The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest by Bethel Saler (review)

The Settlers’ Empire is an ambitious book, an examination of the creation—and implications—of government in the Great Lakes region known as the Old Northwest. Taking a fresh approach to midwestern political history, Bethel Saler sets her extensive research about Wisconsin in the larger contexts of American territorial expansion, the evolution of republican government, Indian-white relations, and the history of women and the family in the period from the 1780s to 1860. She recognizes the United States as both a postcolonial republic and a settler empire. The United States and countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, Saler comments, have “an ambivalent double history as both colonized and colonizers” (2). Following upon recent comparative scholarship on European colonialism, she tells the stories of political institution building with consistent attention to the fact that dispossession of Native people was an essential component of that political development. In addition, she demonstrates the ways that governmental structures institutionalized certain patriarchal ideas about families, households, gender, and race.

In an examination of the Northwest Territory’s early political development, Saler uses her interpretation of colonialism to detail how officials created distinct governing administrations for Native peoples and Euro-Americans. After the Treaty of Paris of 1783 more than doubled the size of the new United States from the original thirteen colonies, the Northwest Ordinance developed from the idea of “a temporary colonialism” (19) for non-Native settlers that would allow new states equal status within the nation. It included legal principles such as the common law and trial by jury, as well as ideals of patriarchal families. At the same time, Indian policy was guided by ideas of “indefinite federal colonial rule” over indigenous peoples who were seen as “quasi-foreign political bodies” (27).

To view the early implementation of these systems, Saler focuses on the reality on the ground in the lower Northwest, especially the Ohio country. This region included a wide variety of Native peoples, French Creoles, and independent-minded Anglo-American squatters. She examines the difficulties and frustrations that appointed leaders such as Brigadier General Josiah Harmar and Governor Arthur St. Clair experienced in governing such scattered and myriad peoples, most of whom held no particular allegiance to the new United States. Federal officials felt an urgent need to claim the allegiance of Indians as well as other peoples east of the Mississippi, fearing that the Spanish west of the river might entice the population into their orbit. The territory’s residents were not easily cowed, according to Saler; however, Native and non-Native peoples eventually conceded the federal government’s power to determine the rules and processes for territorial, provincial, and local leadership during the years after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.

Shifting the focus to Wisconsin, Saler also examines the workings of what she terms the “treaty polity” (4)—that is, the set of officials, laws, and processes that was established to control the Native peoples west of Lake Michigan, which included treaty conferences, contracts, Indian agents, military forts to enforce regulations and agreements, and projects such as model farms designed to “civilize” Native people and impose Euro-American gender roles and economic patterns. As an example of the ways this system served the federal government’s needs, Saler explores the Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825. She interprets it as a conference designed to force indigenous peoples to organize themselves as discrete “nation-states” (105) with exclusive territories that could later be ceded in order to encourage the centralization of leadership and to “confirm American sovereignty over Wisconsin Indian peoples” (119). The treaty polity was complex and uneven in administration, as Saler demonstrates through a series of well-chosen examples involving Ho-Chunks, Menominees, Sauks, Stockbridge and Brothertown Indians, and others.

Saler also explores the efforts of Christian missionaries and the varieties of...