The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.–Mexican War

353 Pages·2023·24.733 MB·English

by  Michael A. Blaakman, Emily Conroy Krutz, Noelani Arista

The Early Imperial Republic
EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES
Series Editors
Kathleen M. Brown, Roquinaldo Ferreira,
Emma Hart, and Daniel K. Richter
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.
THE EARLY
IMPERIAL REPUBLIC
From the American Revolution
to the U.S.– Mexican War
Edited by Michael A. Blaakman,
Emily Conroy- Krutz, and Noelani Arista
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2023 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 Amer i ca on acid- free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8122-5278-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8122-9775-1
A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the
Library of Congress
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
michael a. blaakman and emily conroy- krutz
Part I. Empires, Nations, and States
Chapter 1. The Indian Boundary Line
and the Imperialization of U.S.– Indian Affairs 27
robert lee
Chapter 2. The Sutler’s Empire: Frontier Merchants
and Imperial Authority, 1790–1811 45
susan gaunt stearns
Chapter 3. How Native Nations Survived the Imperial Republic 63
kathleen duval
Chapter 4. Catawba Women and Imperial Land Encroachment 83
brooke bauer
Chapter 5. An Empire of Indian Titles: Private Land Claims
in Early American Louisiana, 1803–40 100
julia lewandoski
Chapter 6. “A Slave State in Embryo”: Indian Territory,
Native Sovereignty, and the Expansion of Slavery’s Empire 118
nakia d. parker
vi Contents
Part II. Continent and Globe
Chapter 7. American Protestant Missionaries, Native Hawaiian
Authority, and Religious Freedom in Hawai‘i, ca. 1827–50 139
tom smith
Chapter 8. “The Colony Must Be Broken Up”:
The Liberian Settler “Rebellion” of 1823–24 158
eric burin
Chapter 9. Freedom in Chains: U.S. Empire and the Illegal Slave Trade 179
m. scott heerman
Chapter 10. An Empire of Illusions: Paul Cuffe, Martin Delany,
and African American Benevolent Empire Building in Africa 202
ousmane k. power- greene
Part III. The Ideologies of Empire
Chapter 11. Imperialism and the American Imagination 227
nicholas guyatt
Chapter 12. Pax Americana? The Imperial Ambivalence
of American Peace Reformers 248
margot minardi
Chapter 13. Mercenary Ambivalence: Military Vio lence
in Antebellum Amer i ca’s Wars of Empire 265
amy s. greenberg
Notes 279
List of Contributors 333
Index 337
Editors’ Acknowl edgments 341
INTRODUCTION
michael a. blaakman and emily conroy- krutz
The United States, Thomas Hutchins marveled in 1784, would soon be a more
“potent empire” than any “that ever existed.” Its dominion, he calculated,
would stretch further “than the Persian and Roman empires together.”1 The
first and last geographer to the United States, Hutchins made this pronounce-
ment in his Historical Narrative and Topographical Description of Louisiana
and West-F lorida, a prospectus for U.S. expansion that compiled the exper-
tise he had gained during twenty- eight years in the ser vice of another
empire— the British one—as a cartographer, Indian agent, and military en-
gineer. Hutchins had shown no concern for colonial protests or patriot ide-
ology during the 1760s and 1770s. In 1776, when his native New Jersey severed
ties with Britain, Hutchins was in London, petitioning the ministry for a large
land grant in West Florida and for an appointment that would place him
closer to the property he already owned there. He cast his lot with the rebel
republic only in 1780, a fter a securities scheme gone bad and a brief impris-
onment dashed his hopes for British land grants and glory. Within months
of returning to North Amer i ca, he joined Congress’s employ.
Hutchins published his Topographical Description amid a busy schedule
charting paths for U.S. incursions into new regions. He drew maps, delineated
state boundary lines, scouted canal routes, surveyed unceded Native lands
northwest of the Ohio River, and at one point pondered an expedition to the
Pacific. But the Gulf Coast was Hutchins’s true passion, and by 1788 he had con-
cluded that the infant empire was e ither uninterested in the region or impotent
to acquire it. Even while holding national office, he spent the final year of his life
making overtures to “become a Spanish Subject” and “geographer to His Span-
ish Majesty,” who had gained claim to West Florida in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.2
Clearly, Hutchins was a creature of empire—or rather, of many empires,
his allegiance and exuberance often chasing opportunity. So perhaps his
2 Introduction
premature paean to American empire should come as no surprise. And yet
during the 1780s, Hutchins was not alone in trumpeting the United States as
an imperial parvenu. John Filson, a surveyor and booster of Kentucky lands,
described the Ohio Valley as eligibly “situated in the central part of the ex-
tensive American empire,” while Thomas Jefferson imagined an unfurling
