The Threshold of Manifest Destiny. Laurel Clark Shire

Seminole “depredations” in his journal. Daniel Wiggins arrived in Middle Florida in October 1838 to live and work on Judge Thomas Randall’s plantation (he likely never met Laura Wirt Randall, who died in 1833). Wiggins was a devout Methodist and a millwright from Randall’s hometown of Annapolis, Maryland. Encouraged by Randall, who perhaps needed someone with his skills to expand his cotton plantation, Wiggins left a wife and children behind in Annapolis (her parents were ill and she did not want to leave) to ply his trade in Middle Florida, in spite of the ongoing war. Wiggins sent his tools ahead on a schooner, collected twelve enslaved people whom Randall had recently purchased in Maryland, and escorted them to Belmont, Randall’s Jefferson County plantation. The monthlong journey began on the Duchess of Baltimore, which sailed from Baltimore to Savannah, and then continued overland, where, Wiggins noted, “the Indians have massacred many families.”²² Wiggins complained about the lack of religious society on the journey and in early Florida; often passed judgment on those who drank, played cards, and danced; and attended religious meetings whenever possible. Throughout his first winter in Florida rumors of Native American attacks swept Florida, and he frequently mentioned them in his diary. In January 1839, he wrote, “Many tragical seigns [scenes] have been acted in and about this neighborhood, the relating of which is enough to make the blood run cold—men women & children indiscriminately massacred by the savage foe. I intend as I may have opportunity to collect some of the particulars and write them down.”²³ Perhaps he planned someday to publish them (although he never did), as did others who recognized that an audience existed for stories about Seminole attacks on white women. His accounts share many details with published narratives, as his attention to “indiscriminate” violence suggests.²⁴

      Wiggins’s opinion and attitude about the Seminoles and their plight was forever changed by his exposure to a depredation. He had arrived in Florida with some sympathy for the Seminoles, mixed with a liberal dose of fear and racism. On a Sunday in early January 1839, just a few weeks after he had arrived, he wrote in his journal that some whites had attacked a nearby Seminole camp and killed several people, including a young girl. “It makes me feel sorry,” he wrote, “to hear of the poor heathens being butchered, especially the females and children, yet I feel glad that they are routed.”²⁵ Wiggins’s limited Christian sympathy for the indigenous peoples of Florida was almost mobilized here for a Seminole girl—due to her age and gender, a victim most likely to earn an American’s sympathies. Yet after another month in the war-ravaged territory, he did not feel the slightest twinge of sadness on behalf of the Seminoles, even women and children. On February 20, 1839, Wiggins personally witnessed the aftermath of an attack on a white woman for the first time: