Читать книгу The Threshold of Manifest Destiny - Laurel Clark Shire - Страница 12

CHAPTER 2

Innocent Victims of a “Savage” War

The citizens of Florida … have been nightly shot down or tomahawked by the light of their own blazing homes.

—Delegate Charles Downing, Florida Territory, July 10, 1840

The barbarities have been perpetrated chiefly upon females.

—Niles’ Weekly Register, October 1, 1836

At ten o’clock on the morning of September 15, 1836, a band of Seminoles and one black warrior attacked the homestead of Clement and Jane Johns, white settlers in East Florida. According to a sensational pamphlet published in the wake of this assault, the attackers shot and killed Clement, leaving Jane to defend herself, their unborn child, and all their property. The attackers shot and scalped Jane Johns and set her house on fire. Miraculously still alive, she lay still until her assailants left, even as the fire spread to her clothes. Once they had whooped and departed, according to one account, she “scraped the blood from her denuded head in her hands and … applied it to the fire,” extinguishing the flames consuming her skirts. In spite of her injuries, Johns managed to get out of the burning house, crawling to a shallow pond nearby. Although she had been shot, scalped, and set on fire, Jane Johns remained alive when her father-in-law found her a few hours later. A remarkable survivor, she became perhaps the most famous victim to survive what Americans called an “Indian depredation” in Florida. The Jacksonville Courier reported the attack on Johns on September 17, 1836, and several regional and national papers printed the details shortly thereafter. The following year printers in Charleston and Baltimore published it in pamphlet form. Her story garnered national coverage because of its sensational and gory details, which pulled at both domestic and nationalist sentiments with the image of a white woman attacked by Indians and an escaped slave.¹

Although perhaps the most sensational, Jane Johns’s story was not unique. It exemplifies Florida Indian depredation narratives in which white women and their children suffered injury or death and lost property when attacked by Seminoles. These tales glossed over Indian removal and the expansion of slavery and framed the conflict in Florida as a noble war being waged for the protection of innocent white women and children. In countless bloodcurdling stories Americans recast whites as victims, never perpetrators, of violence, and they continually portrayed Native Americans and blacks as the aggressors rather than the victims. The cultural prevalence and emotional power of these stories shaped policy as well as attitudes in and about Florida in the 1830s and 1840s. American leaders used them to justify the Second U.S.-Seminole War and its expense, to raise militia volunteers, and to pass pro-settler welfare and land policies. The focus on property losses in depredation accounts distinguishes them from Indian captivity narratives and highlights the importance of household property in white settler colonies (as does the history of property law). By spotlighting sensational destruction, Florida Indian depredation narratives reveal the central role of white women and expansionist domesticity to the U.S. colonization of Florida.

Reports about Seminole attacks on whites in Florida circulated widely, especially after the United States formally declared a second war on the Seminoles in December 1835. Indian depredation stories, as I refer to these accounts, appeared in private sources such as letters, diaries, and memoirs and in public ones, including newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides. Typical Indian depredation stories from Florida begin with an attack by a small band of Native American men (usually identified as Seminoles, but sometimes called Creeks, Mikasukis, or Apalachicolas) on white settlers. Occasionally, Black Seminoles or enslaved people appear as assailants or victims in these stories. The scene is typically a white homestead or plantation, but sometimes Seminoles assailed travelers on Florida’s rudimentary roadways. Narrators repeated several elements in endless combinations in depredation reports about “the Florida War”: innocent white mothers and children attacked at home by Native American and (sometimes) black men, killed or horribly mutilated with “savage” weapons, and their domestic realms plundered and burned. The consistency, ubiquity, and sensationalism of these stories made them culturally powerful and also responded to and re-created certain expectations in their American audience, predicated on assumptions of white female innocence and nonwhite “savage barbarity.”

