household social order was central to the framework that policy makers used in Florida. Their policies aimed to restore women and men to their natural roles, a restoration that they equated with the settlement of the frontier. In return, white women benefited from national expansion and were at least complicit with its violence, whether or not they consciously invested themselves in the ideological project of expansionist domesticity. Their dependence limited women’s choices and makes it very difficult to locate their agency in history, but because of their role and privilege in national expansion, white women must be considered central actors in accounts of U.S. expansion. While several historians have found that white women often resisted frontier migration, studies such as this one reveal that the work women did once they arrived was no less significant to the expansion of slavery and national territory. In fact, that men compelled white women to go should highlight just how important their presence and labor were to those who brought them (sometimes against their wishes) to Florida and other settler colonies.22
Rather than accepting the framing of settler women’s domestic work as innocent or even patriotic, we must recognize that white women, like men, were invaders who the nation rewarded for their work along U.S. frontiers, where they effectively expanded the territory upon which their whiteness would grant them a range of privileges based on their alleged superiority to Native Americans and people of African descent. That white women’s work was gendered and cast as subordinate to white men’s makes it no less significant in the cooperative racial project that was American expansion in the early nineteenth century. In fact, that subordination was part of its significance.
In spite of the ways that nineteenth-century domesticity obscured their significance, white women’s lives are reflected in historical records from the Florida frontier; such records even include white women of modest means who did not leave behind journals or extensive correspondence. Land and court records, public and private accounts of territorial Florida, and military and federal policy papers all illuminate the ways their physical labor and symbolic value underwrote American settler colonialism in Florida.
This book approaches the history of white women in Florida differently than many other books on antebellum women. The “cult of domesticity” and its prescriptive notion that women and men occupied separate spheres of influence in the nineteenth-century United States has been a longstanding feature of U.S. women’s history. Rather than measuring their political significance by the reform movements they championed or the political parties they supported, this book recognizes, first, that making homes in territorial Florida was a political act even if women were not conscious of it. Women’s domestic work had national meanings in the context of territorial and slavery expansion. Second, it suggests that southern white women were not only plantation mistresses or farm wives, but they were also settlers who brought slavery as well as white homes into Indian country. Third, it includes men and masculinity as part of the domestic realm, since almost all households contained both men and women, and because gender ideology relied on the pairing of masculinity and femininity—in oppositional, complementary, and heteronormative ways.23
Another implication of this study is that domesticity was not only an ideological construct that shaped national expansion, it was also a material part of the process of Americanizing new spaces. In frontier Florida, white women used their labor (and that of any enslaved people they exploited), household furniture, and kitchen utensils to make new homes and benefited in material ways because they did so. Here this study takes some cues from socialist feminists, who have long recognized the material importance of domestic ideology. Historically this ideology purported that women did not work but “helped”; that women were especially suited for housework or trades that replicated household skills (work always deemed unskilled regardless of its degree of difficulty, and, therefore, always paid less than “skilled” male labor); and that “love” rather than money, independence, or status was the best and most appropriate reward for female work. In this regard, Americans treated women’s work for settlement as they did the rest of their labor. It was vital to the reproduction and survival of society but completely discounted as work. Unlike women’s domestic work elsewhere, however, their labor on frontiers supported not only their households and the growth of the middle class and modern capitalism but also the expansion of national territory—support that looked apolitical given women’s natural role as “helpers.” This book categorizes and analyzes women’s labor in frontier homesteads as work—domestic and nationalist work—and establishes that white women were important and complicit members of white settler colonies that spread slavery, ended the liberty of free blacks in Florida, dispossessed Native Americans, and attempted to destroy indigenous societies via assimilation, extermination, and removal.24
Since this book’s central claims about the significance of women’s labor depend upon a multifaceted definition of domesticity, the book owes a great debt to scholarship on the antebellum “culture of sentiment.” In particular, critic Amy Kaplan has argued that territorial expansion and domestic ideology were partners in a nationalist project that she named “Manifest Domesticity.” In Kaplan’s view, proponents of domesticity used expansion to give women’s domestic literature national and imperial importance. This study expands upon her work to illustrate how proponents of expansion mobilized domesticity in the service of settler colonialism and Manifest Destiny. In Florida, national and military forces mobilized matters typically confined to women’s history—domesticity, married women’s property law, gender roles—to justify Indian removal, to spread slavery, and to propel territorial expansion via white settlement. Using the tools of social and political history, this book confirms what Kaplan observed in women’s domestic literature—that at times the domestic ideal, rather than dividing women and men into separate spheres, united white American men and women around national expansion.25
This study also draws upon the vibrant scholarship that analyzes U.S. expansion in cultural history. These scholars have bridged histories of U.S. imperialism with studies of American visual and literary culture, showing that culture not only reflected foreign policy concerns but also helped to shape policy. This study asks not only how U.S. policies in territorial Florida shaped and reflected domestic ideology and cultural beliefs about women but also how those policies affected female historical actors who, in turn, sometimes renegotiated such ideologies and beliefs. It moves beyond texts to consider how expansionist domesticity also operated on a political and geographical stage.26
As with settler colonial studies, when histories of national expansion have explored its gendered ideological and material consequences, they have emphasized the ways that white masculinity influenced American foreign policy and imperialism. And for good reason: the idea of martial manhood popular among many nineteenth-century Americans celebrated male exploits in wars fought for territory and framed them as noble violence aimed at the spread of democracy or the defense of women and children. Nevertheless, this important focus on masculinity has overshadowed an equally compelling history of women and femininity. Indeed, only a few studies have looked for women’s roles in national expansion. Unlike previous studies, this book does not suggest that women’s role was solely oppositional or subordinate to expansionist men. Rather, as whites, white women had much to gain from expansionist policies and actively sought those gains for themselves and their households. In doing so, white women undertook particularly female tasks on behalf of territorial expansion and shared the benefits with white men. Moreover, white women who profitably settled the frontier succeeded for the same reasons men did. The male and female settlers most likely to plant permanent roots and prosper in Florida had usually settled near relatives. In extended families, as in domestic relations, men and women were interdependent.27
White women were central to U.S. national expansion and its ideological justifications and effects: they symbolized civilized domesticity, expended the labor that turned frontier dwellings into permanent homes, and gave birth to the next generation of whites in Florida, people who would claim to be its “natives.” In this study, then, white women take center stage to highlight their role in American settler colonialism and to emphasize the ways in which white domesticity privileged them and provided essential service to national expansion. The homes that white women built in territorial
