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 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.