Introduction

This introduction outlines the central argument of Federal Ground. Federal authority in the Northwest and Southwest Territories, the book contends, stemmed less from foundational texts like the Northwest Ordinance than from the demands of territorial residents, who looked on the federal government not as an institution but as a resource and successfully pushed it to serve their ends. The introduction explores the contrast between the formal, nearly unchecked authority that the U.S. Constitution granted the federal government in the territories and the reality that these supposed territories were Native homelands and borderlands where imperial powers had come and gone with little change in control. It then grapples with the amorphous nature of federal government in the territories, divided among cabinet officials, local territorial officers, and key intermediaries like Governors Arthur St. Clair and William Blount, and recounts how these diverse officials believed themselves constrained to try to understand the territories’ inhabitants. It also explores the difficult question of how to measure federal state power in the early republic, contrasting the fiscal-military state with the alternate model of an adjudicatory state, in which territorial citizens turned to federal law to claim rights. It notes the benefits of considering the two territories together and previews the individual chapters and their arguments.

Federal Ground

Federal Ground depicts the haphazard and unplanned growth of federal authority in the Northwest and Southwest Territories, the first U.S. territories established under the new territorial system. The nation’s foundational documents, particularly the U.S. Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance, placed these territories under sole federal jurisdiction and established federal officials to govern them. But, for all their paper authority, these officials rarely controlled events or dictated outcomes. In practice, power in these contested borderlands rested with the regions’ preexisting inhabitants—diverse Native peoples, French villagers, and Anglo-American settlers. These residents nonetheless turned to the new federal government to claim ownership, jurisdiction, protection, and federal money, seeking to obtain rights under federal law. Two areas of governance proved particularly central: contests over property, where plural sources of title created conflicting land claims, and struggles over the right to use violence, in which customary borderlands practice intersected with the federal government’s effort to establish a monopoly on force. Over time, as federal officials improvised ad hoc, largely extrajudicial methods to arbitrate residents’ claims, they slowly insinuated federal authority deeper into territorial life. This authority survived even after the former territories became Ohio and Tennessee: although new states spoke a language of equal footing and autonomy, statehood actually offered former territorial citizens the most effective way yet to make claims on the federal government. The federal government, in short, still could not always prescribe the result in the territories, but it set the terms and language of debate—authority that became the foundation for later, more familiar and bureaucratic incarnations of federal power.

Outposts of the Law: The Frontier and the Civil-Law Fringe

This chapter discusses the history of American frontier law. The new nation faced the problem of how to deal with the western lands. Some of the states had huge, vague, and vast claims to chunks of western land, stretching out far beyond the pale of settlement; other states did not. The Ordinance of 1787 dealt with the issue of governance and the future of the western lands. It set basic law for a huge area of forest and plain that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Ordinance of 1790 extended the influence of the Northwest Ordinance into what became the state of Tennessee.

Creating the Land of Lincoln

This book links the state constitutions of Illinois to Abraham Lincoln’s legacy amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Beginning with Euro-American settlement in the region that would become Illinois, the narrative details the various nations that governed the territory and the issues that concerned its population, from degrees of authoritarian rule to the status of indentured servants and black and Native slaves. As the territory came under U.S. control through the Northwest Ordinance, its sparse population held southern attitudes toward government and slavery. Through an enabling act in 1818, the northern border of Illinois Territory was set sixty miles north of the southern tip of Lake Michigan, encompassing what would eventually become the economic powerhouse of Chicago. Analysis of the four nineteenth-century state constitutional conventions (1818, 1847, 1862, 1869) summarizes essential issues for Illinois’s citizens, from the balance of governmental powers to the civil rights of African Americans, from squabbles over internal improvements like canals and railroads to geographical splits between rural and urban, Yankee and southern. This history and analysis shows that the enabling act that extended the Illinois border north also enabled the growth of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln’s election as president, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution that altered the nation’s history.

Lick Creek, Indiana

This chapter examines the relationship of Quakers and free Blacks in Lick Creek to the Underground Railroad. The Lick Creek settlement once existed in the southeast corner of Paoli Township, Orange County, in southern Indiana. In 1817, freeborn African Americans came to the area and purchased land in what later became the Lick Creek settlement. Blacks also came accompanying Quakers fleeing persecution in North Carolina. With the opening of frontier lands for settlement, free Blacks, encouraged by the antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance, joined the country's westward passage to the Northwest Territory. This chapter first provides a background on Quakers and free Blacks at Lick Creek before focusing on William Paul Quinn's arrival in Indiana, where he built AME churches that became an important focal point of the Lick Creek community. It then considers the antislavery efforts of free Blacks, Quakers, and citizens of conscience working on the Underground Railroad on behalf of escaped slaves. It also discusses the participation of Indiana's Blacks in the Civil War.

Black Bondspeople, White Masters and Mistresses, and the Americanization of the Upper Mississippi River Lead District

African Americans inhabited a multicultural spectrum of bondage and resistance in the antebellum Illinois-Wisconsin lead district. Contests between early Upper Mississippi River Valley Native American, French, and British inhabitants first forced bondspeople into the lead country. There, overlapping US and French practices of bondage and lengthy race-based indentures made a mockery of the Northwest Ordinance that forbade slavery, consigning black men and women to outright slavery at worst or a liminal, limited freedom at best. Bondage fractured families and imposed arduous mining and domestic labor upon African Americans. Simultaneously, it underpinned white Americans’ bids for supremacy in the region, making elite masculinity, protecting whiteness, promoting political advancement, and civilizing the “wilderness” in the process. In response to the miseries inflicted upon them, bondspeople pursued courtroom resistance and sought extralegal respite through religion and within military culture. Too often, their efforts yielded disappointment or devastation. Freedom eluded most until 1850.