The Threshold of Manifest Destiny
EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES
Series Editors Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher
Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
THE THRESHOLD OF MANIFEST DESTINY
Gender and National Expansion in Florida
Laurel Clark Shire
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved.
Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8122-4836-4
For Linda Barnes Clark and Judith Coren Williams
CONTENTS
Introduction. Expansionist Domesticity and Settler Colonialism in Florida
Part I. Slavery, Indian Removal, and Expansionist Domesticity
Chapter 1. Property, Settlement, and Slavery
Chapter 2. Innocent Victims of a “Savage” War
Chapter 3. Seminole Resistance
Part II. Gender and Pro-Settler Policy
Chapter 4. Turning Sufferers into Settlers
Chapter 5. Gender and Settler Colonialism
Conclusion. The Garden and the Spear
NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
I have elected to refer to people of African descent in this book as “black” rather than “African American” because they were not all born in the Americas. I refer to those who were enslaved as “enslaved” persons rather than “slaves” because slavery was a social and legal condition put upon them by whites, not an essential aspect of their being or identity. I refer to people indigenous to North America as “Native Americans” or “indigenous” people or (when accurate) by tribal affiliation (such as Seminole) but rarely as “Indians.” I use “Indian” only when referring to U.S. policies and practices that used that label in the nineteenth century, such as “Indian removal” policy or “U.S. Indian agent.”
INTRODUCTION
Expansionist Domesticity and Settler Colonialism in Florida
In 1841 a young widow named Elizabeth Berry joined a group of white settlers that the U.S. Army deployed to recolonize north Florida. On August 17, Berry and her children, along with three other families and five single men, moved into blockhouses at Fort White. The U.S. military had constructed the fort in 1836 to protect a nearby settlement from Seminole attacks. By August 1841 the army had abandoned it, but military leaders hoped that installing white families there—the same kind of people the fort had been constructed to protect—would similarly discourage Seminole resistance. It was one of a dozen sites targeted by the army for reoccupation in the winter of 1841. By early 1842, however, the settlers had also deserted Fort White (one army officer blamed the whiskey trade), so Elizabeth Berry and her children moved again. For the second time, she found an opportunity for her family that also served national interests, and they settled near a former Seminole town at Chucochatti, where white settlers had made a successful colony with U.S. military support in February 1842.1 Elizabeth Berry’s story illustrates that making homes in Florida was a political act carried out by white families supported by federal policies, and that white women were key actors in settler colonialism.
Prior to U.S. colonization, Florida was not an uninhabited frontier; it was a prosperous agricultural region where five thousand Native Americans and hundreds of Africans and their descendants lived. In 1823, an American trader visited Chucochatti and several other towns in the region northeast of Tampa Bay, where autonomous Seminoles and Black Seminoles (a group whose status varied
