last.25
Her father instructed Laura to protect her new property because as a post-treaty (post-1818) wife in Florida, she fell under common law rules, which allowed her parents to settle a separate estate upon her at the time of her marriage by filing an inventory of her property in a Chancery Court (her property was in Jefferson County, which had just been carved out of Leon County in January 1827).
Laura Wirt Randall’s separate estate had absolutely disastrous consequences for enslaved people and for Native Americans in the region. Laura and her trustees made decisions about her estate in 1827 that uprooted eleven enslaved people from Maryland and relocated them, against their will, to the Randalls’ new plantation, Belmont. When they arrived, the slaves were all sick, a result of their exposure and exhaustion from the long trek to Florida. Many of them were probably also heartbroken. David had been forcibly separated from his wife, Sophy, and their children when Randall purchased him in Maryland. He missed them so intensely that Randall, fearing David “would infest the whole body of the black community with his despondency,” asked William Wirt to purchase Sophy and the children and send them to Belmont in 1828. He did so. One of their children, Sally, was so desperately unhappy at Belmont that she attempted to poison the overseer. Laura Wirt Randall’s “separate property” included at least a dozen people who suffered physically and emotionally as a result of her power to buy them and move them hundreds of miles to labor for the benefit of her new family.26
Belmont’s location in Jefferson County also connects Randall’s property to indigenous dispossession. Middle Florida was not uninhabited virgin forest when the Randalls relocated there in the 1820s. Lower Creeks from Georgia had migrated into the area around 1715 and founded settlements along the Apalachicola River and around Lake Miccosukee (which was just a few miles north of the Randall plantation in Jefferson County; Thomas Randall purchased corn from “Micausukees” in the late 1820s).27 The Apalachicolas and Miccosukees were two of three main indigenous political entities in Florida in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As the conflicts of the 1810s in West and Middle Florida revealed, control over land in Middle Florida had important geopolitical significance. Americans believed these autonomous Native American peoples, once the allies of British and Spanish foes, now posed a threat to the dominance and safety of Middle Florida’s planters. The 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek, made before the Americans had the power to completely displace them, had established small reserves for the Apalachicola chiefs on the lands they already inhabited along the rivers, as well as a reserve further east for Miccosukees and recent Creek refugees from the Red Stick War. Soon, however, the desires for that land expressed by whites like Thomas and Laura Randall would challenge these arrangements.28
Caught up in what Laura called a “mania” for Florida land, her husband, father, and uncles contributed to a booming real estate market in Jefferson County, where land values increased very quickly, from $1.25 per acre in 1828 to $5.00 per acre in 1830.29 Their investments in land, combined with the large numbers of slaves they brought with them, mirrored the movement of many of their neighbors, who all hoped to become wealthy planters. As Americans streamed into Middle Florida, they overwhelmed the indigenous communities there. By 1840, 50.58 percent of the total American population of Florida lived in Middle Florida’s six counties. In Jefferson County, where the Randalls bought land, enslaved people outnumbered free whites (62 percent of total population). The enslaved people on Jefferson County plantations produced 4,639 bales of cotton (15.32 percent of all the cotton grown in Florida in that year). By 1860 enslaved people made up 64.5 percent of the population in Jefferson County, where they toiled in the fields and at the gins that produced 10,847 bales (16.64 percent of Florida’s cotton crop in that year). Jefferson County quickly turned from Native ground to a white plantation agricultural colony.30
As white demand made the land more valuable, and as the population of whites and enslaved blacks became denser, Americans applied increasing pressure on indigenous peoples to leave. Americans wanted the land for growing cotton and feared that Native Americans would offer freedom to enslaved blacks and attack white settler families in retaliation for white encroachment and theft. As a result, some Apalachicola and Miccosukee people voluntarily relocated. In 1833 Apalachicola bands led by John Blount, Davy Elliott, and Yellow Hair (not the Cheyenne warrior famously battled by Buffalo Bill Cody) departed for Texas. Those who remained suffered continued violence and raids from whites. To secure their own protection, they aided the U.S. government during the Second U.S.-Seminole War and even surrendered their guns, which left them defenseless against white attackers and other Native Americans whom they had angered by aiding the Americans. By 1838 the Apalachicolas were in a desperate situation; starving and facing indigenous enemies, they were also denied aid by their white allies. With no other choice available, the remaining Apalachicolas departed for the West in October.31
Laura Randall’s separate estate, along with the property that other white wives used to expand slavery and white settlement in Florida, had far-reaching consequences for peoples throughout the American Southeast. The ambitions of whites such as the Randalls resulted in the loss of Native American land and autonomy, which forced indigenous groups to relinquish key parts of their subsistence and identity. In addition, enslaved black men and women lost their health, their spouses and children, and their ties to former homes in other states. The opportunities that whites found in the southern borderlands relied upon the racial ideologies that undergirded Indian removal and racial slavery.
At the same time, while she was privileged by her wealth, Laura Wirt Randall was not empowered by it. Although her decisions had terrible consequences for nonwhites in Florida, her husband and uncles controlled her estate, and her wealth did not grant her the freedom to do as she liked. She reluctantly married at age twenty-four (practically a spinster in that time), and was never happy about moving to Florida. Raised and educated among the Washington, D.C., elite in the early nineteenth century, she tried to settle into housekeeping and motherhood on an isolated frontier but longed to see her friends and family. Depressed and exhausted after a miscarriage, she became dependent on laudanum (a narcotic frequently prescribed to white women for “female complaints” in the nineteenth century). After four pregnancies between 1828 and 1832, Laura Wirt Randall died in 1833 at age thirty after a lingering postpartum illness. Her unhappiness was in no way commensurate with that of the enslaved families or indigenous people her estate helped to displace, but in contrast to the white men of her class, Laura Wirt Randall was hardly an independent citizen with property. She was the carrier of wealth between men: her father, her husband, and her hypothetical sons. Judge Thomas Randall benefited most from her wealth, for his marriage to Laura Wirt garnered him a state Supreme Court appointment and an entrée into the planter elite. The Randalls illustrate that separate property rights accrued to Florida wives because they were white bearers of domesticity and because white wives’ estates generally reinforced the race and gender norms of patriarchy and slavery, not because lawmakers or judges intended to make them the equals of white men.32
Though it rarely facilitated their liberation, white wives’ property did promote and support white settlement and supremacy in Florida. Enslaved people and domestic property were, like women, mobile. As frontiers expanded seemingly infinitely, women followed, with the things they used to carve “civilization” out of the wilderness. In addition to the material property they brought with them, white women brought domesticity, the cultural ideology that reproduced what Americans believed were white homes superior to the former residences of Native Americans and free blacks. On a frontier, white women’s domestic work acquired nationalist consequences. Expansionist domesticity established and policed the boundary between the “civilizing” culture of the colonizers and the “barbaric” culture of those displaced or colonized.33
Free People of Color in Court
Enslaved blacks and Native Americans in Florida were not the only people for whom U.S. expansion spelled misfortune. In the territorial period, even as white women’s property rights expanded, U.S. law eroded the civil and property rights of free blacks. Many of them were the wives, consorts, or descendants of prominent
