Indian depredation stories also borrowed from the emerging domestic literature and scandalous dime novels of their milieu. The rise of domestic ideology in the northern United States engendered a whole “culture of sentiment.” Authors, artists, journalists, photographers, and educators produced sentimental texts intended to make their consumers feel emotions, especially pity, sympathy, and grief. Sentimental culture also presumed that certain people (whites) were those who felt sympathy, while others (indigenous, enslaved) were the objects and recipients of their pity and sympathy. Tellers of Indian captivity and depredation narratives typically expected their audience to feel horror, fear, sympathy, and solidarity with white victims of violence, and they used sentimental language to achieve this end. Unlike slave narratives, however, they did not as frequently suggest that nonwhites deserved sympathy, and almost none of the Florida narratives do. Early in the war (January 21, 1836), the Jacksonville Courier included this assessment of recent depredations: “None whose hearts are not ice can hear recitals of such dreadful deeds of massacre, without sorrow and grief. We deeply sympathise with afflicted friends in St. Augustine.”7 Only Americans with hearts of ice could resist the affective impact of these stories, which expected them to feel sympathy for the poor residents of Florida who daily faced Seminole “massacres.”8
While the Florida depredation stories invoked sympathy for whites, they were less invested in respectable, virtuous, and socially redemptive lessons than many sentimental novels and captivity narratives were, and typically devoted more of their pages to the shocking and horrific details typical of sensational literature, which emphasized materiality and corporeality. In one frequent element, for example, depredation narrators describe a mother and infant killed by the same bullet or felled by a common stab wound, and then express horror at the barbarity of those who would murder a very young “baby at the breast.” Sentimentalism’s lowbrow cousin, sensational stories filled the story papers, pamphlet novels, and newspapers of the mid-nineteenth century. As innovative publishers and editors capitalized on new technology and began to produce cheaply made texts aimed at the masses, they relied on street sales rather than subscriptions, and so editors chose outrageous headlines full of scandal, crime, violence, and sexuality. The tragic, violent death of a white woman was a favorite sensational subject in the 1830s and 1840s, when the deaths of New Yorkers Helen Jewett and Mary Rogers occupied a great deal of attention. As some readers consumed those dramatic tales, others were reading about the mangled bodies of white mothers left in the wake of depredating Seminoles in Florida. Shelley Streeby argues that U.S. expansionism in the 1840s influenced sensational literature in ways that shaped how Americans constructed norms of class, race, and gender at home and abroad. In the “double vision” of this literature, images of the working-class city and the frontier West colluded to reinforce the boundaries of race, gender, and class that expansion and capitalism sometimes unsettled (and often reproduced) in the nineteenth century. In the sensational story papers and pamphlets, a variety of undesirables populated both seamy urban underworlds and the borderlands of an expanding America: prostitutes, immigrants, Mexicans, Indians, and Cubans, all of them a threat to white women and to (white) “American values.” Against these characters, authors arrayed “real” heroic American men, workers, frontiersmen, even filibusters, consolidating white male citizenship against perceived threats to its continued dominance. Popular cultural representations of urban and frontier spaces and people influenced political culture and vice versa. Nineteenth-century popular fiction reveals how Manifest Destiny offered new backdrops for sensational stories that entertained Americans focused on expanding their nation into former Spanish territories in the Americas.9
Although Florida Indian depredation narratives shared the sensationalism, sentimentalism, gender ideals, and racial assumptions of other narratives of war and captivity, they also differed, primarily in that they are not stories of white captivity among Native Americans. The Seminoles lacked the resources to feed captives, there was no longer the incentive of a ransom system, and there was no market for trading captives, since the United States would send captive Seminoles to Oklahoma, not trade them back in exchange for a white captive. With very few exceptions, then, these were tales about depredations upon families and property, not about captivity among the Seminoles.10
The blacks who sometimes appear in Florida depredation narratives also distinguish these stories from other accounts, which rarely featured people of African descent. Unlike the slavery debate in other frontier states, the Florida debate did not turn on whether slavery would expand into Florida, because it already existed there, and no one doubted that it would continue. Rather, slavery shaped expansion into Florida because proslavery Americans wanted to conquer and remove Native Americans and free blacks from Florida in order to prevent any more slave runaways and because they feared a joint rebellion of Seminoles and blacks. As new Florida resident Corinna Brown put it in 1837, “should the slaves rise about this time, it would make glorious work—the horrors of St. Domingo enacted over again in earnest.”11 While the feared slave insurrection never occurred in Florida, the concerns of many slaveholding whites were very real. Some blacks lived and fought with the Seminoles, and some historians classify the Second U.S.-Seminole War as the longest and most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history as well as a war of Seminole resistance. Although they are somewhat rare in depredation accounts, when blacks were present they brought the specter of a slave rebellion clearly into the frame. This heightened the fear of the reader and further justified the war as a necessary defense—in this case, against the implicit threat of a slave rebellion. Judge Robert Reid warned U.S. Secretary of State John Forsyth just before the Second U.S.-Seminole War began that “while we guard ourselves against a savage foe, we should be prepared for an evil—not entirely out of the list of contingencies—yet nearer home.”12 He meant, of course, the slaves.13
Another difference from other narratives is that, in Florida Indian depredation stories, after the attack the narratives return to the scene of destroyed domestic space, rather than following white captives into Indian country. To “depredate” is to plunder or rob, and these accounts focus on human victims and their property losses. The Indian Depredation Claims system, designed to limit cycles of retaliatory violence on American frontiers, invited peacetime victims to make claims against the federal government for property losses they incurred from Native Americans. Under this policy, citizens of the United States reported “Indian depredations” to local authorities, agents of the Indian Office, or even members of Congress in hopes that by following the proper bureaucratic procedures they would receive compensation. They rarely did, but the policy codified the “Indian depredation” as an officially recognized form of American settler victimization. If whites settled on the frontier and Native Americans attacked them, the Native peoples and the national government bore responsibility, and white settlers remained innocent of any wrongdoing, even as their encroaching settlements enriched them and enlarged the national territory. In this way, the nation expanded without formally declaring war on the indigenous peoples its citizens displaced. Illustrating how clearly “invasion [was] a structure rather than an event” in U.S. settler colonization, the U.S. government put this policy in place in 1796 and continued it until 1921. Leaders anticipated continuous borderlands violence even during times of formal peace because they knew that expanding white settlements would continually pressure indigenous ones; in fact they counted on it. Although the wartime depredations in Florida were not eligible for reimbursement, Floridians knew of the claims system and several filed claims for Creek and Seminole depredations alleged to have occurred in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida in 1836 and 1837. In 1837 a congressional committee investigated and rejected their claims. Although the federal Indian Depredation Claims system did not create Florida Indian depredation narratives, the existence of this policy surely helped to reshape traditional captivity accounts into the genre of “Indian depredations.”14
Fire is an important feature of the typical Florida narrative’s focus on the destruction of property. After the Seminoles plundered, they set their victims’ property alight. As with “indiscriminate” violence against “innocents,” American narrators attributed the use of fire as a practice of the “barbaric” Seminoles, although American troops plundered and burned any villages they encountered during the First, Second, and Third Seminole Wars, setting fire to Seminole homes, supplies, and fields
