The labor of enslaved people supported new white settlements as well, as Florida’s demographic shift toward a population of almost equal numbers of whites and enslaved blacks reveals. Court records make it abundantly clear that, like the Dunham, Johnson, and Robards estates described above, many white Florida wives owned enslaved human property. Enslaved people were also the only class of property to be specifically mentioned in borderlands married women’s property laws. Although not specified in the Florida Acts, human property was more common than any other single type in the court cases involving women that were sampled for this study.
Two other early married women’s property acts that make clear the importance of slaves on expanding frontiers were laws that legislatures passed in Arkansas Territory in 1835 and in Mississippi in 1839. In the Mississippi law, although the initial part of the bill granted married women the right to own both real and personal property separately, every other section of the law spoke only of enslaved human property. When it expanded its first married women’s property act in 1846, Arkansas copied the Mississippi law, adopting a law that protected a wife’s enslaved human property from debts her husband contracted after marriage. This emphasis on enslaved property was in line with a long tradition of planters giving enslaved black people to their female heirs. Female slave owners were not unusual in the antebellum South, where women’s dowries and inheritances often included human beings.18
Throughout the South and in Florida, slavery granted whites, including women, both material and social privileges at the expense of those they enslaved. Slaves were often a white woman’s most important and valuable investment: her fortunes in the marriage market, in a marriage to a debtor, or in widowhood often rested upon whether she owned enslaved people and how many she possessed. Whites built respectable households, social status, and “whiteness” out of enslaved persons. Enslaved people’s labor saved white women from the most grueling work and also established their white “ladyhood”; these material and social benefits conveyed that white women deserved their status and leisure because they were white. Even for white women in households without enslaved human property, the privileges of whiteness were ensured by the existence of racial slavery. Beyond the social and cultural privileges of whiteness, slavery also produced material advantages for whites. In a new territory like Florida, enslaved people were perhaps a safer investment than land speculation (which men favored), and whites could sell enslaved people quickly if needed. It was not uncommon for white Florida wives to use their human enslaved property as collateral in loans, for example, though that practice also opened the possibility of loss and the displacement of the enslaved people. Women could also easily rent their enslaved property, as labor was in short supply and high demand in territorial Florida. The material value of a slave was not only what he or she would bring at the slave market but also the financial benefits he or she brought an owner when mortgaged or hired out. This practice enabled aspiring planters to clear fields and build homes much faster than they could have using only family labor, or if they had to wait for human property purchased from the Upper South. Rented enslaved people helped build Florida’s infrastructure as they labored in sawmills, turpentine camps, and on the railroad. Those hired by the U.S. military during the Second U.S.-Seminole War were even more directly deployed in service to territorial expansion.19
Whites benefited from their property rights in enslaved people, but the consequences for enslaved people were dire. Their “natural increase”—children—enhanced the value of a woman’s slaveholding over time, but this resulted in the traumatic division of many enslaved families by sale or in wills. While land was static, household and slave property were dynamic and able to literally move with the changing boundaries of U.S. territory. Some wives’ enslaved property was the only wealth that enabled their husbands to reach planter status, which was often the goal that prompted migration. Enslaved people suffered, however, when taken away from families and communities to new frontiers. In myriad ways, slaves were vital to expansion and settlement in Florida, but the enslaved people whom whites bought, sold, and hired suffered due to their value and mobility. Florida’s enslaved men, women, and children faced harsh working conditions, many were sent or sold away from kin in the Upper South, and all experienced the privations of the frontier and the dangers of U.S.-Indian warfare.20
The court records reflect white women’s material, and perhaps ideological, investment in slavery. When their enslaved property was threatened or damaged, they actively sought protection or redress in the courts. In a survey of county and circuit civil court records in Escambia County, Florida, between 1821 and 1845, eighty-eight cases involved either a female defendant or plaintiff (or both), and forty-five of these cases also concerned an enslaved person or persons. One-third of seventy-eight cases involving a woman and her property in St. Johns County between 1821 and 1845 included enslaved human property.21
For reasons related to their value and mobility, some white women preferred enslaved human property. They often specifically asked for their inheritance portion in enslaved people, or to sell land rather than enslaved persons to satisfy debts against an estate, even though by law enslaved human property was supposed to be sold before land in settling an intestate estate. In Gadsden County in 1833 Sarah Stone petitioned the court to settle her deceased husband’s debts through the sale of land rather than enslaved people, as the money she made renting the enslaved people out supported her family. When Margarita Bonifay married John de la Rua, her mother gave her $1,100 in separate property in the form of town lots in Pensacola. In 1832 Bonifay de la Rua became concerned about the depreciation of real estate in Pensacola, so she asked her husband to sell the lots and use the money to purchase an enslaved woman and her four children for her separate estate. He complied.22
In the context of national and slavery expansion in the South, white wives’ ownership of enslaved people and household property points to their role in the creation of southern households. Such households were rural and patriarchal and were the location of production and reproduction. They required the presence and labor of white women and children and often, enslaved blacks, to produce white mastery and the means of subsistence and profit.23 Creating such households was directly related to the nationalist project of expansion, as their construction one by one on the Florida frontier eventually created permanent white American settlements.
The separate property of a Middle Florida resident, Laura Wirt Randall, illustrates how white women’s property aided white settler colonialism at the expense of enslaved blacks and indigenous people. Randall moved to Florida in 1827, following her new husband, Thomas, the son of an Annapolis, Maryland, merchant who had studied law and served during the War of 1812. The educated daughter of U.S. Attorney General William Wirt, Laura had family wealth and connections that enabled the newlyweds to enter frontier Florida as elite planters. Laura’s dowry, set aside in a separate estate entrusted to her maternal uncles, included land, furniture, food, china, crystal, and enslaved people worth $5,000. Furthermore, her father worked his Washington connections to get Randall appointed as a judge to the Florida Supreme Court.24
Laura Wirt Randall’s parents were careful to legally protect her separate property. In December 1827, her father wrote to her:
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. The Judge [her husband, Thomas Randall] will observe that I am guided by a Territorial law of Florida in the form of acknowledgement by your mother and myself, that law adopting the form in use where the parties reside. If there has been any later law which changes the formalities on this subject the Judge will apprise me of it and return the deed for execution anew. If it is desirable for you to have the patents for the land and Tilghman’s Bill of Sale for the negroes, these also will be sent…. instead of having the thirteen negroes mentioned in the original bill of sale you have only eleven: the remaining five hundred dollars which represented the other two negroes, I sent you by the last mail. The negroes I hope will arrive shortly after your receipt of this letter. Your two thousand dollars worth of furniture and provisions will I hope reach you before