The fact that white women were injured or killed in the Second U.S.-Seminole War proved very important to the ways that American citizens, journalists, and politicians framed the war. As with stories from many other settler colonial regimes, these narratives relied upon gender to justify colonial violence. Depredation stories cast white women and children as the “innocents” whom only barbaric savages would attack; but the presence of white families was a real threat to the Seminoles in Florida. As in most settler colonies, conquest and settlement occurred simultaneously in Florida as settlers arrived before and during Indian removal, and armed conflicts over land coincided with settlement. Most white male settlers brought families and, if wealthy enough, enslaved people with them, while others found wives and formed new families once they arrived. Growing white families competed with indigenous peoples for land, food, and resources, and signaled that soon there would be increasing numbers of whites claiming this frontier as their own “native” home. Women’s reproductive and productive labor was indispensable to the creation of new homes and the next generation of Americans on the frontier. The work of enslaved people supported the productive and reproductive work of white women for the benefit of white households.² Far more than just symbols of “barbaric” indigenous violence or white “civilization,” white women were absolutely vital to white households and growing communities. Since this book aims to clarify white women’s part in Manifest Destiny, it is important to note that Florida Indian depredation accounts were part of the historical process of obscuring the importance of women’s labor to national expansion. In counterpoint to the image of women as innocent victims in Seminole depredation narratives, this chapter highlights white women’s labor as a colonizing force that assisted in Seminole dispossession and in the white settlement of Florida.

Although they deemphasized women’s expansionist work, depredation narratives inadvertently offer evidence of its significance, for they paid special attention to the destruction of the families and the domestic spaces that white women created in Florida. A central component of a cultural campaign that represented Florida as already “home” to American settlers, the narratives represent Indian depredations as attacks on the home in two senses: Native Americans stole or destroyed white settlers’ property, and many whites faced poverty or fled the territory as a result. Along with the material consequences, depredations were also attacks on white mothers and children, the families who transformed property into a “true home.” That cultural labor was significant beyond its sentimental appeal, because it once again framed whites as settlers who had been attacked by a savage enemy rather than as a colonizing force that the Seminoles targeted as a strategy of resistance to removal. This frame presumed, rather than explicitly argued, that whites had a natural claim to their Florida properties as home, and therefore that the Seminoles did not. Sentimental accounts of scorched and plundered frontier cabins had the power to frame Indian removal as the defense of white women and children.

While they gloss white women’s work as colonizers and represent women as innocent victims, Florida Indian depredation narratives do illustrate that white women fought on the front lines of the Second U.S.-Seminole War. Many homesteads became battlegrounds as violence erupted in Florida between 1835 and 1842, and many white women’s domestic realms became central sites of depredation accounts. Neither military nor women’s historians often place nineteenth-century white women on battlefields. Usually they are stoking home fires and observing from the sidelines. This was not the case in Florida (nor was it on most frontiers), because the Seminoles brought this conflict to whites’ doorsteps. They refused removal and, since they had fewer warriors and resources than the U.S. military, waged a guerilla war. Since this was a conflict aimed at ousting them from the territory in order to make Florida safe for white settlement and slavery, and because American troops frequently destroyed Seminole homes and families, they resisted and retaliated by attacking white homesteads and plantations, where white women defended their homes.

Florida Indian depredation stories were propaganda rooted in real events. This chapter examines the ways that they shaped perceptions and policies, but they are also evidence that white Americans and Seminole people terrorized each other between 1835 and 1842. Although widely reported, it is difficult to quantify this violence. The rations program that supported Florida’s “suffering inhabitants” between 1836 and 1842 (described in detail in Chapter 4) furnishes some information about how many white settlers in Florida lost homes and family members to Seminole attacks. In June 1842, as the war was closing, there were 1,795 people on the rolls of suffering inhabitants drawing rations from the U.S. military. They came from eighteen households that had been “broken up by Indians” (some more than once), while another twenty-three households had lost civilian husbands, fathers, or sons (and in one case a wife) who had been “killed by the Indians,” and another fifteen households had lost the support of men who died in military service (from disease, wounds, or in battle). All the ration rolls before 1842 are missing, so it is difficult to estimate exactly how many homes and civilians the Seminoles destroyed, but given the numbers from 1842 the number of households disrupted was probably in the hundreds. In addition to an unknown number of civilian deaths, 1,466 American soldiers died in the Second U.S.-Seminole War (mostly from disease, not combat). The Seminoles suffered even higher losses from whites. Americans burned many villages during the U.S.-Seminole Wars and killed hundreds of Seminole warriors and civilians, although an exact count is unknown. The U.S. removed 4,420 indigenous people and their allies of African descent from Florida during the Second U.S.-Seminole War, and approximately 1,400 died on the journey west.³

