The Threshold of Manifest Destiny. Laurel Clark Shire
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American exceptionalism—the notion that America was different and better than European empires—tends to further obscure this in the U.S. case. Previous generations of U.S. historians argued that the United States was never imperialist so long as its territorial acquisitions were contiguous annexations within the continent; but that argument no longer holds. Scholars of U.S. settler colonialism describe it as a violent imperial mode under which Indian removal and genocide laid the groundwork for subsequent U.S. foreign policy and imperialism. Diplomatic historians now recognize that various iterations of imperial ideology operated well before and after the era of the U.S.-Mexico War, from the expansionist logic among the founding generation of American leaders, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in particular, to the Latin American filibusters of the 1850s and to the U.S. occupation of Haiti, Cuba, and the Philippines in the 1890s.18
While histories of American settler colonialism usually include Florida, its significance in the development of U.S. expansionism has never been fully explored, in part due to the old myth that contiguous expansion was not imperialist. Historians also have overlooked it because the United States acquired it long before Manifest Destiny (the ideology that God intended for the growing population of white Americans to spread over all of North America, bringing Christianity, democracy, and capitalism to improve it) entered popular speech in the 1840s. The U.S. colonization of Florida began in the 1820s, as whites moved west into Missouri and other parts of the Louisiana Purchase, and at nearly the same moment that Moses Austin brought the first Anglo settlers into Mexican Tejas; thus Florida deserves as much recognition in the development of Manifest Destiny. If anything, the colonization of Florida and Missouri led the way, as both were already American territories by the time Cora Montgomery coined the term “Manifest Destiny” in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1839. Placing Florida into the history of national expansion before 1840 links settler colonialism to other forms of U.S. imperialism and stretches histories of Manifest Destiny back to its beginnings, well before the conflict over Texas and Northern Mexico crystallized Americans’ support for (or opposition to) national expansion.19
Florida is also left out of histories of U.S. expansion because of its location in the coastal Southeast far from the western frontier. Historians of the Spanish borderlands include Florida as a northern outpost of Spain’s empire, while many U.S. histories include Florida as part of the Old South, even though it was a relatively recent acquisition by the time it joined the Confederacy. Many historical accounts of expansion begin with the annexation of Texas in the mid-1840s and then follow expansion into the West, but Americans had set their sights on Spain’s holdings in North America long before that. In fact, Americans had wanted Florida since the revolution, when John Adams wrote a prototype treaty that demanded Europeans acknowledge the United States as the rightful successor to all of Britain’s North American colonies, including Canada, Bermuda, and Florida. Four decades later, when Adams’s son, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, negotiated the Transcontinental Treaty with Spanish diplomat Luis de Onís (ratified by Congress in 1821), he finally fulfilled his father’s wishes. In exchange for Florida the United States agreed to pay $5 million in claims that Americans held against Spain, and to concede Texas, which it had claimed (over Spanish and Mexican objections) as part of the Louisiana Purchase.20
Expansionist Domesticity
As the border space between public and private, the threshold offers a useful metaphor for theorizing the gender history of American settler colonialism and the relationship between nineteenth-century nationalism and domesticity. As white women remade their homes in disputed borderlands, their domestic work crossed the threshold from private concern to public service—the settling up of the “public land.” As Catharine Beecher opined in her 1842 Treatise on Domestic Economy, one of American women’s most significant roles was to bring Christian domesticity to the wilderness, to install “an ark of civilization amid an ocean of foliage.” As Beecher and other adherents of such domestic ideology noted, as the nation expanded, virtuous and well-ordered households (created and sustained by white women) would ensure that new territories and states would become civilized places that supported republican democracy. This belief countered the anxiety that pioneers would “go native” when they encountered “uncivilized” places and societies, or that the peoples that an expanding America swallowed up would challenge American political and social order rather than assimilating into it. Although historians rarely link male political and military leaders to domestic ideology, some of the American national and military leaders in this study also believed that the presence of white women in new settlements would ensure that American virtues would spread outward. Women’s domestic roles as workers, mothers, wives, and mistresses required them to submit to patriarchal authority and to instill morality and patriotism in children; they therefore both upheld the patriarchal household model and supported the republic. Many Americans believed that white women were central to the spread of properly ordered households and civilization, just as other colonial regimes had cast European women as civilizing agents.21
As they made homes in Florida, white women established that it was part of the United States and home to Americans. The homemaking that they performed operated at both national and household levels, a dynamic I label “expansionist domesticity.” Americans rarely explicitly theorized or described this expansionist domesticity because most believed that domestic labor was the work that women naturally provided. Antebellum Americans viewed white women’s work in creating permanent settler colonies as their innate, God-given role and rarely commented on it. In historical accounts, white frontier women appear to do the same quotidian labor in a different place, with perhaps more difficulties, fewer comforts, and added loneliness. They seem to have little choice about whether to risk the rewards of frontier living. Yet, as this study shows, male and female migrants into Florida all relied on extended family and kinship networks in order to survive and thrive, in spite of the image of the single, independent male trailblazer favored in popular representations of the frontier. As subordinate partners to male settlers, women (and their labor) could be taken for granted; thus expansionist domesticity underwrote settlement policies and processes in unacknowledged ways. Hence women, even white women, are frequently marginalized or absent from histories of expansion and settler colonialism. Similarly, histories of women and domestic work often remain limited to the world within households, even though territorial expansion regularly counted on women’s willingness to cross the threshold and make new homes in contested places.
The continuing assumption that territorial expansion was men’s work arises both from the public/private dichotomy that shaped domestic ideology and from ideas about dependence and independence embedded in the antebellum social order. Most Americans, across regional variations, presumed that white men were independent, chivalrous, and responsible for their dependents—women, children, servants, and slaves. The white patriarch derived his power from his position as the independent household head to whom all his dependents owed their labor and loyalty. This patriarchal household social order was central to the framework that policy makers used in Florida. Their policies aimed to restore women and men to their natural roles, a restoration that they equated with the settlement of the frontier. In return, white women benefited from national expansion and were at least complicit with its violence, whether or not they consciously invested themselves in the ideological project of expansionist domesticity. Their dependence limited women’s choices and makes it very difficult to locate their agency in history, but because of their role and privilege in national expansion, white women must be considered central actors in accounts of U.S. expansion. While several historians have found that white women often resisted frontier migration, studies such as this one reveal that the work women did once they arrived was no less significant to the expansion of slavery and national territory. In fact, that men compelled white women to go should highlight just how important their presence and labor were to those who brought them (sometimes against their wishes) to Florida and other settler colonies.22
Rather than accepting the framing of settler women’s domestic work as innocent or even patriotic, we must recognize that white women, like men, were invaders who the nation rewarded for their work along U.S. frontiers, where they effectively expanded the territory upon which their whiteness would grant them a range of privileges based on their alleged superiority to Native Americans and people of African descent. That white women’s work was gendered and cast