Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country

Chapter Three

Fort Snelling was built in Dakota country, high upon the bluffs above the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. 03chap3_Layout 1 5/30/2013 09:55 Page 82 In , Frances Webster wrote a severely displeased letter to her brother Edmund,a recent graduate of West Point Academy. Frances came from a military family—her father had served in the War of  and risen to the rank of colonel by the time he resigned his commission in , while a second brother, Ephraim, began his career in the infantry in . Ephraim rose swiftly through the ranks and served at posts across the United States’ western front, including Fort Snelling in  and . Frances herself married a military man—Lucien Bonaparte Webster, an artillery officer—and by  they had settled at Hannock Barracks in Maine. From there Frances launched a blistering attack on Edmund when she heard he intended to join the infantry, like his brother, rather than the artillery, like his brother-in-law. “What possible advantage you imagine you can obtain by going into the Infantry I cannot conceive,” she wrote.“[A]ll who have any knowledge of the subject and will give an unprejudiced opinion at once yield the superiority to the Artillery in point of position and society while the emolument is the same.” Frances had  c h a p t e r t h r e e eE The Politics of the Garrison Household 03chap3_Layout 1 5/30/2013 09:55 Page 83 very specific fears. “In the Infantry you must all your life be con- fined to remote western frontier posts with little or no society beyond your garrison,” she wrote,“until you gradually assimilate to the demicivilized races who surround you.”1 To join the U.S. Infantry was, without a doubt, to commit oneself to service in locations far from mainstream American society: Nathan Jarvis, surgeon at Fort Snelling from  to , called the post a “retir’d & isolated spot.” Jarvis was generally happy with his post, and considered the rooms he occupied and the staff he had to help him“a pretty large establishment” that was“abundantly supply’d.” The post possessed “glorious & every magnificent views, a serene & delightful atmosphere & all that can ingratiate man with the works of nature.”This beauty helped, he believed, to“compensate in some manner for our seclusion in this distant region so far from the delights of society and civilized life.” The want of society at the fort was a repeated theme in Jarvis’s letters to his family.“One thing is only wanting that is society,” he wrote his brother, as “our garrison constitutes almost the only white population in the country.” Left to their own devices, he told his father in October , the bachelor officers “are very agreeable men although too much addicted to cards, which is the prevailing vice in all the outposts where men are shut out from amusements during the long & severe winter.”In a letter to his sister in , Jarvis suggested a solution.“Mary all I want now is a wife, can you pick me out one?” he asked.2 A wife—a household—was central to the colonial venture at Fort Snelling. Far from assimilating into nonwhite society, as Frances Webster supposed was the norm, the officers and their families at Fort Snelling worked hard to maintain the trappings of a “civilized” life while posted at their“retir’d and isolated spot.” In the upper chambers  making marriage 03chap3_Layout 1 5/30/2013 09:55 Page 84 of the officers’quarters, wives and children, friends and guests worked and visited, dined and played. Their labor and leisure depended on other members of the household—the servants and slaves who toiled below stairs.This was key.Despite the fort’s location in land above the º ´ parallel—a marker that, after , meant the region should have been free territory—slavery flourished at the post in support of the lifestyle white officers pursued. It was slavery and servitude that released officers’ wives from the relentless domestic labor undertaken by almost all other married women in the region, and slavery and servitude that made the lifestyle of bachelor officers possible. While slave labor supported white households, however, slaves had limited means to create households of their own. Across the United States, slavery was predicated in part upon the understanding that enslaved men and women, as chattel, lacked the legal...