As it is hard to determine the frequency of all this violence, it is often impossible to verify whether the precise details of a particular Indian depredation story are historically factual. Did Jane Johns really use her own blood to put out the fire burning her legs? It seems unlikely. More important than the veracity of that sensational detail is that white Americans in 1836 found it credible that Native Americans would shoot, scalp, and set fire to a white woman and leave her for dead in her burning frontier home. They would have taken her innocence (in spite of her presence on a contested frontier) and her attackers’ savagery for granted. While American accounts placed Seminole violence against whites (especially women and children) in the foreground, they consistently ignored or justified the violence that whites perpetrated against Native Americans and blacks, including women and children. No accounts of “white depredations” upon the Seminoles made their way into print (although the oral accounts passed down among Seminole descendants provide some alternative views of the war, as the next chapter recounts). Regardless of the frequency or verity of Seminole attacks on white Florida settlers, the widespread circulation of depredation accounts in private, public, and political discourse about the Second U.S.-Seminole War testifies that they performed a weighty set of cultural and political tasks in narrating this conflict.

Florida “Indian Depredations”

Resonant with the long-standing genre of Indian captivity narratives, Indian depredation narratives from Florida framed stories about Native American violence on white settlers in the sensationalist language of early nineteenth-century print culture, using a term drawn from federal frontier policy. Under the Indian Depredation Claims system (1796–1920) the U.S. government promised to indemnify all losses that American suffered from “Indian depredations” if the attacks took place outside of Indian territory during a time of peace and if white settlers had not continued the cycle of violence with a revenge attack. In the absence of kidnapping, depredation stories focused on injured white bodies and homes.⁴

In numerous ways, Florida Indian depredation stories followed the conventions of Indian captivity narratives. Narratives of Indian war and captivity were among the major frontier myths in which American national identity and culture originated, and Americans had been recounting the horrific details of Native American violence against whites for hundreds of years. Authors of such stories sought to explain and justify the violent campaigns they waged to take the lands of Native Americans and to establish their fundamental difference from those they eventually deemed racial inferiors. The depredation stories from Florida, like captivity narratives, featured “savage” violence against white (and sometimes nonwhite) men, women, and children, and highlighted scalping and the use of exotic implements such as “tomahawks” and “scalping knives” (known as axes and knives when wielded by whites). The narrator usually decries the attackers as “indiscriminate” for harming white women and children, a label Americans had long used to establish the uncivilized nature of indigenous warfare (and justify their own violence on Native women and children). “Indiscriminate” Indian depredations were cited as early as 1819 in Florida. The presence of vulnerable white women helped make them more sensational and compelling stories, and so narrators highlighted female victims, as when the editor of Niles’ Weekly Register noted that “these barbarities have been perpetrated chiefly upon females.”⁵ Following the conventions of antebellum culture, depredation accounts emphasized female passivity, piety, maternity, and domesticity. They invoke particular sympathy for the plight of white mothers who, unable to protect their children, were forced to watch them harmed or killed. Captivity narratives and depredation accounts focused on female victims because this allowed them to invoke emotional, sympathetic responses using gender conventions, which dictated that such victims were innocent and civilized because they were maternal and domestic. The emphasis on domestic spaces and on maternal and infant victims harkened back to captivity narratives even as they made Florida scenes of armed struggle difficult to cast as conventional war zones.⁶

