or surrender, American military escorts imprisoned the Seminoles at a fort where they waited, sometimes for months, for the steamboats that would take them west. By 1841, most of the Seminoles had been sent west to the Creek Indian Territory. Some Black Seminoles went with them, while others aided U.S. forces in exchange for their freedom. After removal, Black Seminoles found little safety from slavery in Indian Territory, and some traveled further south into Texas and Mexico in search of secure freedom.42
In 1841 American military leaders also began to recruit white settler families to reoccupy the frontier. Military leaders believed that white recolonization would induce the remaining Seminoles to surrender. As an incentive to reestablish settlements at abandoned forts, plantations, and farms, the army provided white settler families with rations, transportation, and temporary homes. The white women who participated in this colonization scheme are featured in Chapter 4. Congress passed a bill that awarded free public land to armed white settlers in Florida just as the war ended in late summer 1842. This new law rewarded whites who inhabited and cultivated Florida farms (south of the existing line of settlement) for five years. Chapter 5 highlights the gendered ways in which white settler families operated as armed occupiers under this law.43
Ultimately, the U.S. Army never managed to rid Florida of Seminoles completely or to capture all the Black Seminoles and return them to slavery. Several hundred Seminoles remained on an informal reservation in southwest Florida after 1842, distant from white settlements. Nationalists and other proponents of aggressive expansionism found little to celebrate in the Second U.S.-Seminole War and far more to commemorate in the U.S.-Mexico War, which began four years later. This is another reason why histories of Manifest Destiny sideline Florida. The U.S.-Seminole wars, especially the long and bloody Second U.S.-Seminole War, brought more shame than praise to the American military and government. The war with Mexico, by contrast, was relatively quick and gloriously successful, making it a more favorable context for celebrating national expansion.44
As the history of early U.S. Florida reveals, women’s history is not separate from histories of war, expansion, slavery, colonialism, and politics. Domestic ideology influenced not only women’s lives but also the development of American nationalism and territorial expansion. In the chapters that follow, it will become clear that in political speech, popular representations, and federal and military policy, white women and their domestic labor played an important role in how Americans made Florida part of the United States. Some white women found opportunities on the Florida frontier that were not available to women elsewhere in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their gains, however, came at a high cost for indigenous and black peoples in Florida.
Slavery, Indian Removal, and Expansionist Domesticity
CHAPTER 1
Property, Settlement, and Slavery
I enclose you the promised deed for the land and negroes, which will have to be executed by your two uncles, the trustees, and then recorded in the court of Leon County, and the sooner you have it attended to, the better.
—William Wirt to Laura Wirt Randall, December 8, 1827
By the laws of the Spanish Monarchy … your oratrix was entitled to her separate property independent of the control or disposition of the said Defendant, which right has in no wise been changed by the transfer of the Province to the United States, but said property was secured to her by the treaty of Cession and by an Act of the legislative council … according to the right and title by which she held it while the Province was under the dominion of his Catholic Majesty.
—LeSassier v. Alba, Escambia County, Florida, May 1831
In 1831 Victoria LeSassier, a wealthy Pensacola widow in her seventies, divorced her second husband, Pedro de Alba. Deeply in debt, Alba had recently threatened to take control of his wife’s separate estate, which was worth about $36,000. His financial problems had plagued their marriage since 1819, when LeSassier, suspecting that he had attempted to poison her in order to inherit her property, left Alba’s household and went to live with her son. She wrote Alba that she was quitting their marriage because he had treated her so badly that even a slave would have complained, and warned him: “But, Alba, that time of slavery is over. Consider myself your equal in every respect.”1 A slave owner herself, Victoria LeSassier was well aware of the privileges that her whiteness and wealth produced. It was not until Florida became an American territory, however, that she could sue Alba for a divorce (since divorce had been impossible under Catholic Spain). Unlike most other wives in the United States in the 1830s, she was able to keep and control the property that she had brought into their marriage, which made divorce much more attractive. When LeSassier divorced Alba she regained control over several town lots in Pensacola, thousands of acres of land in West Florida, and twenty enslaved people.2 Her story illustrates how Florida’s transition from Spanish colony to U.S. territory resulted in a hybrid legal system that supported white settler colonialism. Legally, Americans did not seamlessly replace civil law with common law; rather they chose to honor some parts of civil and treaty law—even when they challenged common law rules—if doing so favored white settlement in Florida. Under the new regime, white women of property such as Victoria LeSassier (especially those who owned slaves) would benefit in unexpected ways, while Seminoles and blacks would face increasing discrimination.3
LeSassier jettisoned her husband but kept her property in Florida because it was a colonial borderland. Before 1821, Spain ruled Florida, and Spanish civil law granted wives separate property rights and half of marital property, not because it supported female independence but rather due to the continuation of their lineage in marriage. While Anglo wives left behind their families of birth when they married, Spanish wives brought familial ties with them, retaining their maiden names in addition to their married ones. Uniquely, colonial-era Florida wives ended up keeping their separate property rights in Florida after 1821 via treaty law. Article 8 of the Adams-Onís Treaty (in which Spain ceded Florida to the United States) upheld the property rights of all Spanish colonists. Since many women had received or inherited property in Spanish Florida, Article 8 confirmed their right to own separate property even though some of them were married and, therefore, would not have had the right to separate property under the common law. The loophole was accidental, as neither John Quincy Adams nor Luis de Onís said anything about women in their correspondence concerning Article 8. In 1822, Florida’s legislature adopted the common law and explicitly repealed Spanish civil codes, contradicting Article 8 of the treaty for married women. Historians have often accepted this as proof that civil law no longer applied after U.S. annexation, but in fact it necessitated another law. In 1824, “to obviate any doubts,” the Florida Legislative Council specifically confirmed the rights of “husbands and wives” married under civil law to treat their property “in the same manner as they could or might have done under the laws of Spain.” Colonial-era wives kept their separate property, and several cases arose in early territorial Florida to test this law. In most cases colonial-era wives prevailed, especially if they were white.4
This chapter examines the intersection of race and gender in the application of property law in Florida in the first decades after it transferred into the United States. Using court records to unearth the material contributions that white women made to settler colonialism and the expansion of racial slavery into Florida, I argue that their property was essential to expansionist domesticity, for through their holdings
