Territories of Empire: U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence by Andy Doolen (review)

In his latest book, Andy Doolen discusses the significance, to early America, of what he calls “cartographic texts.” An array of sources fall under that heading—from maps and reports on exploration to filibustering memoirs and novelizations of the Mexican war for independence—all united by a common interest in dramatizing US territorial expansion. This obsession with territorialization, the expansion of America’s geographic borders, became the means by which authors, poets, travelers, and politicians collectively worked to legitimize US possession of the heavily contested North American continent. In zeroing in on several key cartographic texts, Doolen reminds us not only of the significance of frontier or western writers to national development at an early nineteenth-century moment when the Atlantic seaboard’s “sophisticates” tend to receive more scholarly attention but also of the crucial role such nonstate actors played in the growth of American empire. And in covering the years 1800–30 explicitly, the author also sheds light on a neglected moment before the trope of Manifest Destiny shaped representation of the West and its peoples. What we gain from Doolen’s creative periodization is added appreciation for the sense of contingency and possibilities present at a moment when US domination of the hemisphere was hardly assured.

Each chapter, then, deals with a different cartographic text (or type of cartographic text) engaged in describing or reimagining the relationship between the nation and what were, at the time, its ever-shifting borders. In the first chapter, Doolen presents an analytically robust reading of several key texts surrounding the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. His core concern there has to do with American efforts to integrate the cultural and ethnic mélange concentrated around New Orleans into the national body politic. In a process labeled “empire by deferral,” US officials delayed Louisiana statehood and held “racially impure” French and Spanish Creoles at arm’s length in a bid to allow time for white American citizens to emigrate there and tutor the extant populace in the art of republican self-government. But if that was the plan, reality unfolded quite differently. Model citizens failed to materialize in sufficient numbers, and those who did quickly found themselves under suspicion for possible involvement in Aaron Burr’s supposed conspiracy to detach much of the West from US hands. Doolen presents fascinating evidence detailing the ways in which previously suspect Creoles seized upon swirling rumors of treason among American arrivals to demonstrate their loyalty to the new Washington, DC–backed regime in the area. With their fidelity proven yet again in 1811, when they played a pivotal role in suppressing the German Coast slave uprising outside New Orleans, Creoles were able to extract favorable legal concessions (particularly as pertained to their slaves) and secure social position from a territorial government that initially had spurned them. Doolen presents the entire episode as an educational moment in the future history of US empire: faced with perpetual crises of loyalty on its western borders, American leaders learned the power of promoting white racial solidarity at the nation’s margins as an antidote for disunion.

Subsequent chapters show a similar regard for many of these themes: territorialization as a process negotiated between periphery and center; cartographic texts as instrumental to solidifying the bonds of empire; and early expansion characterized by much trial and error and a steep learning curve. Hence one chapter’s examination of Zebulon Pike’s exploration narrative, fraught as it was with a sense of failure following his capture by Spanish military officials. And yet Doolen urges us to reapproach Pike as the influential figure he was at the time (only much later overshadowed by Lewis and Clark) and reread his Account of Expeditions as a triumphant narrative about the discovery of crucial transcontinental trade routes and the successful conduct of Indian diplomacy. The author also does equally impressive work in a pair of chapters dedicated to investigating two (very different...