White gender norms prescribed that dominant white men protect vulnerable and subordinate white women, so when white men appeared in depredation accounts authors tended to glorify the bravery, chivalry, and gallantry of white men, contrasted with descriptions of women’s vulnerability. Many white men were killed in the initial stage of an attack attempting to protect their families, while others (as the narratives often explain) were away fighting this war on other fronts or had already been killed doing so. Even when a man died in an Indian depredation, it was sympathy for the woman and children he left behind that authors expressed. In accounts of the attack on Clement and Jane Johns, for example, narrators always described the murder of Clement Johns but followed that with sympathy for his widow, not for Clement. This made it possible to evacuate all traces of white aggression from the story: the white men who had invaded Florida were framed as the heads of families rather than soldiers or squatters, and they were gone. Left behind were their families—the women and children whom nineteenth-century Americans understood not as invaders of indigenous lands but faithful followers of migrating husbands and fathers. They were innocent victims, then, of their loyalty to men unable to protect them and of the “barbaric” Seminoles.

Alongside white mothers, white children also appear as victims in Florida Indian depredation stories. If these stories are reliable, white parents left many children at home alone (or with other relatives or enslaved black guardians) in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, for in many stories white mothers return home to find their houses in flames and their children endangered. In some cases this was an embellishment that heightened the sentimental and sensational appeal of the tale, although in other instances it appears that the war left white mothers with few alternatives. Faced with fulfilling the duties of the absent male household head as well as their own work, perhaps white women sometimes risked leaving children at home, particularly since Florida’s roads were no safer than their homesteads.

Florida Indian depredation stories also borrowed from the emerging domestic literature and scandalous dime novels of their milieu. The rise of domestic ideology in the northern United States engendered a whole “culture of sentiment.” Authors, artists, journalists, photographers, and educators produced sentimental texts intended to make their consumers feel emotions, especially pity, sympathy, and grief. Sentimental culture also presumed that certain people (whites) were those who felt sympathy, while others (indigenous, enslaved) were the objects and recipients of their pity and sympathy. Tellers of Indian captivity and depredation narratives typically expected their audience to feel horror, fear, sympathy, and solidarity with white victims of violence, and they used sentimental language to achieve this end. Unlike slave narratives, however, they did not as frequently suggest that nonwhites deserved sympathy, and almost none of the Florida narratives do. Early in the war (January 21, 1836), the Jacksonville Courier included this assessment of recent depredations: “None whose hearts are not ice can hear recitals of such dreadful deeds of massacre, without sorrow and grief. We deeply sympathise with afflicted friends in St. Augustine.”⁷ Only Americans with hearts of ice could resist the affective impact of these stories, which expected them to feel sympathy for the poor residents of Florida who daily faced Seminole “massacres.”⁸

While the Florida depredation stories invoked sympathy for whites, they were less invested in respectable, virtuous, and socially redemptive lessons than many sentimental novels and captivity narratives were, and typically devoted more of their pages to the shocking and horrific details typical of sensational literature, which emphasized materiality and corporeality. In one frequent element, for example, depredation narrators describe a mother and infant killed by the same bullet or felled by a common stab wound, and then express horror at the barbarity of those who would murder a very young “baby at the breast.” Sentimentalism’s lowbrow cousin, sensational stories filled the story papers, pamphlet novels, and newspapers of the mid-nineteenth century. As innovative publishers and editors capitalized on new technology and began to produce cheaply made texts aimed at the masses, they relied on street sales rather than subscriptions, and so editors chose outrageous headlines full of scandal, crime, violence, and sexuality. The tragic, violent death of a white woman was a favorite sensational subject in the 1830s and 1840s, when the deaths of New Yorkers Helen Jewett and Mary Rogers occupied a great deal of attention. As some readers consumed those dramatic tales, others were reading about the mangled bodies of white mothers left in the wake of depredating Seminoles in Florida. Shelley Streeby argues that U.S. expansionism in the 1840s influenced sensational literature in ways that shaped how Americans constructed norms of class, race, and gender at home and abroad. In the “double vision” of this literature, images of the working-class city and the frontier West colluded to reinforce the boundaries of race, gender, and class that expansion and capitalism sometimes unsettled (and often reproduced) in the nineteenth century. In the sensational story papers and pamphlets, a variety of undesirables populated both seamy urban underworlds and the borderlands of an expanding America: prostitutes, immigrants, Mexicans, Indians, and Cubans, all of them a threat to white women and to (white) “American values.” Against these characters, authors arrayed “real” heroic American men, workers, frontiersmen, even filibusters, consolidating white male citizenship against perceived threats to its continued dominance. Popular cultural representations of urban and frontier spaces and people influenced political culture and vice versa. Nineteenth-century popular fiction reveals how Manifest Destiny offered new backdrops for sensational stories that entertained Americans focused on expanding their nation into former Spanish territories in the Americas.⁹

