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

The Settlers’ Empire examines state formation in the Northwest Territory, primarily focusing on Wisconsin. Most of Saler’s attention centers on the 1820s and 1830s, after the War of 1812 had secured the area’s fate as a permanent part of the United States, but before a large influx of white immigrants during the early 1840s led to statehood. During these decades, Wisconsin was a colonial region in an America that was both “a postcolonial republic and a contiguous domestic empire” (1). Saler argues that the government’s cultural and political aims in Wisconsin were deeply intertwined. She is most interested in federal efforts to impose a vision of civilization on the various peoples who lived on the western shore of Lake Michigan. The early occupants of Wisconsin were notably diverse: among them numbered various nations of Native Americans, Anglo and Francophone white traders, along with inter-loping lead miners, including African Americans. Forging a new state out of this territory led to governmental interference in the inhabitants’ everyday lives: “reform of local economies, religious conversion by missionaries, and the regulation of marriage and family were all foundational aspects of state formation in and of themselves” (8).

Some of Saler’s most intriguing analysis deals with federal intrusion into local marriage practices. White traders in the region often entered into customary marriages with local Indian women. These could last indefinitely or merely for fixed periods of time, such as a year. Saler argues that federal officials saw marriage and family practices at the root of the racial divide between whites and Indians. Not only were these marriages un-Christian and unofficial, they complicated questions of property ownership—did the husbands own their lands, and did they continue to own those lands after the marriages had ended? During the 1820s the first territorial justice with principal jurisdiction over the Wisconsin region, James Duane Doty, prosecuted dozens of white men for “lewd cohabitation,” commuting the sentences of those men willing to file proper marriage certificates. “By making new western citizens conform to the dominant U.S. laws and customs such as the Michigan territorial statute on marriage, territorial officers ensured the legal ownership and conveyance of property by husbands and patriarchal family organizations” (214). Indeed, Saler suggests that Doty’s penchant for land speculation “probably spurred his own campaign for licensed marriages among Green Bay residents” (215). Despite these actions, customary marriages remained common for decades, especially among the French creole community.

As with the attitude toward marriage, most of the territorial government’s interactions with Wisconsin’s locals aimed to effect a cultural transition that would elevate the status of private property, patriarchs, and agriculture. Missionaries competed for government grants, aiming to effect a “double conversion” (178) on local Indians—not only changing their religion, but civilizing them as well. In this way, missionaries could help avoid the corrupting effects of Indian contact with degenerate frontier whites. Their civilizing mission played into the hands of the federal government. Saler reinforces this narrative by discussing federal treaty efforts, noting the ways in which Native Americans and métis peoples were divided and driven off their lands.

In some ways Wisconsin’s constitutional debates from 1846 to 1848 encapsulate this narrative. Saler details the disagreements over banking, homestead laws, female property rights, and black voting rights. Many of the immigrants who flooded to the region in the years leading up to statehood shared the federal vision of what Wisconsin should become: an agricultural society controlled by white patriarchs. However, Saler complicates this story, pointing to the creation of the state’s historical society, where Lyman Draper became one of the early republic’s most thorough documenters. While governmental policy aimed at homogeneity, the historical society’s collections maintained the history of the diversity of peoples who lived on Lake Michigan’s western shore.

While the book’s title refers to the Old Northwest...