The Threshold of Manifest Destiny. Laurel Clark Shire
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At each stage of Florida’s transition from Seminole villages to American farmland, Americans mobilized white women like Berry to support their efforts. Such women provided material labor and cultural support for the growing American settlements in Florida. They represented national growth as the spread of domesticity and civilization and rationalized the violence of territorial expansion as the protection of white American women and their homes. American journalists, settlers, and politicians also told and retold stories that placed white women into threatened homesteads in Florida. “Indian depredation” narratives enabled white Americans to paint the territory as their home, where autonomous Native American and black people threatened their property. Within that rhetorical context, those who predated U.S. settlers in Florida became invaders, while white Americans, who took possession of already settled land, became the victims. Americans naturalized this startling reversal by using racialized notions of civilization and savagery in proximity to white women and children, who were always presumed to be vulnerable innocents. Thus stories about Seminole men’s attacks on white women relied on a highly gendered ideology of female vulnerability and domesticity to frame white frontier settlers as innocent homemakers, repurposing domesticity for Manifest Destiny. In this way, white women’s domestic work in Florida provided needed physical, material, and reproductive labor and served the fundamentally ideological process of claiming Florida as home to white Americans (many of them slave owners) and not home to Seminole and free black families and communities.
This book examines the central role that gender (masculinity and femininity as understood through domesticity) and race (particularly through white women) together played in the effort to turn Florida into an American place. In the period from 1821, when the United States acquired Florida from Spain, through the Second U.S.-Seminole War (1835–1842) and the decades beyond, American leaders and settlers used white men’s and women’s physical labor to create homes, farms, families, and communities. The colonization of Florida illustrates how gender ideology—domesticity as well as masculinity—abetted settler colonialism in the early nineteenth-century United States.
Settler Colonialism
As the first territory added after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and a frontier that attracted many white migrants in the 1820s, Florida was on the threshold of Manifest Destiny. One of several early experiments in expansion, the aggressive white colonization of Florida provided Americans with a place to test various cultural and political methods of supporting national growth. White settler colonization turned out to be the most effective method, supported by federal policies that granted land to white families.
Settler colonialism in North America began with European colonial ventures. It continued after 1783 in the early U.S. republic in the southern and midwestern borderlands that would become states such as Kentucky, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri. While white settlement proceeded differently in each context, American settler colonialism shares much with European colonization elsewhere. In settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil, Europeans expanded their empires through the settlement of families—men and women—who created permanent, mixed societies in which whites dominated native peoples.3
In settler colonies, outsiders (white Europeans in many cases) invaded a place and used political, cultural, and economic structures to transform it into their space, turning themselves into its “natives.” Intending to stay permanently, settlers used legal and military methods to take and control the land. They also participated in a legal fiction that turned land into property that could be exclusively claimed by (white) individuals under colonial legal structures. Rather than claiming colonial space in the name of a monarch, however, settler colonists often declared their own sovereignty over the land. Many eventually asserted formal or informal independence from their empires of origin (as the United States did in 1776). The permanence of invading white settler families resulted in a perpetual conquest. While whites enjoyed land and citizenship in new territories, for the Native Americans coerced out of these lands, and the Mexicans and blacks denied basic rights and freedoms within them, U.S. expansion hardly felt like liberation. The settler/invaders never left, and indigenous survivors still live under colonial rule in settler societies, as Seminole and Mikasuki peoples do in Florida today.4
Unlike other kinds of imperial regimes, large numbers of women from the invading culture helped to colonize settler colonies, providing vital domestic and reproductive labor to create homes and reproduce white families and society. Settler women’s work was essential to colonial efforts to dispossess indigenous peoples because they created settlements that were both permanent and dominated by white cultural norms (albeit hybrid colonial ones, distinct from both European and indigenous North American cultures). Other than the presence of a large number of white women, settler colonies were similar to other colonies, and to varying degrees most combined the appropriation of Native land with resource extraction and forced labor.5
White settler colonialism in North America placed Native Americans and people of African descent in different positions. Settler societies shared what theorists call a “logic of elimination” regarding indigenous peoples. White settlers rendered land available to themselves by eliminating indigenous peoples; they engaged in violent campaigns to exterminate, assimilate, or segregate indigenous peoples who held prior claims to the space. By contrast, displaced populations of subordinated or enslaved people supplied the labor force needed to build a new society on that land and extract profit from it to benefit the white ruling class. The importation of an alienated and subaltern labor force was fully compatible with settler colonialism, as racial slavery was in the United States. Racial hierarchy arose from white settler colonies’ needs for land and labor, which relied on eliminating indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans.6
In the United States, settlers often began to unofficially colonize territory through passive, instead of active, expansionist policy. Rather than sending out settlers formally charged with civilizing conquered territory (although it eventually resorted to that in Florida), typically the U.S. government just failed to prevent settlers from squatting on lands in contact zones, and it later granted them preemption (the right to purchase land before auction) or even free public land. When, inevitably, violence erupted between white squatters and Native Americans, national leaders did not directly bear the burden of responsibility. Thus the government could rhetorically pursue peace with indigenous groups (or assimilation) even as its unofficial colonial army (white settler families) encroached on their lands. The young and cash-poor federal government slowly won more territory without having to officially declare simultaneous wars against all the indigenous peoples in its borderlands, and white settlers acquired more and more land through preemption and other generous federal land policies—policies framed as Jacksonian Free-Soilism, not imperialism. Of course, on many occasions violence between whites and Native Americans in frontier zones erupted to such a degree that the government had to intervene, usually when white encroachment had provoked Native resistance that resulted in the widely reported killing of white settler families. At such points, the U.S. military or state militias, sent to put down indigenous resistance, could be framed as protecting national borders and defending white women and children from the Native Americans, which conveniently made aggressive expansion look like defensive peacekeeping. Land recently wrested from Native Americans and (in the South) open to slavery was the tacit reward for aggressive, individualistic, entrepreneurial behavior. “Settler colonist” may sound more innocent than “imperialist invader,” but white settlers were far from harmless.7
Florida’s history produced a unique version of settler colonialism. Many groups had laid claim to Florida before 1821, so the territory that Americans acquired in 1821 was already home to European colonists, autonomous Native Americans, and free blacks. This mixed population made Americans extremely anxious about their southern border; these groups might ally with foreign empires, or each other, and invade the United States or launch an insurrection against American slavery. A brief summary of Florida’s past reveals who lived there on the eve of transfer to the United States in 1821, how these different constituencies provoked white American anxiety, and how each would either be coopted or driven out to make way for American settlers and their enslaved labor force in the decades that followed. White settler colonization, enabled by white women’s labor in multiple ways, represented