action and actors, it cannot determine behavior.46 What is clear is that white women did not hesitate to exercise their property rights in the courts of territorial Florida, where American legislators and judges did not hesitate to extend the advantages of this legal protection to whites who used their property to expand national borders and slavery in Florida. Since these rights supported white settler colonialism in Florida, they were inherently bound to have negative consequences on enslaved people, free blacks, and Native Americans.
CHAPTER 2
Innocent Victims of a “Savage” War
The citizens of Florida … have been nightly shot down or tomahawked by the light of their own blazing homes.
—Delegate Charles Downing, Florida Territory, July 10, 1840
The barbarities have been perpetrated chiefly upon females.
—Niles’ Weekly Register, October 1, 1836
At ten o’clock on the morning of September 15, 1836, a band of Seminoles and one black warrior attacked the homestead of Clement and Jane Johns, white settlers in East Florida. According to a sensational pamphlet published in the wake of this assault, the attackers shot and killed Clement, leaving Jane to defend herself, their unborn child, and all their property. The attackers shot and scalped Jane Johns and set her house on fire. Miraculously still alive, she lay still until her assailants left, even as the fire spread to her clothes. Once they had whooped and departed, according to one account, she “scraped the blood from her denuded head in her hands and … applied it to the fire,” extinguishing the flames consuming her skirts. In spite of her injuries, Johns managed to get out of the burning house, crawling to a shallow pond nearby. Although she had been shot, scalped, and set on fire, Jane Johns remained alive when her father-in-law found her a few hours later. A remarkable survivor, she became perhaps the most famous victim to survive what Americans called an “Indian depredation” in Florida. The Jacksonville Courier reported the attack on Johns on September 17, 1836, and several regional and national papers printed the details shortly thereafter. The following year printers in Charleston and Baltimore published it in pamphlet form. Her story garnered national coverage because of its sensational and gory details, which pulled at both domestic and nationalist sentiments with the image of a white woman attacked by Indians and an escaped slave.1
Although perhaps the most sensational, Jane Johns’s story was not unique. It exemplifies Florida Indian depredation narratives in which white women and their children suffered injury or death and lost property when attacked by Seminoles. These tales glossed over Indian removal and the expansion of slavery and framed the conflict in Florida as a noble war being waged for the protection of innocent white women and children. In countless bloodcurdling stories Americans recast whites as victims, never perpetrators, of violence, and they continually portrayed Native Americans and blacks as the aggressors rather than the victims. The cultural prevalence and emotional power of these stories shaped policy as well as attitudes in and about Florida in the 1830s and 1840s. American leaders used them to justify the Second U.S.-Seminole War and its expense, to raise militia volunteers, and to pass pro-settler welfare and land policies. The focus on property losses in depredation accounts distinguishes them from Indian captivity narratives and highlights the importance of household property in white settler colonies (as does the history of property law). By spotlighting sensational destruction, Florida Indian depredation narratives reveal the central role of white women and expansionist domesticity to the U.S. colonization of Florida.
Reports about Seminole attacks on whites in Florida circulated widely, especially after the United States formally declared a second war on the Seminoles in December 1835. Indian depredation stories, as I refer to these accounts, appeared in private sources such as letters, diaries, and memoirs and in public ones, including newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides. Typical Indian depredation stories from Florida begin with an attack by a small band of Native American men (usually identified as Seminoles, but sometimes called Creeks, Mikasukis, or Apalachicolas) on white settlers. Occasionally, Black Seminoles or enslaved people appear as assailants or victims in these stories. The scene is typically a white homestead or plantation, but sometimes Seminoles assailed travelers on Florida’s rudimentary roadways. Narrators repeated several elements in endless combinations in depredation reports about “the Florida War”: innocent white mothers and children attacked at home by Native American and (sometimes) black men, killed or horribly mutilated with “savage” weapons, and their domestic realms plundered and burned. The consistency, ubiquity, and sensationalism of these stories made them culturally powerful and also responded to and re-created certain expectations in their American audience, predicated on assumptions of white female innocence and nonwhite “savage barbarity.”
The fact that white women were injured or killed in the Second U.S.-Seminole War proved very important to the ways that American citizens, journalists, and politicians framed the war. As with stories from many other settler colonial regimes, these narratives relied upon gender to justify colonial violence. Depredation stories cast white women and children as the “innocents” whom only barbaric savages would attack; but the presence of white families was a real threat to the Seminoles in Florida. As in most settler colonies, conquest and settlement occurred simultaneously in Florida as settlers arrived before and during Indian removal, and armed conflicts over land coincided with settlement. Most white male settlers brought families and, if wealthy enough, enslaved people with them, while others found wives and formed new families once they arrived. Growing white families competed with indigenous peoples for land, food, and resources, and signaled that soon there would be increasing numbers of whites claiming this frontier as their own “native” home. Women’s reproductive and productive labor was indispensable to the creation of new homes and the next generation of Americans on the frontier. The work of enslaved people supported the productive and reproductive work of white women for the benefit of white households.2 Far more than just symbols of “barbaric” indigenous violence or white “civilization,” white women were absolutely vital to white households and growing communities. Since this book aims to clarify white women’s part in Manifest Destiny, it is important to note that Florida Indian depredation accounts were part of the historical process of obscuring the importance of women’s labor to national expansion. In counterpoint to the image of women as innocent victims in Seminole depredation narratives, this chapter highlights white women’s labor as a colonizing force that assisted in Seminole dispossession and in the white settlement of Florida.
Although they deemphasized women’s expansionist work, depredation narratives inadvertently offer evidence of its significance, for they paid special attention to the destruction of the families and the domestic spaces that white women created in Florida. A central component of a cultural campaign that represented Florida as already “home” to American settlers, the narratives represent Indian depredations as attacks on the home in two senses: Native Americans stole or destroyed white settlers’ property, and many whites faced poverty or fled the territory as a result. Along with the material consequences, depredations were also attacks on white mothers and children, the families who transformed property into a “true home.” That cultural labor was significant beyond its sentimental appeal, because it once again framed whites as settlers who had been attacked by a savage enemy rather than as a colonizing force that the Seminoles targeted as a strategy of resistance to removal. This frame presumed, rather than explicitly argued, that whites had a natural claim to their Florida properties as home, and therefore that the Seminoles did not. Sentimental accounts of scorched and plundered frontier cabins had the power to frame Indian removal as the defense of white women and children.
While they gloss white women’s work as colonizers and represent women as innocent victims, Florida Indian depredation narratives do illustrate that white women fought on the front lines of the Second U.S.-Seminole War. Many homesteads became battlegrounds as violence erupted in Florida between 1835 and 1842,
