A Fragile Empire?: Early American Expansion from Below

In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot cautions against “formulas of banalization” that “empty a number of singular events of their revolutionary content so that the entire string of facts, gnawed from all sides, becomes trivialized.”¹ If anyone can string together trivialized facts, it is the historian. On the one hand, the historian’s commitment to contingency—that what happened did not have to happen, that any one change might have resulted in a different outcome—means that we have a healthy suspicion of overly linear, teleological explanations. Yet historians are equally committed to causality. What happened did not have to happen, but the things that did happen must be explained. And the distance between causality and culpability is not all that wide, and as such, these historical investigations become implicated in political debates and ethical issues.

Thanks to pioneering works by Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, among others, the pendulum in imperial studies has shifted from top-down analyses of “big men” to emphasize social and cultural histories. For historians of the early republic, such attention to local actors raises fruitful questions: who (if anyone) was the architect of early American imperial expansion? Was it Thomas Jefferson, who in the 1780s saw in the western lands a solution to the young republic’s political divisions and demographic problems? Capitalistic local elites who collaborated with U.S. officials for personal profit? Settler-imperialists from the Eastern Seaboard whose desires for profits and autonomy at times threatened their fidelity to the empire itself? The most insightful answers to such questions show the possibilities of resistance to imperial might while remaining attentive to the multidirectional and meandering vectors of imperial power. After all, decentralized power can still be devastating power.

How, then, do we narrate the small stories and false starts, not to render them banal but to show the trend line that such events, taken together, ultimately advanced? Two recent books, Honor Sachs’ Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier and Eberhard “Lo” Faber’s Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America, use different but equally illuminating approaches. The former emphasizes the role of gender norms and household hierarchies on the frontier toward the expansion of the early republic, while the latter shows how federal authorities empowered self-interested local elites to establish and energize favorable hierarchies and labor systems. Both authors offer fresh contributions that together shed new light on the “empire of liberty” from below.

In Home Rule, Honor Sachs explores the period between the American Revolution of 1776 and Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800 to untangle a paradox: “How did the American West simultaneously nurture households of many and produce autonomous individuals at the same time?” (p. 4). Extending contributions by Kathleen Brown, Amy Greenberg, and other historians of gender and sexuality in North American imperial expansion, Sachs argues that “the experience of families and the expectations of households shaped settlers’ demands on the western fringe of the emerging nation-state and guided the story of national expansion on a turbulent frontier” (p. 4). In this fine-grained analysis, Sachs examines “the settlement and statehood of Kentucky during the eighteenth century to understand how visions of patriarchal household order forged the experience of nation building in the first state west of the Appalachian Mountains” (p. 2). The well-ordered household populated by an independent white man and his dependents was the bedrock of the well-ordered nation: “Central to their local understanding of rights was an abiding faith in the patriarchal household and an evolving commitment to the social and political privileges of white men” (p. 8). Ultimately, Sachs argues, Euro-American settlers’ efforts to establish patriarchal households...