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 a solution to the threat Americans believed Florida’s indigenous and colonial population posed.
Indigenous people had lived in Florida long before Europeans arrived there, but disease, warfare, and the slave trade devastated Florida’s first peoples between the 1500s and the 1700s. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, several groups came south to populate this recently emptied region and founded villages in the panhandle and in the interior of north central Florida. Whites began calling all the Native Americans in Florida the Florida Indians and the Seminoles in the late eighteenth century, but indigenous Floridians did not think of themselves as part of one group at that point. Some historians believe that the name Seminole originated from the Spanish word cimarron, meaning “runaway.” Others believe it derives from a Muscogee Creek word for wild plants and animals. By 1821 their settlements included at least five thousand Native American people as well as several hundred people of African descent. By the outbreak of the Second U.S.-Seminole War in 1835, the “Florida Indians” lived in four regional political communities—Apalachicola, Apalachee, Alachua, and Mikasuki—which were largely autonomous from each other. These groups were also distinct from the Muscogee Creeks (their nearest ancestral relatives) and Europeans. They were farmers and traders who understood kinship through matrilineal clans. Some of them claimed the tribute of enslaved black laborers, which granted them increased status, much as the labor of captives had enriched indigenous peoples in the Southeast for centuries.8
In addition to the indigenous people who lived there, there were also a few thousand people of European ancestry. Multiple European rulers had claimed Florida, an attractive territory due to its long coastlines and its strategic location between British and Spanish colonies, close to the Caribbean. The Spanish made the first permanent European settlement at St. Augustine in 1565. Its European population remained tiny (fewer than five thousand people), and by the mid-1700s Spain still exerted little authority outside of St. Augustine. At the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 Great Britain claimed Florida, and most members of the small Spanish colonial population (approximately three thousand people) departed. The British combined part of Louisiana with Florida to create two provinces, East and West Florida, and designated capitals at St. Augustine and Pensacola. The British hoped to encourage the development of profitable plantations in the Floridas and pursued peaceful relations with Native American groups to stabilize them. British colonist Andrew Turnbull, for example, recruited 1,403 Mediterranean laborers (mainly from Minorca) in 1767–1768 to work on his sugar plantation at New Smyrna. Turnbull’s experiment with European contract workers failed when disease, grueling labor, violent overseers, and indigenous attacks killed nearly half of them, and the survivors abandoned the plantation in 1777. In St. Augustine the colonial government gave them land. By 1786, their families made up half of the population of St. Augustine and over 70 percent of its white population, because these contract laborers became “white” there, as in other colonies where there were few Europeans and many people of indigenous and African ancestry. Few other British planters were permanently successful, and although Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution added to British Florida’s colonial population, most of Florida remained beyond European authority during the British period. Twenty years later, at the end of the American Revolution, East and West Florida returned to Spanish rule, and many of the British colonists evacuated. As the nineteenth century began, Napoleon occupied Spain, weakening it and opening its empire up to nationalist revolutions, which soon spread across South and Central America. Spain therefore had few resources to invest in controlling Florida. As a result, throughout the Second Spanish period (1783–1819), populations of autonomous Native and black people controlled parts of East and West Florida.9
There was a significant population of free blacks in Florida because its tenuous position as a barely fortified outpost of the Spanish empire had encouraged liberal immigration policies toward nonwhites since the First Spanish Period. Spain had welcomed runaway slaves and granted them freedom if they converted to Catholicism, swore loyalty to Spain, and helped protect Florida. The Spanish Crown also encouraged slave owners to manumit their slaves and incorporate them into a three-caste society of whites, free blacks, and enslaved blacks. This system allowed individuals to become free so as to discourage a collective uprising of enslaved people. Black and mixed-race residents of Spanish Florida participated in its social and economic life, and the Spanish governor of Florida sent hundreds of them to build and to occupy a fort two miles north of St. Augustine in 1738. Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, or Fort Mose, became the first free black town in North America sanctioned by a European power.10
In addition to the free blacks who lived among European colonists, in the early nineteenth century there were five hundred or more blacks (called estelusti by the indigenous people) living among the Native peoples of Florida. Some were runaways or their descendants who had escaped slavery sometime in the past two centuries, while others came into Seminole towns through the trade in enslaved people. They occupied and could move between several different social roles, including spouse, adopted kin, ally, and tributary slave. The Seminoles did not categorically treat enslaved blacks as chattel property. Some of the Black Seminoles, whom elite Seminoles inherited, purchased, or gave as gifts, were treated as property. However, unlike enslaved blacks among American whites, the estelusti lived with their own families in Seminole villages or in four separate, but allied, towns where they elected their own leaders, owned property, carried weapons, and chose their own spouses. If they desired to acculturate fully into Seminole society, blacks might do so through intermarriage or even adoption into a clan. The black towns, like all other Seminole and Creek towns, gave tribute and military alliance to the leaders of their mother towns, in exchange for which they received protection and trade privileges. Since Creek and Seminole towns were highly autonomous, having separate towns actually made the estelusti more like Seminoles and Creeks. In other ways the Black Seminoles maintained their own culture, practicing Christianity and speaking their own language (as well as English and indigenous languages), but they shared with Seminoles similar agricultural and building methods, clothing styles, some religious practices, and very clear political and military interests. The Second U.S.-Seminole War solidified their alliance due to their common interest in defeating the Americans so that the Seminoles might retain their lands and the Black Seminoles their freedom. Though contemporary whites were concerned about the status of the “Indian negroes” in Florida, the Seminoles were not preoccupied about it. Kinship ties as part of clans or extended families, not status as black, white, or Indian, were the most important categorization for them, at least in the early nineteenth century. Native Floridians thus challenged slavery organized by race even as they practiced a form of it.11
Much to the displeasure of American slaveholders, no single regime dominated outside of St. Augustine and Pensacola in the early nineteenth century, and Spain’s weak presence left autonomous Native Americans and blacks in the Floridas free to ally with the British, whom the United States was already fighting on its northern frontier in the 1810s. Florida’s mixed population also made American slaveholders very nervous. These anxieties drove repeated U.S. invasions of Florida in the 1810s. The Americans lacked a viable legal reason to intervene in Spanish territory, however, and had to withdraw after each invasion prior to 1818,
