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 rights of free blacks (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
