This introduction shows how US Army officers used reports and other official correspondence to deploy specific narratives, constructing an identity for themselves and their institution premised on protecting women. This previously unacknowledged process erased or reframed evidence of women’s wartime activities. Yet, acknowledging this process reveals how paternalism shaped army culture; naturalized officers’ authority over enlisted men; and provided a cultural foundation for military law, policy, and strategy. Breaking up the fictive separation of women and war shows how army culture developed between 1835 and 1848. It also illuminates how that culture shaped, rather than removed, violence against women.

Chapter 2 shows how officers and enlisted men related to one another. Both groups were white, but where many officers were middle class, enlisted men were often poor immigrants with unstable access to white men’s privileges in the Jacksonian Era. Officers had to hold the army together to fight a war, and they could not do it by punishment alone. Much as officers sought to tame the Florida wilderness and the Seminole people, they sought to gentle their soldiers. As the regulars fought their enemies and struggled with each other, a shared culture emerged, premised on the common ideal that regulars should protect women. Hierarchical white male unity – based on the concept of the army family in which all military men protected and subordinated all women – helped the army function. This framework appealed to paternalistic officers because it allowed for intense distinctions (of rank) between white men. In this climate, although rhetoric rooted in the need to protect women could bolster army cohesion, it could also serve as a weapon. Soldiers used such language to rebut officers’ claims of superiority.

Chapter 3 shifts focus to Seminole women. It tells the stories of their wide-ranging and vital involvement in the war. Women fed and clothed warriors, gathered ammunition, collected and shared information, spread misinformation, and lured enemies into attacks. They provided advice, leadership, diplomatic expertise, and negotiated conditions for surrender. The chapter also argues that by the war’s end in 1842, the army had reconciled its mission to remove Native groups from Florida with its imperative to protect women – ultimately choosing to frame the act of capturing women as the best way to bring women under military protection. The idea of capturing women to protect them (from savagery, from Seminole men, from white settlers) also drove changes in policy and military regulations that gave the army more freedom to take noncombatants as prisoners of war and violate flags of truce.