regime that dispossessed Native Americans, as well as places in which people lived under the deeply unequal relations of racial slavery.
Race and the Domestication of U.S. Florida
The gender dynamics of American expansion cannot be separated from the racial projects under way in territorial Florida. The colonization of Florida unfolded as Americans in general began to change their perceptions of Native Americans. Whites viewed people of African descent as irredeemably different from whites, but they had long seen indigenous difference as rooted in environment rather than race. For most Americans before about 1830, Native American “savagery” was a problem that could be solved by “civilization” or assimilation programs, and U.S. Indian policy, at least rhetorically, had reflected this attitude. After 1830 that view began to change, and many white Americans (except for a few Christian missionaries) began to think of “Indians” as a distinct race that would never achieve the same level of civilization as whites or live comfortably among them, in spite of the many examples of indigenous people who did just that. Not only did whites increasingly view Indians as racially distinct and incapable of assimilating but the alliance and occasional kinship between blacks and Seminoles in Florida further inflamed anti-Indian sentiment there.28
As white Americans increasingly invested race with immutable meaning, U.S. rule brought a changing racial regime to Florida. American racial systems built on earlier Spanish and British colonial models, and racial categories outside American settlements were somewhat in flux in the early nineteenth century. Florida’s middle ground, however, was eroding quickly (along with many others in North America at the end of the Wars of the 1810s), as it became a U.S. territory in which the Native peoples lacked European allies. In the 1820s and 1830s, white settlers began to reproduce the inequalities of patriarchal white supremacy as they settled in Florida, and Seminole and Black Seminole people fought to maintain their land and autonomy. The values attached to differences in skin tone and culture increasingly conformed to the American model, in which the most significant distinctions were between whites (whether of Spanish, English, or other European descent); Native Americans, increasingly cast as undifferentiated “Seminoles” (who Americans believed must be removed); and blacks (who Americans believed must be enslaved). Americans imposed these racial categories in Florida through racial slavery, via the privileging of whites, and in its diplomacy with Native Americans. People of mixed European, African, and/or Native American ancestry would find it much more difficult to maintain their rights and property in U.S. Florida than they had under Spain.29
The labor of enslaved people—forced by threat of violence and a dehumanizing racial regime—was central to the creation of white American homes, wealth, and identity in Florida. While the estelusti fought alongside their Seminole allies to remain free, enslaved blacks found themselves separated from families and communities and sold or sent to Florida to toil in cotton, sugar, or indigo fields. The number of enslaved people in Florida had already swelled to 15,501 by 1830 and then nearly quadrupled to 61,745 by 1860. Free blacks living in former Spanish colonial towns faced increasing harassment and discrimination after 1821.30 Meanwhile, white settlers were granted citizenship and property rights, rations, protection, transportation, housing, and cheap or even free land if they helped colonize Florida.
Americans also created a single category of indigenous identity so that all those deemed Indians in Florida could be removed. American negotiators in the 1820s and 1830s regarded Florida’s separate bands of Native American peoples as one group, because doing so allowed them to make treaties that (from a U.S. perspective) conveniently bound all of them to one agreement. From a Native American perspective, however, there was no such group or council that could make decisions for all Native people in Florida. In fact, a unified political and cultural “Seminole” identity only solidified in indigenous resistance to American demands, especially in the three wars they fought against U.S. forces. The “Black Seminoles” experienced their own parallel but distinct ethnogenesis in the same conflicts, as they fought to maintain their freedom. U.S.-Seminole diplomacy and conflict thus created new Black Seminole and Indian identities even as they sought to eliminate them.31
The absence of a captive trade in Florida also influenced the shift toward American racial hierarchy. By the 1820s the Seminoles were not taking many white captives, for there was no market for them. This made nineteenth-century Florida a far different place—with fundamentally dissimilar relationships between whites, Native Americans, and blacks—than other Spanish borderlands in the early nineteenth century. The captive trade in Pueblo, Plains, Cherokee, and other borderland societies, which continued in the West into the nineteenth century, challenged traditional Native kinship and integrated Native communities into larger capitalist economies there. Intermarriage via captive taking also forged kin connections between imperial settlers and Native Americans in such borderlands, but not in Florida. In the main, the Seminoles viewed whites as enemies and not potential kin, especially since there were plenty of runaway slaves available for adoption as kin or tributary slaves. Instead of taking and trading in white captives, the Seminoles attacked homesteads in order to discourage white migration into Florida. As a result of settler colonialism and the conflicts it produced, whites and Native peoples in Florida increasingly saw each other as fundamentally different.32
White Settlers and Ethnic Cleansing
Between the First and Second U.S.-Seminole Wars, the United States signed three treaties with “the Florida Indians.” U.S. agents negotiated these agreements in the 1820s and 1830s as white families moved into Florida. American Indian agents conducted these treaties, like almost all U.S.-Indian diplomacy, with a bare modicum of honesty, mostly to create plausible but thin arguments that they were valid. Indigenous people in Florida resisted making and complying with each of these treaties. The first one established reservations for Native Americans in the Florida territory, but subsequent documents created a series of impossible and escalating demands on the Seminoles, in particular for land, for the return of the Black Seminoles whom Americans termed runaway slaves, and for Seminole reunification with the Creeks (by now their enemies) on a shared reserve west of the Mississippi River. White Americans were determined to end the freedom that the Seminoles offered runaways and to reclaim their “property” among the Black Seminoles.33 Chapter 1 analyzes how international treaty law endowed white settler women with separate marital property rights in this period, even as American law also limited the rights of free blacks and shored up racial slavery.
Table 1. Florida Population by Race and Enslavement, 1830–1860
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Schedules, Florida, 1830, 1840, 1850, and 1860, in Social Explorer Dataset, Census 1830, 1840, 1850, and 1860 [database online].
a Includes one “Indian.”
As in many settler colonies, white colonization happened in tandem with Indian removal and the expansion of slavery into Florida. The American population increased quickly after 1821, from a total of 34,730 in 1830 (the date of the first U.S. census of Florida) to 87,445 in 1850. By 1850, migrants from other states comprised over half (56.1 percent) of the free, native-born population in Florida. In that same period, the indigenous population of Florida dropped dramatically, from about five thousand to fewer than four hundred. Many of the whites who settled Florida were slaveholders, and Florida’s growing population included nearly equal numbers of whites and enslaved blacks (Table 1). Migrants also built other institutions that nineteenth-century whites associated with civilization: Protestant churches, schools for free white children, and newspapers.34
Intending to stay permanently and hoping to become wealthy planters using enslaved labor, the white settler population concentrated in the middle of upper Florida and increasingly limited the
