Caribbean Borderlands in the United States and Mexico: The Second Seminole War and the Caste War of Yucatán

The state of Florida and the peninsula of Yucatán lie at the borders of their respective nation-states, distinct geographically from Washington and Mexico City while tied economically to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. The borderland character of Florida and Yucatán was even more pronounced during the nineteenth century, when planters backed by these new nation-states vied with Indigenous military leaders for access to power and land. From the perspective of national history, the Second Seminole War (1836) and the Caste War of Yucatán (1847) posed temporary setbacks to the steady expansion of national hegemony and borders in North America. For local elites at the time, however, these conflicts pertained equally to the Caribbean, where plantation societies created wealth through the coerced labor of non-white people and the violent suppression of their attempts to rebel.

       My paper uses correspondence between government officials, military leaders, and foreign diplomats during the Second Seminole and Caste wars to explore the role of the Caribbean in Florida and Yucatán in the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, I examine the claim that the topography of these peninsulas, along with the skill and apparent savagery of Seminole and Maya warriors, likened these wars to events in Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, and the Miskito Coast rather than Illinois or Sonora. These writers’ claims to Caribbeanness highlights the geographic contours of their social and economic networks while providing a context for the controversial military measures to which they resorted: for example, the use of Cuban bloodhounds in expeditions against the Seminoles and the sale of Maya rebels to work the Cuban sugar fields. As a whole, the paper questions the geographic boundaries of the Greater Caribbean borderlands during this period and reflects on the role of the Caribbean in the expansion and consolidation of US and Mexican national regimes.