Widening The Scope on the Indians’ Old Northwest

The northwestern theater of the War of 1812 brought the complex nature of tribal politics and diplomacy into full relief. While the militant, inter-tribal coalition led by Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa was one Indian strategy for reckoning with U.S. territorial expansion, the historiographical focus on the Shawnee brothers and their movement has obscured a range of shifting Indian objectives and strategies for negotiating the wartime upheaval. By closely examining inter-tribal rivalries and coalitions, as well as tensions within Indian polities, we see a broader spectrum of Indian agendas in action during the War of 1812. Those agendas included neutrality, spying for or outright alliance with the United States, and situational Indian participation in the conflict when the British made gains early in the war. Well after Tecumseh’s death, we also see the geopolitical influence of western Indian forces, particularly the Potawatomis, Sauks, and the Sioux, on the conflict. For an era so closely associated with Indian prophecy and millenarianism, pragmatism most often reigned.

“Murder, Robbery, Rape, Adultery, and Incest”

This essay considers how and why Federalist writers turned to the medium of fiction after the Revolution of 1800 in order to continue to express their concerns about the dangers of a Jeffersonian ascendency and the future of national development. By exploring the connections between rhetorical practices before and after Jefferson’s election, I argue that Federalist writers deployed the same tropes and metaphors to reflect on the loss of their authority despite the shift in genre from newspaper editorial to the novel form. Central to this practice was the use of reflections on the Haitian Revolution which served to represent the instabilities of plantation culture and its capacity to erode cultural mores. The essay focuses on Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta (1807) as an emblematic example of the ways in which Federalist writers sought to deploy representations of planter decadence as a means of critiquing Jeffersonian power. Yet more than simply critiquing Jeffersonianism, Read also seeks to reframe the tenets of Federalism by advocating that properly ordered domestic spheres are the true source of cultural stability.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the deeply ambivalent attitudes of Americans as they engaged in a crucial contest over the definition and direction of the country—its language, politics, social structures, citizenry, and boundaries of national authority—thirty years after the American Revolution.

Domestic Fronts in the Era of 1812

In 1811, while working as U.S. Indian Agent to the Choctaw nation, a white man named Silas Dinsmoor took guardianship of a ten- or eleven-year-old Choctaw boy named James McDonald. By examining the federal career and household arrangements of this government official and their convergence with the lives of James and his mother Molly McDonald, this essay highlights the central role that race, slavery, and kinship played in both imposing and resisting U.S. imperial rule. It begins by revisiting federal Indian policy and discourses concerning Indian “civilization” to consider the racialized and gendered kinship structures that supported U.S. territorial expansion. It then looks at how Dinsmoor specifically drew upon these same familial arrangements to push for U.S. settlement in the Choctaw nation on both a grand and intimate scale. Dinsmoor was initially invested in federal Indian policies and programs aimed at assimilating Choctaw people and their lands into the U.S. plantation economy by encouraging them to adopt U.S. kinship structures. However, in light of Choctaw responses to his controversial presence in their homelands, the Indian Agent became disillusioned with his work. Presented with an opportunity to “settle” Choctaw lands by establishing a plantation household of his own, Dinsmoor recalibrated his ambitions. Instead of trying to impose U.S. familial values on Choctaw people writ large, he began to acquire Choctaw lands for his own family’s gain, shoring up his claims to Choctaw lands and his sense of spatial mastery through the containment of black and Indian bodies within the space of his own “private” patriarchal household. The essay briefly concludes with the unexpected consequences of Dinsmoor’s actions. When Dinsmoor incorporated a Choctaw youth into his plantation home, he inadvertently supported Molly McDonald’s efforts to use both her son and racial slavery to bolster her own influence on lands coveted by the United States. In the end, Silas Dinsmoor and Molly McDonald’s actions reveal the yawning gap between imperial agendas and colonial realities as Native people found new ways to maintain control over their homelands.

“Can You Be Surprised at My Discouragement?”

This chapter explores the warring—and yet mutually constitutive—discourses of education and colonization through a particular focus on the New York African Free School (1787-1834), an institution designed by the New York Manumission Society to prepare black children for freedom. The school produced a remarkable roster of alumni, including Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, Henry Highland Garnet, Ira Aldridge, Patrick Reason and others. The development and curriculum of this school, when placed in context with early republican conversations about education, race and citizenship, provides a means of understanding how in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Enlightenment notions of a child’s malleability had become a means of determining whether non-white occupants of United States soil could be educated into citizenship, or whether they would have to be excised from the nation’s borders. Ultimately, this chapter attends to the conversations about black education that unfolded in the interplay between parents and administrators, and between students and the schoolwork those students were assigned, to better understand how and why colonization would emerge as the reigning antislavery philosophy during these years, and how African Americans engaged and eventually dismantled the racial logic underlying the American Colonization Society.

