early 1818 when Andrew Jackson, using reports of “Indian depredations” on white settlers along the Florida-Georgia border as an excuse, led a large American military force (composed of regulars, volunteers, and Lower Creek warriors) into Florida, destroying indigenous villages throughout Middle Florida and capturing thousands of cattle and hundreds of bushels of corn. The Americans began the First U.S.-Seminole War in cultural terms that would become even more familiar in the next twenty years. Cloaking expansionist aggression as self-defense, Jackson justified his actions as vengeance for the deaths of white women and children even as he targeted Seminole homes and families. He defended the invasion as vital to American national interests, since Spain had failed to rid the southeastern borderlands of threats to U.S. sovereignty by autonomous Native Americans, black runaways from slavery, and British agents who aided these groups. Although Jackson’s campaign was militarily successful, the Seminoles were too smart to engage his larger force, and most survived to fight another day. Nevertheless, Jackson had exposed Spain’s weakness. Treaty negotiations with Spain began in 1819 and Florida officially transferred to the United States in 1821. U.S. forces had finally claimed Florida, but it would take several more decades of war on its indigenous people, and white settler colonialism, before the Americans would fully control the territory.12
Due to its unique colonial and indigenous past and its location in the southern borderlands, Florida’s version of white settler colonialism differs from that in other contemporary U.S. territories. Much as U.S. economic forces influenced local economies in other Native North American communities, Americans quickly sought profits in Florida. Due to Florida’s location in the Southeast, however, the economic interests of slaveholders and land speculators prevailed over those of traders, and early U.S. policy toward Florida focused on removing the threats posed by autonomous Seminoles and free blacks rather than sustaining trade relationships. Thus American rule quickly marginalized the Seminole trade economy. Furthermore, while the expansion of market capitalism touched all American territories in the nineteenth century, the expansion of white settlement usually accompanied the spread of market capitalism in the borderlands. Yet large numbers of American squatters had not settled in Florida prior to 1821, making its colonization different from the process in many other early American frontier territories. While in Illinois and Georgia, for example, white squatters demanded violent federal efforts to remove indigenous residents in the 1830s in order to secure “their” property (in the Black Hawk War and the Cherokee Removal from Georgia), in Florida the impetus for the First U.S.-Seminole War, which finally forced Spain to cede Florida to the United States, came from slaveholders rather than squatters. Andrew Jackson obliged them and invaded Florida because doing so extended his anti-Indian campaign into Florida and removed the British-Seminole alliance that had threatened the United States during the War of 1812. After 1821 white settlers flooded into upper Florida, and land speculation was popular there; however, the Second U.S.-Seminole War—brought on by Jackson’s removal agenda in the 1830s—soon discouraged many potential immigrants. In response to the scarcity of immigrants, American leaders enacted several policies during and right after the Second U.S.-Seminole War to attract white settler families to the unsettled parts of Florida in order to pressure the Seminoles to leave. They made policies that enlisted white women in colonization in order to replicate the settlement process unfolding in other territories, realizing that war and removal alone could not accomplish the same colonial goal: permanent settlement.13
In other respects, Florida is similar to other American settler colonies built in former Spanish colonial borderlands. In Missouri, as in Florida, the United States removed Native Americans in the early nineteenth century as thousands of white settlers arrived there (with the enslaved laborers they claimed as property) hoping to gain some of the cheap or free public land on offer from the U.S. government. In Texas and New Mexico, lawmakers passed similar public land bills, hoping to attract white settler families as they had done in Florida. Compared to Texas and New Mexico, Florida’s southeastern coastal location and its population distinguish it, for it had far fewer white settlers than Texas did by the time of the 1836 rebellion, and a much smaller indigenous population than the New Mexico territory included when the Americans captured it (and the rest of Northern Mexico) in the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846–1848. Pro-settler land policies shaped the white colonization of all these places, and white settler women played an important role in the settler colonialism of all these states, even though their locations and demographics varied.14
Most settler colonies, including Florida and other U.S. states, justified imperial violence in the past and disavow it in the present through origin stories that frame settlement as natural, inevitable, or benevolent (for example, Manifest Destiny and the Thanksgiving story). Settler colonial accounts often cast particular imperial actors, such as the monarch, the metropolitan colonizer, and the ethnic cleanser, as the truly guilty parties, while they present settlers as persecuted migrants, refugees seeking asylum, or hardworking pioneers. In doing so, such accounts emphasize settlers’ hardships to justify their rewards, while downplaying their role in dispossessing Native peoples. In the United States, settler colonialism had to further distinguish itself from imperialism because the American Revolution left a legacy of anticolonial feelings. However, Americans did not reject colonizing new territory; they just called it something else—such as the spread of democracy. Their stories about territorial expansion sideline settler aggression toward indigenous peoples by focusing on the religious persecution or pioneering valor of the white settlers, who are the heroes and heroines of an inspiring story about overcoming adversity to bring civilization to the wilderness. The brave settlers’ sacrifices on the colonial frontier validate their entitlement to the land, which conveniently leaves indigenous peoples with prior claims outside of the main story. Settler stories intentionally marginalize the sustained legal and military battles that whites waged to claim Native land. When settler stories mention conflict with indigenous people, as in stories about Native attacks on white settlers, white narratives blame Native Americans for “bringing it on themselves” (by violently resisting white encroachment), and thus frame indigenous exile or death as the inevitable fate of “savages” who could not coexist with whites (eliding that it is wholly impossible to coexist with neighbors who want to remove or kill you).15
Although scholars rarely acknowledge it, the rhetorical frameworks that obscure imperial aggression in settler colonial origin stories often rely on gender. In Florida, female war refugees and hardy male farmers took center stage in the dramatic conflict between whites and Seminoles, and both of those images of Florida settlers helped to paint the naked aggression of Indian removal as a defensive policy to protect “peaceful” settler families. White women especially allowed American expansion into Florida to disappear as chivalrous defense, and at the same time settler narratives naturalized homemaking as woman’s duty rather than framing it as imperialist action.
Few scholarly overviews of settler colonial theory analyze gender or examine white women as colonizers. Some lack any gender analysis, while others examine white masculinity or the way colonial regimes targeted indigenous men and women differently. Those insights are important and valuable, but such accounts are incomplete because they do not include settler women and the ways that domestic work drove the political and geographic success of white settlements. As Margaret Jacobs notes, “We must move beyond merely adding (white) women to a simple narrative of heroic triumph over adversity.” Rather, settler women must be understood as colonizers who were simultaneously complicit with and subordinated by colonial regimes.16
There is a growing literature that fully incorporates women and gender, alongside race, class, and nation, in analyses of the colonial past. Many of these studies build on the insights of postcolonial theorist Ann Laura Stoler, who argues in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power that colonial regimes invaded intimate spaces and harnessed gender, race, and sexuality to their imperial mission. Margaret Jacobs’s White Mother to a Dark Race, Adele Perry’s On the Edge of Empire, and Lora Wildenthal’s German Women for Empire take up these “intimacies of empire” in settler colonies. These studies put gender and settler women at the center of the colonial encounter. They broaden theories of settler colonialism and challenge previous scholarship in women’s history that tended to romanticize settler women as pioneers rather than critically analyze white
