The Threshold of Manifest Destiny. Laurel Clark Shire

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       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:

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