The Threshold of Manifest Destiny
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In The Threshold of Manifest Destiny , Laurel Clark Shire illuminates the vital role women played in national expansion and shows how gender ideology was a key mechanism in U.S. settler colonialism. Among the many contentious frontier zones in nineteenth-century North America, Florida was an early and important borderland where the United States worked out how it would colonize new territories. From 1821, when it acquired Florida from Spain, through the Second Seminole War, and into the 1850s, the federal government relied on women's physical labor to create homes, farms, families, and communities. It also capitalized on the symbolism of white women's presence on the frontier; images of imperiled women presented settlement as the spread of domesticity and civilization and rationalized the violence of territorial expansion as the protection of women and families. Through careful parsing of previously unexplored military, court, and land records, as well as popular culture sources and native oral tradition, Shire tracks the diverse effects of settler colonialism on free and enslaved blacks and Seminole families. She demonstrates that land-grant policies and innovations in women's property law implemented in Florida had long-lasting effects on American expansion. Ideologically, the frontier in Florida laid the groundwork for Manifest Destiny, while, practically, the Armed Occupation Act of 1842 presaged the Homestead Act.
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The Threshold of Manifest Destiny
Series Editors Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher
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In spite of the ways that nineteenth-century domesticity obscured their significance, white women’s lives are reflected in historical records from the Florida frontier; such records even include white women of modest means who did not leave behind journals or extensive correspondence. Land and court records, public and private accounts of territorial Florida, and military and federal policy papers all illuminate the ways their physical labor and symbolic value underwrote American settler colonialism in Florida.
This book approaches the history of white women in Florida differently than many other books on antebellum women. The “cult of domesticity” and its prescriptive notion that women and men occupied separate spheres of influence in the nineteenth-century United States has been a longstanding feature of U.S. women’s history. Rather than measuring their political significance by the reform movements they championed or the political parties they supported, this book recognizes, first, that making homes in territorial Florida was a political act even if women were not conscious of it. Women’s domestic work had national meanings in the context of territorial and slavery expansion. Second, it suggests that southern white women were not only plantation mistresses or farm wives, but they were also settlers who brought slavery as well as white homes into Indian country. Third, it includes men and masculinity as part of the domestic realm, since almost all households contained both men and women, and because gender ideology relied on the pairing of masculinity and femininity—in oppositional, complementary, and heteronormative ways.23
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