Although Florida Indian depredation narratives shared the sensationalism, sentimentalism, gender ideals, and racial assumptions of other narratives of war and captivity, they also differed, primarily in that they are not stories of white captivity among Native Americans. The Seminoles lacked the resources to feed captives, there was no longer the incentive of a ransom system, and there was no market for trading captives, since the United States would send captive Seminoles to Oklahoma, not trade them back in exchange for a white captive. With very few exceptions, then, these were tales about depredations upon families and property, not about captivity among the Seminoles.¹⁰

The blacks who sometimes appear in Florida depredation narratives also distinguish these stories from other accounts, which rarely featured people of African descent. Unlike the slavery debate in other frontier states, the Florida debate did not turn on whether slavery would expand into Florida, because it already existed there, and no one doubted that it would continue. Rather, slavery shaped expansion into Florida because proslavery Americans wanted to conquer and remove Native Americans and free blacks from Florida in order to prevent any more slave runaways and because they feared a joint rebellion of Seminoles and blacks. As new Florida resident Corinna Brown put it in 1837, “should the slaves rise about this time, it would make glorious work—the horrors of St. Domingo enacted over again in earnest.”¹¹ While the feared slave insurrection never occurred in Florida, the concerns of many slaveholding whites were very real. Some blacks lived and fought with the Seminoles, and some historians classify the Second U.S.-Seminole War as the longest and most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history as well as a war of Seminole resistance. Although they are somewhat rare in depredation accounts, when blacks were present they brought the specter of a slave rebellion clearly into the frame. This heightened the fear of the reader and further justified the war as a necessary defense—in this case, against the implicit threat of a slave rebellion. Judge Robert Reid warned U.S. Secretary of State John Forsyth just before the Second U.S.-Seminole War began that “while we guard ourselves against a savage foe, we should be prepared for an evil—not entirely out of the list of contingencies—yet nearer home.”¹² He meant, of course, the slaves.¹³

Another difference from other narratives is that, in Florida Indian depredation stories, after the attack the narratives return to the scene of destroyed domestic space, rather than following white captives into Indian country. To “depredate” is to plunder or rob, and these accounts focus on human victims and their property losses. The Indian Depredation Claims system, designed to limit cycles of retaliatory violence on American frontiers, invited peacetime victims to make claims against the federal government for property losses they incurred from Native Americans. Under this policy, citizens of the United States reported “Indian depredations” to local authorities, agents of the Indian Office, or even members of Congress in hopes that by following the proper bureaucratic procedures they would receive compensation. They rarely did, but the policy codified the “Indian depredation” as an officially recognized form of American settler victimization. If whites settled on the frontier and Native Americans attacked them, the Native peoples and the national government bore responsibility, and white settlers remained innocent of any wrongdoing, even as their encroaching settlements enriched them and enlarged the national territory. In this way, the nation expanded without formally declaring war on the indigenous peoples its citizens displaced. Illustrating how clearly “invasion [was] a structure rather than an event” in U.S. settler colonization, the U.S. government put this policy in place in 1796 and continued it until 1921. Leaders anticipated continuous borderlands violence even during times of formal peace because they knew that expanding white settlements would continually pressure indigenous ones; in fact they counted on it. Although the wartime depredations in Florida were not eligible for reimbursement, Floridians knew of the claims system and several filed claims for Creek and Seminole depredations alleged to have occurred in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida in 1836 and 1837. In 1837 a congressional committee investigated and rejected their claims. Although the federal Indian Depredation Claims system did not create Florida Indian depredation narratives, the existence of this policy surely helped to reshape traditional captivity accounts into the genre of “Indian depredations.”¹⁴

