Property, Settlement, and Slavery

      I enclose you the promised deed for the land and negroes, which will have to be executed by your two uncles, the trustees, and then recorded in the court of Leon County, and the sooner you have it attended to, the better.

      —William Wirt to Laura Wirt Randall, December 8, 1827

      By the laws of the Spanish Monarchy … your oratrix was entitled to her separate property independent of the control or disposition of the said Defendant, which right has in no wise been changed by the transfer of the Province to the United States, but said property was secured to her by the treaty of Cession and by an Act of the legislative council … according to the right and title by which she held it while the Province was under the dominion of his Catholic Majesty.

      —LeSassier v. Alba, Escambia County, Florida, May 1831

      In 1831 Victoria LeSassier, a wealthy Pensacola widow in her seventies, divorced her second husband, Pedro de Alba. Deeply in debt, Alba had recently threatened to take control of his wife’s separate estate, which was worth about $36,000. His financial problems had plagued their marriage since 1819, when LeSassier, suspecting that he had attempted to poison her in order to inherit her property, left Alba’s household and went to live with her son. She wrote Alba that she was quitting their marriage because he had treated her so badly that even a slave would have complained, and warned him: “But, Alba, that time of slavery is over. Consider myself your equal in every respect.”¹ A slave owner herself, Victoria LeSassier was well aware of the privileges that her whiteness and wealth produced. It was not until Florida became an American territory, however, that she could sue Alba for a divorce (since divorce had been impossible under Catholic Spain). Unlike most other wives in the United States in the 1830s, she was able to keep and control the property that she had brought into their marriage, which made divorce much more attractive. When LeSassier divorced Alba she regained control over several town lots in Pensacola, thousands of acres of land in West Florida, and twenty enslaved people.² Her story illustrates how Florida’s transition from Spanish colony to U.S. territory resulted in a hybrid legal system that supported white settler colonialism. Legally, Americans did not seamlessly replace civil law with common law; rather they chose to honor some parts of civil and treaty law—even when they challenged common law rules—if doing so favored white settlement in Florida. Under the new regime, white women of property such as Victoria LeSassier (especially those who owned slaves) would benefit in unexpected ways, while Seminoles and blacks would face increasing discrimination.³

      LeSassier jettisoned her husband but kept her property in Florida because it was a colonial borderland. Before 1821, Spain ruled Florida, and Spanish civil law granted wives separate property rights and half of marital property, not because it supported female independence but rather due to the continuation of their lineage in marriage. While Anglo wives left behind their families of birth when they married, Spanish wives brought familial ties with them, retaining their maiden names in addition to their married ones. Uniquely, colonial-era Florida wives ended up keeping their separate property rights in Florida after 1821 via treaty law. Article 8 of the Adams-Onís Treaty (in which Spain ceded Florida to the United States) upheld the property rights of all Spanish colonists. Since many women had received or inherited property in Spanish Florida, Article 8 confirmed their right to own separate property even though some of them were married and, therefore, would not have had the right to separate property under the common law. The loophole was accidental, as neither John Quincy Adams nor Luis de Onís said anything about women in their correspondence concerning Article 8. In 1822, Florida’s legislature adopted the common law and explicitly repealed Spanish civil codes, contradicting Article 8 of the treaty for married women. Historians have often accepted this as proof that civil law no longer applied after U.S. annexation, but in fact it necessitated another law. In 1824, “to obviate any doubts,” the Florida Legislative Council specifically confirmed the rights of “husbands and wives” married under civil law to treat their property “in the same manner as they could or might have done under the laws of Spain.” Colonial-era wives kept their separate property, and several cases arose in early territorial Florida to test this law. In most cases colonial-era wives prevailed, especially if they were white.⁴

      This chapter examines the intersection of race and gender in the application of property law in Florida in the first decades after it transferred into the United States. Using court records to unearth the material contributions that white women made to settler colonialism and the expansion of racial slavery into Florida, I argue that their property was essential to expansionist domesticity, for through their holdings in household property and enslaved people, white women supported Florida’s colonization. Due to the advantages that civil law granted them in Florida, many wives were able to amass wealth in their own names, making Florida court records an especially rich source of information on women’s property holdings and practices, as women went to court to protect property from competing heirs, creditors, or predatory relatives. Although wives owned all kinds of real and personal property, enslaved human property was more common than any other single type in the court cases involving women surveyed for this study.

      Florida’s legislature granted a powerful combination of rights to white wives in the 1820s, but it upheld married women’s property rights, rather than reversing the loophole to follow common law, in order to honor international law and preserve the treaty with Spain, not in order to protect or empower women. At the same time, Florida law began to limit the civil and property rights of nonwhites in Florida, including free people of color, regardless of whether they were married or women, which suggests that there was more at stake than obedience to international law. Although potentially empowering for white women, the legal hybridity that resulted from Florida’s transfer to the United States offered little relief to enslaved people, free blacks, and Native Americans. Many enslaved people—the “property” of whites—were uprooted from their own communities, separated from their families, and sent to labor in Florida’s growing cotton and sugar plantations in the early nineteenth century. Indigenous people in Florida, whose removal became an American goal and the object of the three U.S.-Seminole Wars in that same period, had very recently farmed the ground that they worked. For free people of color, including many people in mixed-race Spanish colonial families, the legal and cultural changes that U.S. rule wrought were also devastating. Although there were rare exceptions, typically U.S. courts ruled in ways that benefited whites (whether male or female), while Native Americans and blacks lost property and autonomy. The rights and property of women of color suffered a much different fate than those of white wives because their presence and independence from whites challenged white supremacy. Rather than understanding these only as contrasting experiences, it is helpful to view them as interlocking parts of U.S. settler colonialism, which used property and property law to expand white settlement and slavery into Florida.

      Married women’s property rights in early Florida seem contrary to antebellum gender norms and the common