href="#ulink_face67a2-d172-5448-8c0b-cba2b4c63eb8">Table 2). By 1840 over half of Florida’s population resided in the region between the Suwanee and Apalachicola Rivers. Attracted by rich agricultural land, whites eagerly flocked to the area, laying out the new state capital Tallahassee in 1824. Middle Florida whites held disproportionately high numbers of slaves, nearly half of all the slaves in Florida in 1830 and more than half of the total in 1840. As slavery increased, the number of free blacks fell (and many fled the territory), especially in Middle Florida.35
Map 1. Florida, 1821–1845.
U.S.-Seminole diplomacy in the 1820s and 1830s culminated in a highly disputed 1833 agreement that the Seminoles would return runaway slaves and move to the Creek reservation in the western Indian Territory by 1835. Those who lived in upper Florida—closest to the whites moving into Middle Florida and already facing violence—capitulated and left in 1834. Elsewhere, especially in East Florida, cycles of borderland violence renewed between indigenous residents and white settlers. These rising tensions erupted into war in late 1835. In November, resistant Seminoles killed Charley Emathla, a Seminole who was cooperating with removal. In late December a band of Seminoles ambushed American soldiers as they traveled between Fort Brooke and Fort King (Tampa and Ocala). On the same day, Seminole warriors killed the Indian agent at Fort King. In retaliation, President Jackson ordered U.S. forces to invade a Seminole stronghold on the Withlacoochee River. These events formally started the Second U.S-Seminole War.36
Table 2. Florida Population by Most Populated Regions, Race, and Enslavement, 1830–1860
Notes: In 1830 Middle Florida included Gadsden, Hamilton, Jefferson, Leon, and Madison counties; for 1840 data Franklin County was added, it was carved out of Gadsden County in 1832. This table does not include the sparsely populated South Florida region (Indian lands, Mosquito and Monroe Counties) as part of East Florida although they had been included in the British Province of East Florida. U.S. Census, Florida, 1830, 1840, 1850, and 1860 in Social Explorer Dataset, Census 1830, 1840, 1850 and 1860 [database online].
a Includes one “Indian.”
In the ethnic cleansing campaign that whites called the Second Seminole War, many Seminoles died from starvation, violence, or disease, but their resolve to remain in Florida fiercely challenged their Americans foes. Determined to remain independent and in Florida, but fewer in number and resources than the Americans, the Seminoles fought an effective guerilla war for nearly seven years from December 1835 until August 1842. The United States spent more than $30 million (far more than planned for the removal of all indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi) and sent nearly 1,500 white men to their deaths in Florida during this conflict. The Florida War, as the American press called this conflict at the time, lasted much longer than anticipated, cost more money than any other U.S. war with Native Americans before or since, and resulted in the loss of more American soldiers than any other U.S. war against an indigenous nation. The U.S. military removed about 4,400 indigenous people (including nearly five hundred Black Seminoles) during the Second U.S.-Seminole War.37
Most of the military action occurred between the Withlacoochee River and Lake Okeechobee, a region stretching 150 miles across central Florida. That region contained white homesteads as well as Seminole villages, and therefore women and children from both indigenous and white communities were on the front lines. Throughout the war, the U.S. Army attacked Seminole villages, where they killed and captured people and burned homes, goods, and fields. The Seminoles retaliated in kind, attacked troops or white settlers, and then disappeared into Florida’s vast coastal plains and swamps where American forces struggled to even locate them. By its second year, the war appeared to be a hopeless effort that Americans, in the context of the economic panic that began in 1837, could not afford to keep funding. Critics did not, however, voice any opposition to the war’s aims—just to President Jackson’s failure to achieve them.38
Critics of the Florida War expressed little sympathy for the Seminoles because, in the 1830s, Indian depredation narratives emerged in the American press, framing the conflict as a war to protect white women and children from “savages” and “barbarians,” in spite of the fact that American forces resorted to the same strategy of attacking Seminole homes and families. Chapter 2 examines those stories, the version of this history that has dominated prior written accounts, and their effects on American policy. Chapter 3 features Seminole accounts of the war and their removal from Florida, a perspective that confirms some aspects of white American accounts but challenges their framing of the conflict. Many whites, fearful of Indian depredations, fled to other states or to military garrisons in 1835 and 1836. Desperate to keep them from abandoning Florida, Congress responded in 1836 by ordering the army to supply rations to any white families, widows, and orphans who stayed in the territory. Chapter 4 analyzes this wartime welfare program.39
Although they were essential to white settlements, white women were scarce in territorial Florida, a problem that American leaders would seek to remedy. In 1830 and 1840 Florida had more white adult men and fewer adult white women than national averages. While Florida’s enslaved population had a balanced gender ratio and an average age near the national norm, its white population skewed male and its white female population skewed young. If U.S. leaders wanted to populate Florida with white families, they would have to find ways to change this, given the importance of available reproductive-age wives to family formation and white settler colonialism. The influx of white soldiers and the flight of some white women out of the territory during the Second U.S.-Seminole War increased the white gender and age imbalances. In 1840, there were almost twice as many white men in the territory as white women. Furthermore, the enslaved population continued to grow with nearly equal numbers of males and females, so that by 1840 enslaved black women outnumbered white women. As Chapters 4 and 5 reveal, American leaders enacted supportive family settlement policies in the early 1840s as they ended the Second U.S.-Seminole War. As a result, gender ratios among white adults began to equalize. In 1850 the white gender ratio was 1.3 men for every white adult woman (as compared to 1.74 in 1840). By 1860, it approached parity (1.18). As soldiers departed, new white families arrived or formed and white women produced more children. In fact, in addition to migration (voluntary and coerced) and in spite of the relative scarcity of white adult women, reproduction boosted Florida’s population in these years. Children under the age of fifteen made up 41–45 percent of the total population in the decades after 1821, and by 1850 Florida had proportionally more white children than the national average and roughly the same percentage of enslaved children (see Appendix).40
American leaders created these policies aimed at retaining and increasing adult white female settlers in Florida even as they sought to remove Seminole families. U.S. forces finally broke the fierce Seminole resistance about five years into the war brought on by the U.S. Indian removal policy. Determined to fracture their alliance, U.S. Brigadier General Thomas Jesup offered the Black Seminoles a deal in 1837. Against white southerners’ wishes, Jesup promised them freedom if they agreed to surrender and leave Florida. This gave them an alternative path to liberty and manipulated them into aiding the Americans. As one of their descendants recalled, “They all went together to leave Florida to Oklahoma…. You know that they had to do something to be free.”41 In addition to the loss of their Black Seminole allies, the Seminoles lost the war because they ran out of resources and safe places to live. They were rarely routed on the battlefield, but deprivation led many to surrender between 1837 and 1841, while American
