Negotiating Sovereignty

This essay looks at nineteenth-century treaty-making between Blackfoot peoples and the U.S. and Canadian governments. All parties initially saw treaties as assertions of their own sovereignty over the Northwest Plains. Hall argues that the two treaty regimes were interrelated in significant ways and that the human costs of the transformation of Canadian and American sovereignty in this period were ultimately devastating for Blackfoot peoples in both economic and cultural terms (an outcome they did not foresee or believe they had agreed to).

Conclusion

Whereas the introduction to this volume focused on the question of sovereignty and the nation-state, our conclusion takes stock of another important theme of this volume, writing North American history outside of a national framework. Riding the crest of a wave of studies on transnational and global comparative studies of the nineteenth century, historians working in this field would do well to pause briefly to take stock of its achievements, limitations, and future research questions....

State, Market, and Popular Sovereignty in Agrarian North America

This essay focuses on agriculture and particularly the “freehold ideal” of independent farmers in the nineteenth-century United States. An odd contradiction of American territorial settlement was the farmers’ simultaneous drive to exploit resources for the market and the aim of many of those actively engaged in settlement to shield themselves from the market’s dangers by acquiring land on the frontier. Clark shows how the ideal of freehold farming, which was so central to the American political economy, was actually threatened not so much from the dangers of the market overwhelming the small farm as from the family farm running out of labor to uphold its own productive capacity. Labor, not land, was the problem confronting the freehold vision, as he argues in a provocative re-reading of late nineteenth-century small farmers’ calls for state intervention.

The United States from the Inside Out and the Southside North

This chapter counters the tendency of many comparative and transnational studies of the United States to focus on the Atlantic and ties between Europe and the Americas. The author reorients the reader’s gaze west and southward in the Civil War era to argue for the simultaneity of nation state and empire as governing forms and ideological goals. He highlights the sometimes seemingly contradictory impulses involved in the consolidation of sovereignty within U.S. borders and also in the contemporaneous movement outward to conquer and subjugate new lands and peoples.

Introduction

Today’s political map of North America took its basic shape in a continental crisis in the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation (1867), the end of the U.S. Civil War (1865), the restoration of the Mexican Republic (1867), and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples through the 1870s. This volume explores the tumultuous history of North American state-making in the mid-nineteenth century from a continental perspective that seeks to look across and beyond the traditional nation-centered approach. This introduction orients readers by first exploring the meaning of key terms—in particular sovereignty and its historical attachment to the concept of the nation state—and then previewing how contributors interrogate different themes of the mid-century struggles that remade the continent’s political order. Those themes fall into three main categories: the character of the states made and remade in the mid-1800s; the question of sovereignty for indigenous polities that confronted the European-settler descended governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States; and the interaction between capitalist expansion and North American politics, and the concomitant implications of state making for sovereignty’s more diffuse meaning at the level of individual and group autonomy.

Indian Raids in Northern Mexico and the Construction of Mexican Sovereignty

This essay focuses on the borderlands of Mexico and the United States in the decades following the Mexican-American War. There, American, Apache, Comanche, and Mexican inhabitants came into contact with one another and their distinctive and sometimes conflicting understandings of sovereignty led to significant discord. In different ways, Mexico and the U.S. sought to assert control over part of these borderlands, which included restricting the movement of outsiders within their territory. Apache and Comanche peoples, on the contrary, regarded free movement across the region as “irrevocable.” The increasing American population both provided demand for livestock that drove indigenous raids into Mexico and curtailed access to land and resources, promoting migration across the border and making it exceedingly difficult for Mexico to assert sovereign control over northern territory.

Confederation as a Hemispheric Anomaly

This chapter focuses on the decision of several of Britain’s North American colonies to develop a political confederation for domestic self-governance in the 1860s while eschewing external sovereignty. Bringing insights from U.S. historiography to bear on recent studies of British identity, Smith finds an additional motive for Confederation not often addressed: defending Britishness against “an ethnic-nationalist definition of U.S. citizenship.” The use of British “as both an ethnic label and a more inclusive legal concept that corresponded to the category of British nationality” gave important protections to nonwhite and non-Protestant Canadians that they worried might be lost after annexation to the bellicose United States, which had shown its hand in anti-Catholic attitudes in its conquest of Mexico.

The Long War

This essay examines the actions of two indigenous groups who had not experienced removal—Eastern Cherokees and Bayou Lacombe Choctaws. Because they remained east of the Mississippi, they found themselves living in the heart of the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. Dinwoodie explores the different strategies these two groups employed to defend their autonomy in the wartime context and what their presence meant for Confederate sovereignty claims.

1860s Capitalscapes, Governing Interiors, and the Illustration of North American Sovereignty

The author identifies democratic nationalism as a common theme of state making in Canada, Mexico, and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The essay focuses on public architecture and commemoration in the capital cities of Ottawa, Washington, DC, and Mexico City, largely as conveyed in illustrated news. Midcentury illustrations of “Leviathan 2.0” repeatedly assert that power was wielded on behalf of the people. Bonner argues further that illustrated print journalism’s focus on “parliamentary procedure, staged as a matter of federative give-and-take,” balanced and distracted from “the physical force on which the ‘self-rule’ of territorial nation-states depended.”

Civil War and Nation Building in North America, 1848–1867

In this essay, the author “outlines a regional and comparative history of the emergence of North American nation-states during the mid-nineteenth century, attempting to highlight common challenges and solutions—and reciprocal influences—between the region’s distinct countries.” It analyzes the “successive ‘constitutional pacts’ that governed the difficult adaptation of the North American peoples to the demands of liberal capitalism and representative government.” Mijangos observes that the US and Mexico experienced “constitutional revolution,” while Canadians, who experienced neither civil war nor a revolution of independence, arrived at a similar place in the 1860s by a distinctive, more gradual process.