyed domestic space, rather than following white captives into Indian country. To “depredate” is to plunder or rob, and these accounts focus on human victims and their property losses. The Indian Depredation Claims system, designed to limit cycles of retaliatory violence on American frontiers, invited peacetime victims to make claims against the federal government for property losses they incurred from Native Americans. Under this policy, citizens of the United States reported “Indian depredations” to local authorities, agents of the Indian Office, or even members of Congress in hopes that by following the proper bureaucratic procedures they would receive compensation. They rarely did, but the policy codified the “Indian depredation” as an officially recognized form of American settler victimization. If whites settled on the frontier and Native Americans attacked them, the Native peoples and the national government bore responsibility, and white settlers remained innocent of any wrongdoing, even as their encroaching settlements enriched them and enlarged the national territory. In this way, the nation expanded without formally declaring war on the indigenous peoples its citizens displaced. Illustrating how clearly “invasion [was] a structure rather than an event” in U.S. settler colonization, the U.S. government put this policy in place in 1796 and continued it until 1921. Leaders anticipated continuous borderlands violence even during times of formal peace because they knew that expanding white settlements would continually pressure indigenous ones; in fact they counted on it. Although the wartime depredations in Florida were not eligible for reimbursement, Floridians knew of the claims system and several filed claims for Creek and Seminole depredations alleged to have occurred in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida in 1836 and 1837. In 1837 a congressional committee investigated and rejected their claims. Although the federal Indian Depredation Claims system did not create Florida Indian depredation narratives, the existence of this policy surely helped to reshape traditional captivity accounts into the genre of “Indian depredations.”14
Fire is an important feature of the typical Florida narrative’s focus on the destruction of property. After the Seminoles plundered, they set their victims’ property alight. As with “indiscriminate” violence against “innocents,” American narrators attributed the use of fire as a practice of the “barbaric” Seminoles, although American troops plundered and burned any villages they encountered during the First, Second, and Third Seminole Wars, setting fire to Seminole homes, supplies, and fields after taking any provisions they desired. Following the violence and the fire, depredation narratives catalogue the property stolen or destroyed in the attack. The details about property damage linked the violence to colonization: how would whites ever settle in Florida if Seminoles kept burning down their farms? Any subsequent pursuit of the attackers, or rumors of the site of their next attack, generally closed out depredation accounts.15
Private Accounts
Depredation narratives had the power to transform whites’ perceptions of the Florida conflict. Throughout the early nineteenth century Americans in Florida who survived or witnessed depredations recorded those events in letters, diaries, journals, or memoirs. In their accounts it is possible to observe an individual’s emotional and political reactions to Native American violence against white women framed as depredation. While some people might express sympathy for the Seminoles in the abstract, once Americans observed a bloody attack they began to view the Seminoles as aggressors, not victims. Operating at an extremely emotional level, depredation stories reframed Indian removal as white defense, one sensational story at a time.
Well before the start of the Second U.S.-Seminole War, Nancy Cone Hagan was so moved by one Indian depredation that she wrote a poem to commemorate the deaths of several white children, “On the Death of Allen Carr’s Children, Murdered by the Indians in 1826 Near Col. Gadsden’s in Leon County.”16 On December 6, 1826, a small band of Miccosukee warriors attacked Carr’s homestead and killed four white children, their uncle, and one enslaved black man. Allen Carr was a squatter on land “originally that of the Indian,” that John Gamble (maternal uncle of Laura Randall) had speculatively purchased in 1823. According to family notes compiled in 1898 by his son (Major Robert Gamble), the Seminoles “were on the eve of leaving the country, and, in the hope of avoiding the necessity a number of the young warriors attempted to embroil the tribe in war, and to that end they murdered Carr’s family.”17 Hagan paid no attention to the motives of the Miccosukees fighting to keep their homes, however. The first stanza of her poem contains elements typical of depredation narratives: an absent head of household and a baby at the breast:
Poor Allen Carr was absent, the cruel Indians
knew, Took the advantage of the helpless, their savage rage to show.
The mother too was gone from home, a lucky circumstance,
Which thereby saved herself and son, the infant at the breast.18
Hagan’s poem and the newspaper reports never offer any explanation for why Allen Carr and his wife left their oldest children with an uncle and departed their home. In the following stanzas Hagan included other typical elements: the “spotless innocence” of the slain white children, the destruction of the Carr’s home, and specific mention of instruments of “Indian” violence, the hatchet and the scalping knife.19 Yet Hagan’s poem also suggested—as later accounts would not—that perhaps some compromise with the Seminoles was possible:
But have we no compassion for the savage forest men?
And try to cultivate them? Let mercy be our theme.
Teach them to be more human and teach them all we can.
And tell them of the Saviour and of the gospel plan.20
Encouraging a Christian mission to convert the Seminoles (who apparently need to be taught how to be human), she does not only call for punishment. In this, she displays a lingering commitment to indigenous “civilization” policies that policy makers in the Early Republic had embraced—plans to assimilate Native Americans rather than remove or kill them. With the rise of scientific racism and the ideology of Manifest Destiny in the 1820s and 1830s, civilization schemes would become supplanted by Indian removal policies. While Hagan responded with some pious sympathy for the unsaved “savages” in