to award them property, rather than bringing their marriage contracts and deeds into court (as civil law wives did).10
Slavery and Settler Colonialism
White women’s property contributed materially to the expansionist project under way in America’s newest territory in the 1820s and 1830s. The kinds of property that white women went to court to protect in Florida helps to demonstrate the diverse ways in which they used it to support settlement. The women uncovered in the sample of court records examined for this study lived in Florida during the territorial and early statehood years (1821–1860). They resided in Escambia and St. Johns Counties (which contained the colonial capitals of Pensacola and Saint Augustine); in Jefferson, Leon, and Gadsden Counties (in the Middle Florida plantation belt, around the new capitol at Tallahassee), and in Hillsborough County (where Tampa Bay linked cattle ranchers with ports in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea). Records from these different regions captured cases that concerned the property of colonial-era wives as well as that of white American wives who migrated into Florida after 1821, and involved wives who lived in towns, on farms and ranches, and on plantations. While only those with separate property would end up in court, excluding poorer or propertyless women from this analysis, the court cases included here involved a wide range of female-owned property, from kitchen utensils and cows to acres of land and hundreds of slaves. Women owned the same kinds of property as white men in early nineteenth-century Florida: “real property,” such as land, houses, enslaved people, and livestock; and “personal property,” the category the law used to describe household goods, apparel, jewelry, and specie (money).
Spanish colonial women often owned land or town lots and houses, particularly in Florida, where the colonial population was likely to vest brides with land in dowries. Victoria LeSassier owned four houses and five lots in Pensacola and over sixteen hundred acres of land nearby. On a smaller scale, when Josephine Gagnet won a divorce from an abusive drunkard in 1829 she was awarded half of his town lot. Comparatively, white wives in the countryside were less likely to own large amounts of land and were a minority among large landholders. In 1827 Laura Wirt Randall received more than one thousand acres in Middle Florida from her father, U.S. Attorney General William Wirt, but hers was an exceptionally large separate estate.
The frequency of different kinds of property in court records suggests, however, that women were more likely to own enslaved people and household goods than to own land or houses. In 1860, by which time plantation agriculture was firmly established in Florida, there were 268 planters in Florida who held thirty or more slaves and sizeable acreage (from 75 to 15,115 acres); only thirteen of them were women.11 Court records reveal that many women in territorial Florida owned household goods, from humble objects to fancy furnishings. In St. Augustine in 1824, seamstress Eliza Hutchinson found herself in court accused of stealing a shawl, sheets, and eggs from Amelie Nichols. Mary Pemberton took William McVoy to court in 1828, accusing his slaves Lidia and Rachel of stealing clothes from her. Compared to large plantation estates, these matters of personal property appear small, but they were significant to the women attempting to recoup their property. These were also the kinds of property most southern white women of any means held, in part because their families were likely to give them things like clothes or linens, and in part because they probably preferred and felt more entitled to domestic forms of property—the items associated with “women’s work” on a daily basis.12
Due to their connection with household property, women often asked for it in estate and divorce cases. Carolina Dunham claimed a portion of the furniture and silver from her family’s home on the Hillsborough River in 1834. She noted that her mother (Mary) had built a large house in Florida, furnished it, owned several enslaved people, and had died in 1833 without repaying $5,677 that Carolina had loaned her in 1830. Additionally, Mary Dunham had bequeathed Caroline a $350 annuity from her estate. David Dunham, Caroline’s brother, the executor of their mother’s estate, refused to pay either the debt or the annuity, claiming that the Florida property had been destroyed by “the hostile Indians.” Caroline complained to a judge that if the estate had been destroyed, David’s neglect rendered him responsible. He had sufficient warning that war was likely, and should have removed and protected the property. Further, Caroline suspected that David had taken the silver, furniture, and enslaved people to St. Augustine and ought to have paid her annuity out of what he had salvaged. She understood the value of silver, furniture, and enslaved human property and believed they could easily be transferred to her or liquidated to cover her inheritance. There is no ruling the record, so it is unclear whether she prevailed.13
Similarly, when Nancy and William Johnson filed a joint petition in 1822 to end their marriage, she asked for the return of property she had brought into their household. Both cited mutual “misery and discord,” although Nancy’s separate petition revealed that William was a drunkard, who “squandered his property at the card table” and openly committed adultery. She claimed that several enslaved people, including “Duranda, Honora, Amanda, Rich, Handy, Eddenborough, and William,” some household furniture, and two tracts of land in North Carolina were her own property. William, she complained, had already sold some of it and threatened to sell the rest, turn her out of her rented home in Pensacola, and abandon her. She asked the judge for a divorce, the return of her household furniture, and to set aside seven of the enslaved people in a life estate for her use. No decree appears in this record, but the court did serve William Johnson with a Notice to Appear and sequestered seven enslaved persons and the furniture in preparation for a hearing.14
After 1845, more recent migrants also began to enter courtrooms to protect their holdings. Nancy Robards’s separate property furnished a well-appointed town house for her family, as befit the wife of a county clerk. The 1848 inventory she filed in Hillsborough County included eight enslaved people, two cows, two horses, a lot in Tampa, a bedstead and furniture, cooking utensils, and forks and knives. In 1849, she added a carriage, more livestock, and fancy furniture.15
Nancy Jackson’s household boasted fewer luxuries than Robards’s, but she too asked a judge to recoup her marital property. When her abusive husband made off with thirty-two cattle in 1846, Jackson went to the courthouse armed with her receipts, evidence that she had purchased and raised the livestock “on account of herself and children.” As the wife of a smalltime rancher, she was unlikely to have a separate equity estate, but the 1845 extension of separate property rights to all Florida wives allowed her to protect her livestock from her husband, who she claimed failed to provide for his family.16
When an impending marriage or an irresponsible spouse threatened the property that white wives listed in courthouse inventories and marriage contracts, they used legal means to protect it. From these legal traces of their domestic lives, one can deduce the many kinds of work white women did on an expanding frontier, from raising cattle to creating hospitable and respectable domestic spaces. Like white women across the South, whether they were married to poor white “crackers,” were the wives of “countrymen” (yeoman farmers), or were plantation mistresses, white women in Florida worked hard—probably harder than those who did not live in a frontier territory (while the enslaved people among them often worked harder still). White women did almost every kind of work on small farms except for clearing and plowing new fields (work that enslaved black women were forced to perform). They often raised poultry and dairy cows and had vegetable gardens. Only the most elite did not have to use their own hands to make candles, spin cotton, weave cloth, sew clothes, gather firewood, prepare meals, and plant, tend, and harvest crops. Women, along with their families, cared for children, enslaved people, and livestock. Wealthier mistresses oversaw the labor, clothing, and feeding of their own children and the people their families enslaved, all while enacting the gentility that their class demanded. In Florida, this work was more challenging and was nationally significant because of its frontier context. As the owners of some land, many enslaved people, and a great deal of household furniture and other goods, white women created homes for white families in Florida—the kinds of “civilized” domestic spaces that national policy makers believed anchored white settlers permanently to a territory that would otherwise remain a hostile
