The Threshold of Manifest Destiny. Laurel Clark Shire

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 forces captured others. After their capture 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