“Empire of liberty.”3 In speeches and letters to domestic and foreign audiences
alike, George Washington began calling the United States a “rising empire”
even before the Treaty of Paris was signed.4 During the revolutionary and
early national eras, Americans referred to the United States as an empire re-
peatedly, in numerous contexts, and almost as soon as they started calling it
a republic. What did they mean? Such language was not without its contra-
dictions. For many of Hutchins’s contemporaries, the lessons of classical his-
tory taught that empire spelled the end of a republic, and some wondered
whether the idea of an expansive republic was a contradiction in terms.
In recent years, historians have begun looking to empire, imperialism,
and colonialism as frameworks for thinking about U.S. history from in de-
pen dence to the U.S.– Mexican War. They have shown how the United States
added its own imperial ambitions to a long Atlantic and North American his-
tory of competition and conflict among Eu ro pean and Indigenous polities.
For years, the fledgling seaboard confederation strug gled even to proj ect
power over the Appalachian crest. Yet within seven de cades, it transformed
itself into an imperial juggernaut with aspirations to rule a continent and be-
yond. By the 1850s, the United States had sharpened its tools for dispossess-
ing Native peoples and expanding a po liti cal economy grounded in Black
enslavement. White Americans had conquered an im mense amount of ter-
ritory and claimed the Pacific Ocean as their western boundary, while set-
ting their imperial sights upon regions, people, and resources much further
afield.
The language of Hutchins and others in the early republic opens a trove
of interpretive questions about the character of the new nation and the mean-
ing of empire, then and now. When we speak of empire, do we mean a po liti-
cal form? Something formal, or informal? A set of practices? A set of pro cesses?
A set of ideas, visions, and ambitions? We might ask how Americans recon-
ciled the United States’ simultaneous development as both a republic and an
empire, and what kind of empire it was. We might look at the geography of
the early republic to ask where the early United States was an empire, and
how North American developments connected to U.S. efforts to proj ect power
in other parts of the globe.
Introduction 3
These questions are at the center of this volume. The Early Imperial Re-
public draws together historians investigating the origins of U.S. imperial-
ism from an array of vantage points. The essays gathered h ere do not advance
one single definition of empire. But they fruitfully use an imperial lens to
bring into focus patterns of continuity and change from the prerevolutionary
period to the mid- nineteenth c entury. They are attentive to multiple forms and
registers of imperial power— politics, culture, economy, and imaginaries—as
well as their limits, vulnerabilities, unevenness, and failures. They examine
white settlers, f ree and enslaved Black p eople, Native Americans, politi-
cians, merchants, missionaries, and more on an even analytical footing,
probing their interrelationships across evolving systems of power, sover-
eignty, and exchange. This volume does not aspire to pre sent a comprehensive
history of the origins of U.S. empire. Rather, it provides a series of snapshots
of how early U.S. imperial claims, ambitions, and conflicts emerged in their
local contexts. Taken together, its chapters illuminate how an imperial ap-
proach to the early republic opens new possibilities for understanding a pol-
ity that was si mul ta neously a republic and an empire, and for integrating the
history of the early imperial republic with that of the larger world.
* * *
Although it is increasingly difficult to find scholars who would deny that the
United States became an empire, diplomatic historians have traditionally
marked 1898 as the beginning of the republic’s imperial era. It was in that
year that the United States went to war with Spain purportedly to liberate
Cuba and the Philippines from Spanish rule. By year’s end, Puerto Rico,
Hawai‘i, the Philippines, and Guam were U.S. territories. The liberating rhe-
toric of the American war was belied by the many years of brutal warfare it
took to make the Philippines an American colony. As Rudyard Kipling’s po-
etry urged the United States to take up the “white man’s burden” of civilizing
empire, the wars of 1898 saw a surge of both pro- and anti- imperialist fervor
in the United States that asked, among other t hings, what kind of country
the United States had been and would become on the world stage.5
These conversations were especially loaded because the possession of
an overseas colony seemed to make the United States look more like the
Eu ro pean empires that many Americans had spent de cades defining their
country against. What did it mean for Americans’ national identity to have
the United States stepping into this role? To resolve this apparent tension,