accounts. Neither military nor women’s historians often place nineteenth-century white women on battlefields. Usually they are stoking home fires and observing from the sidelines. This was not the case in Florida (nor was it on most frontiers), because the Seminoles brought this conflict to whites’ doorsteps. They refused removal and, since they had fewer warriors and resources than the U.S. military, waged a guerilla war. Since this was a conflict aimed at ousting them from the territory in order to make Florida safe for white settlement and slavery, and because American troops frequently destroyed Seminole homes and families, they resisted and retaliated by attacking white homesteads and plantations, where white women defended their homes.
Florida Indian depredation stories were propaganda rooted in real events. This chapter examines the ways that they shaped perceptions and policies, but they are also evidence that white Americans and Seminole people terrorized each other between 1835 and 1842. Although widely reported, it is difficult to quantify this violence. The rations program that supported Florida’s “suffering inhabitants” between 1836 and 1842 (described in detail in Chapter 4) furnishes some information about how many white settlers in Florida lost homes and family members to Seminole attacks. In June 1842, as the war was closing, there were 1,795 people on the rolls of suffering inhabitants drawing rations from the U.S. military. They came from eighteen households that had been “broken up by Indians” (some more than once), while another twenty-three households had lost civilian husbands, fathers, or sons (and in one case a wife) who had been “killed by the Indians,” and another fifteen households had lost the support of men who died in military service (from disease, wounds, or in battle). All the ration rolls before 1842 are missing, so it is difficult to estimate exactly how many homes and civilians the Seminoles destroyed, but given the numbers from 1842 the number of households disrupted was probably in the hundreds. In addition to an unknown number of civilian deaths, 1,466 American soldiers died in the Second U.S.-Seminole War (mostly from disease, not combat). The Seminoles suffered even higher losses from whites. Americans burned many villages during the U.S.-Seminole Wars and killed hundreds of Seminole warriors and civilians, although an exact count is unknown. The U.S. removed 4,420 indigenous people and their allies of African descent from Florida during the Second U.S.-Seminole War, and approximately 1,400 died on the journey west.3
As it is hard to determine the frequency of all this violence, it is often impossible to verify whether the precise details of a particular Indian depredation story are historically factual. Did Jane Johns really use her own blood to put out the fire burning her legs? It seems unlikely. More important than the veracity of that sensational detail is that white Americans in 1836 found it credible that Native Americans would shoot, scalp, and set fire to a white woman and leave her for dead in her burning frontier home. They would have taken her innocence (in spite of her presence on a contested frontier) and her attackers’ savagery for granted. While American accounts placed Seminole violence against whites (especially women and children) in the foreground, they consistently ignored or justified the violence that whites perpetrated against Native Americans and blacks, including women and children. No accounts of “white depredations” upon the Seminoles made their way into print (although the oral accounts passed down among Seminole descendants provide some alternative views of the war, as the next chapter recounts). Regardless of the frequency or verity of Seminole attacks on white Florida settlers, the widespread circulation of depredation accounts in private, public, and political discourse about the Second U.S.-Seminole War testifies that they performed a weighty set of cultural and political tasks in narrating this conflict.
Florida “Indian Depredations”
Resonant with the long-standing genre of Indian captivity narratives, Indian depredation narratives from Florida framed stories about Native American violence on white settlers in the sensationalist language of early nineteenth-century print culture, using a term drawn from federal frontier policy. Under the Indian Depredation Claims system (1796–1920) the U.S. government promised to indemnify all losses that American suffered from “Indian depredations” if the attacks took place outside of Indian territory during a time of peace and if white settlers had not continued the cycle of violence with a revenge attack. In the absence of kidnapping, depredation stories focused on injured white bodies and homes.4
In numerous ways, Florida Indian depredation stories followed the conventions of Indian captivity narratives. Narratives of Indian war and captivity were among the major frontier myths in which American national identity and culture originated, and Americans had been recounting the horrific details of Native American violence against whites for hundreds of years. Authors of such stories sought to explain and justify the violent campaigns they waged to take the lands of Native Americans and to establish their fundamental difference from those they eventually deemed racial inferiors. The depredation stories from Florida, like captivity narratives, featured “savage” violence against white (and sometimes nonwhite) men, women, and children, and highlighted scalping and the use of exotic implements such as “tomahawks” and “scalping knives” (known as axes and knives when wielded by whites). The narrator usually decries the attackers as “indiscriminate” for harming white women and children, a label Americans had long used to establish the uncivilized nature of indigenous warfare (and justify their own violence on Native women and children). “Indiscriminate” Indian depredations were cited as early as 1819 in Florida. The presence of vulnerable white women helped make them more sensational and compelling stories, and so narrators highlighted female victims, as when the editor of Niles’ Weekly Register noted that “these barbarities have been perpetrated chiefly upon females.”5 Following the conventions of antebellum culture, depredation accounts emphasized female passivity, piety, maternity, and domesticity. They invoke particular sympathy for the plight of white mothers who, unable to protect their children, were forced to watch them harmed or killed. Captivity narratives and depredation accounts focused on female victims because this allowed them to invoke emotional, sympathetic responses using gender conventions, which dictated that such victims were innocent and civilized because they were maternal and domestic. The emphasis on domestic spaces and on maternal and infant victims harkened back to captivity narratives even as they made Florida scenes of armed struggle difficult to cast as conventional war zones.6
White gender norms prescribed that dominant white men protect vulnerable and subordinate white women, so when white men appeared in depredation accounts authors tended to glorify the bravery, chivalry, and gallantry of white men, contrasted with descriptions of women’s vulnerability. Many white men were killed in the initial stage of an attack attempting to protect their families, while others (as the narratives often explain) were away fighting this war on other fronts or had already been killed doing so. Even when a man died in an Indian depredation, it was sympathy for the woman and children he left behind that authors expressed. In accounts of the attack on Clement and Jane Johns, for example, narrators always described the murder of Clement Johns but followed that with sympathy for his widow, not for Clement. This made it possible to evacuate all traces of white aggression from the story: the white men who had invaded Florida were framed as the heads of families rather than soldiers or squatters, and they were gone. Left behind were their families—the women and children whom nineteenth-century Americans understood not as invaders of indigenous lands but faithful followers of migrating husbands and fathers. They were innocent victims, then, of their loyalty to men unable to protect them and of the “barbaric” Seminoles.
Alongside white mothers, white children also appear as victims in Florida Indian depredation stories. If these stories are reliable, white parents left many children at home alone (or with other relatives or enslaved black guardians) in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, for in many stories white mothers return home to find their houses in flames and their children endangered. In some cases this was an embellishment that heightened the sentimental and sensational appeal of the tale, although in other instances it appears that the war left white mothers with few alternatives. Faced with fulfilling the duties of the absent male household head as well as their own work, perhaps white women sometimes risked leaving children at home, particularly since Florida’s roads were no safer than their homesteads.