Fire is an important feature of the typical Florida narrative’s focus on the destruction of property. After the Seminoles plundered, they set their victims’ property alight. As with “indiscriminate” violence against “innocents,” American narrators attributed the use of fire as a practice of the “barbaric” Seminoles, although American troops plundered and burned any villages they encountered during the First, Second, and Third Seminole Wars, setting fire to Seminole homes, supplies, and fields after taking any provisions they desired. Following the violence and the fire, depredation narratives catalogue the property stolen or destroyed in the attack. The details about property damage linked the violence to colonization: how would whites ever settle in Florida if Seminoles kept burning down their farms? Any subsequent pursuit of the attackers, or rumors of the site of their next attack, generally closed out depredation accounts.¹⁵

Private Accounts

Depredation narratives had the power to transform whites’ perceptions of the Florida conflict. Throughout the early nineteenth century Americans in Florida who survived or witnessed depredations recorded those events in letters, diaries, journals, or memoirs. In their accounts it is possible to observe an individual’s emotional and political reactions to Native American violence against white women framed as depredation. While some people might express sympathy for the Seminoles in the abstract, once Americans observed a bloody attack they began to view the Seminoles as aggressors, not victims. Operating at an extremely emotional level, depredation stories reframed Indian removal as white defense, one sensational story at a time.

Well before the start of the Second U.S.-Seminole War, Nancy Cone Hagan was so moved by one Indian depredation that she wrote a poem to commemorate the deaths of several white children, “On the Death of Allen Carr’s Children, Murdered by the Indians in 1826 Near Col. Gadsden’s in Leon County.”¹⁶ On December 6, 1826, a small band of Miccosukee warriors attacked Carr’s homestead and killed four white children, their uncle, and one enslaved black man. Allen Carr was a squatter on land “originally that of the Indian,” that John Gamble (maternal uncle of Laura Randall) had speculatively purchased in 1823. According to family notes compiled in 1898 by his son (Major Robert Gamble), the Seminoles “were on the eve of leaving the country, and, in the hope of avoiding the necessity a number of the young warriors attempted to embroil the tribe in war, and to that end they murdered Carr’s family.”¹⁷ Hagan paid no attention to the motives of the Miccosukees fighting to keep their homes, however. The first stanza of her poem contains elements typical of depredation narratives: an absent head of household and a baby at the breast:

Poor Allen Carr was absent, the cruel Indians

knew, Took the advantage of the helpless, their savage rage to show.

The mother too was gone from home, a lucky circumstance,

Which thereby saved herself and son, the infant at the breast.¹⁸

Hagan’s poem and the newspaper reports never offer any explanation for why Allen Carr and his wife left their oldest children with an uncle and departed their home. In the following stanzas Hagan included other typical elements: the “spotless innocence” of the slain white children, the destruction of the Carr’s home, and specific mention of instruments of “Indian” violence, the hatchet and the scalping knife.¹⁹ Yet Hagan’s poem also suggested—as later accounts would not—that perhaps some compromise with the Seminoles was possible:

But have we no compassion for the savage forest men?

And try to cultivate them? Let mercy be our theme.

Teach them to be more human and teach them all we can.

And tell them of the Saviour and of the gospel plan.²⁰

Encouraging a Christian mission to convert the Seminoles (who apparently need to be taught how to be human), she does not only call for punishment. In this, she displays a lingering commitment to indigenous “civilization” policies that policy makers in the Early Republic had embraced—plans to assimilate Native Americans rather than remove or kill them. With the rise of scientific racism and the ideology of Manifest Destiny in the 1820s and 1830s, civilization schemes would become supplanted by Indian removal policies. While Hagan responded with some pious sympathy for the unsaved “savages” in 1826, those who experienced Seminole attacks and read depredation stories from Florida in subsequent decades were far less hopeful than even her racist mission plan suggests.²¹

Nearly thirteen years after the attack on the Carr homestead, another Southern migrant recorded 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: