Bethel Saler - The Settlers Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in Americas Old Northwest

The Settlers Empire

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Series editors:

Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown,
Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial,
revolutionary, and early national history and culture,
Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes
and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character,
and with a special emphasis on the period from about
1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with
the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.

Colonialism and State Formation
in Americas Old Northwest

Bethel Saler

Copyright 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Saler, Bethel.

The settlers empire : colonialism and state formation in Americas Old Northwest / Bethel Saler. 1st ed.

p. cm. (Early American studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index

ISBN 978-0-8122-4663-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Statehood (American politics)History. 2. Indians of North AmericaGovernment relations. 3. Indians of North AmericaNorthwest, Old. 4. Indians of North AmericaWisconsin. 5. Northwest, OldHistory17751865. 6. WisconsinHistoryTo 1848. 7. United StatesTerritorial expansionHistory. 8. Northwest, OldPolitics and government17751865. 9. WisconsinPolitics and governmentTo 1848. I. Title. II. Series: Early American studies.

F479 .S25 2015

977'.01

2014028299

For Joyce and Benson Saler
and
In Memory of
Jeanne Boydston

Changing territorial boundaries of the Northwest.

Treaties of Wisconsin Indian Nations.

THROUGH THE TREATY of Paris in 1783, Britain vested the United States with an immense swath of western country that stretched from the middle of the Great Lakes in the North to the Mississippi River at its western border and the Thirty-First Parallel in the South. That addition of land doubled the territorial girth of the original thirteen colonies, creating a situation rife with both possibility and vulnerability. Not only was the United States a fledgling republic in a world of powerful empires, but it had also just acquiredat least on paperits own domestic empire in need of protection from those competing imperial regimes in North America.

This book examines the peculiar situation endemic to the young American nation as both a postcolonial republic and a contiguous domestic empire. It does so by looking at where these dual political demands inevitably collidedin the federal project of western state formation. The main focus of the study is Wisconsin, part of the central governments first experiment in state building in the Old Northwest during the early national era and the last territory and state formed entirely from the original Northwest Territory. While anchored in Wisconsin, however, this is the story of the first formal national endeavor to build republican states wholesale out of the public domain, a public domain that, at the time, largely encompassed Indian homelands.

The history of United States territories boasts a venerable historiography created by generations of western historians dating back to Frederick Jackson Turner.

This last pointthat independence freed the United States to govern its own colonial territories and subjugated populationsspeaks to the countrys distinct identity as a settler nation. Sometimes called second world countries, settler nations such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ulster, South Africa, and Israel negotiate double identities of belonging to both European first world traditions and non-western third world regions.

My understanding of the early American republic as a settler nation draws on a rich seam of recent scholarship looking at European colonialism in comparative context. Among other points, studies in comparative colonialism have underscored how much local factorsthe specific cultural, geographic, demographic, economic, and political conditionsmattered to the look and shape of each colonial enterprise. Comparing just the late eighteenth-century European colonies reveals the differences as much as or more than the similarities. The young United States staked its reputation as one of the first modern republics in contrast to hidebound European monarchies, but a republic that was also vested with an expansive, continental empire stretching ultimately to the Pacific Coast. Thus, a chief distinguishing feature of the United States as a settler nation was its struggle to broker its postcolonial republican commitments with its federal, colonial administration over its variegated territorial populations.

With the passage of the Ordinance of 1787 (familiarly called the Northwest Ordinance), Congress provided a blueprint for western territorial development that outlined political stages for the transition from initially alien, unruly, and scattered populations under federal rule to organized, self-governing American settlements possessing an institutional infrastructure uniform with the older states. Still, the Northwest Ordinance was a response to the formidable challenges in the Northwest, not a directive from on high; diverse groups of western inhabitants lived and fought with each other often heedless of federal or state authorities. Nor was this provincial autonomy new for the Northwest. For nearly two centuries under French and British colonial empires, Northwestern inhabitants had followed their own localized dictates, drawing only intermittent and halfhearted attention from colonial governors. Republican precepts ushered in by the American Revolution only undergirded local expectations for independence and circumscribed national government appointees power over their western citizens.

Although the mixed French, Anglo, African, and Indian trading communities posed the difficulty of foreign customs, languages, and initially questionable national allegiances, it was the clashing proprietary claims of Euro-American citizens and Indian peoples that most prompted, constrained, and altered federal policies and actions. Congressional policymakers and those appointed federal officers serving in parts of the Northwest had to come to grips with two disparate, concurrent colonial jurisdictions. On the one hand, intrepid postcolonial settlers presumed a public domain available for settlement, their inalienable rights as American citizens including self-governance, and eventual independent statehood promised by the Northwest Ordinance. On the other hand, federal agents had to address the actuality of Indian rights of possession to and inhabitance of this same region.