Conceptual Traffic

This essay argues that rhetorical and material gaps have limited scholars’ ability to see the connections between Atlantic slavery and the War of 1812, and it outlines these limits as created by contemporary conceptual changes in the meaning of trade, ideologies of neutrality and “free trade,” as well as current-day nation-centered historiography and the problem of missing archival records. By turning to French shipping records, the essay outlines the difficulty of documenting contraband and illicit activities, and draws connections between neutrality disagreements, early nineteenth century U.S.-French commerce, slavery, and the War of 1812. The essay suggests that a better understanding of wartime trade agreements and the related issue of neutrality, more careful attention to the conceptual disaggregation of foreign from internal slave trade, and an awareness of the gaps in the archive are all necessary to challenge and amend the heretofore-isolated narratives of the Atlantic slave trade and the War of 1812.

“Borders Thick and Foggy”

This paper examines transnational movements at the northern border in 1838, a pivotal year in United States, British, and indigenous relations. In that year, the Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions were launched from Maine to Detroit as an attempt by local people on both sides of the border to over throw a small cadre of British elites who dominated a conservative political machine. That same year, Potawatomi of the southern Great Lakes who had traditionally freely crossed the border due to treaty arrangements negotiated at the end of the eighteenth century, utilized these transnational options to flee forced removal by the U.S. government. Similarly, indigenized French, individuals who were the products of over a century of integration into Native communities, were migrating away from these communities as British Indian agents attempted to protect indigenous homelands. At Detroit, a key location for migrating Potawatomi and other Anishinaabe, the movements of these three groups came together, dislocating and relocating families, and at times breaking out into armed conflict that threatened a British/American neutrality agreement. Detroit’s location at the apex of the indigenous buffer zone made the performance of indigeneity a crucial means to negotiate and sometimes thwart the agendas of the two Euro-American nations. Of the three groups, Potawatomi were most successful in maintaining their communities.

Naval Biography, the War of 1812, and the Contestation of American National Identity

This essay argues that a close look at the relationship between periodical production and nationalist rhetoric in the biographies of naval officers printed in the Analectic Magazine between 1813 and 1816 suggests the contingent nature of national identity in the context of the War of 1812. American periodicals took great interest in the events of the War of 1812, providing something akin to war reportage to their subscribers. During the War of 1812, several periodicals turned to the production of biographies of naval and military commanders that had excelled on the battle field. Biography, however, provided more than merely a glimpse of notable lives: instead, periodicals negotiated and contested ideas about American nationhood through the medium of biography, a discovery which necessitates a re-appraisal of the role of biography in the Early Republic as well as of simplifying notions about American nationalism. Reading Washington Irving’s 1813 biography of Oliver Hazard Perry, winner of the Battle of Lake Erie, against James Kirke Paulding’s 1816 life of Thomas Macdonough reveals how different genealogical models of American ascendancy shaped the narratives told about naval officers; and in turn, how naval officers could become models for particular versions of American national identity. Nevertheless, both of these models remained contingently tied into a pre-existing nationalist discourse triggered by the war, rather than actively shaping this national discourse: in this, they also reveal something about the often-overemphasized power of periodicals to shape national consciousness.

Military Service and Racial Subjectivity in the War Narratives of James Roberts and Isaac Hubbell

This essay explores how racist thought became tied to the history of early US political violence through the analysis of two narratives of the War of 1812, one written by a supporter of slavery and the other by an advocate of African American equality. It argues that divisions among the soldiers in the War of 1812 provided a symbol of the perpetual instability faced by a nation founded in revolutionary violence. In response, a discourse of white supremacy and racial purity would be remembered in the antebellum era as the source of affiliation between men that could balance this volatility. As they illustrate a cultural effort to define legitimate expressions of political violence as the exclusive right of a sovereign community of white men, these narratives reveal how racial divisions obscured the similar forms of exploitation experienced by both white soldiers and enslaved blacks in the service of an expanding nation state.

Meditating on Slavery in the Age of Revolution

From the nation’s founding inclusion in and exclusion from the U.S. body politic has been racialized. Citizenship and whiteness have been defined in opposition to slavery and blackness, the free white man celebrated as the prototype of the liberty-loving American citizen. “The very structure of American citizenship is white,” political philosophers and historians repeatedly tell us. Yet U.S. democracy took form during one of the most radical periods of human history, the Age of Revolution when the political world appeared remade and the promise of freedom unlimited. Between the 1780s and the War of 1812, increasingly radical political movements crisscrossed the Atlantic challenging absolute monarchies, establishing post-colonial republics and questioning the legitimacy of human slavery. Born of such momentous times, how were U.S. citizenship and democracy constituted as powerful instruments of racial exclusion? How were the majority of US citizens and their political leaders able to reconcile their commitment to the equality of all men with the centuries-old practice of chattel slavery? This essay ponders that conundrum through an exploration of a rapidly growing literary genre, the Barbary captivity narratives, cheaply printed popular accounts of the seizure and enslavement of American sailors by Barbary “pirates.” Focusing on the period between the 1780s and the War of 1812, that epic time when revolutionary fervor — and most especially the Haitian Revolution — made the contradictory interplay of Atlantic slavery and universal rights impossible to ignore, this article will explore the role popular representations of white and black enslavement played in the construction of the new U.S. republic and U.S. citizenship.