Journal of the Early Republic

Western historians have long emphasized the importance of the federal government in the history of the U.S. West. Recently, historians of the state have likewise highlighted the significance of the West for understanding state power. If most Americans in the antebellum East could live their lives with only minimal contact with the federal government, this was not the case for those living in the broad region reaching from west of the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Although state and local governments only gradually assumed many of the functions we associate with a modern state, in the early U.S. West federal officials and troops worked to conquer territory; negotiate treaties; map, survey, and distribute land; establish and enforce laws; and administer Indian agencies and territorial governments.¹ [End Page 87]

However, an active federal government was not necessarily a powerful one. With its piecemeal acquisition of vast territories over the nineteenth century, the U.S. government often found its authority overstretched. Federal officials made agreements and adopted policies that exceeded the capacity of the government's finances, personnel, and administrative systems. Even as the federal government claimed dominion over great expanses and diverse and dispersed populations in western North America, it faced fundamental challenges to sovereignty, including the inability to fulfill treaty obligations; the failure to enforce laws or to maintain a monopoly on violence; and the lack of territorial control over large parts of the country. These problems were compounded by corrupt and incompetent officials and by the government's dependence on local agents who had questionable loyalties.

These struggles remind us that the antebellum West was both the region where the federal government was most active and where the limitations of federal power were most evident. Thinking about state power in the West changes the calculus by which we discuss the relative strength or weakness of the state in the early republic. It forces us to consider not just the form and extent of state authority but also whether federal agents achieved the goals and responsibilities they set out for themselves. The question then becomes not whether the state was weak in comparison to the twentieth-century state (in the United States or elsewhere), but whether it was weak relative to the agenda it claimed for itself. Could the federal government fulfill treaty terms; provide funding for surveys, annuities, and military operations; adequately staff government offices; maintain a monopoly on violence; assert territorial sovereignty; enforce a system of state-sanctioned justice; or define and control borders? That the answer to these questions was quite often "no" undermines the notion that the nineteenth-century federal state was strong even where it was often most active.

Although the definition of the West evolved with U.S. expansion, and historical conditions and state activity varied within and between regions, during the early republic period (defined here as 1783 to 1861), the federal government played a disproportionately large role west of the Appalachian Mountains. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the federal government's responsibilities for diplomacy and Indian affairs combined with the extent of western public lands and federal territories meant that it had a lot to do in the West. Its activities provided the foundation for a settler colonial state. It was in the West that, as [End Page 88] Bethel Saler argued, the "dual political demands" of the United States' simultaneous existence as a "postcolonial republic and a contiguous domestic empire" "inevitably collided—in the federal project of western state formation."²

Beginning with the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Congress developed a system for the federal distribution of land and administration of territories (until they gained a large enough white population to form co-equal states). These laws endowed the federal government with administrative responsibilities that were supposed to be temporary. It is unlikely that Congress anticipated the prolonged territorial periods endured by many western states (for instance, Wisconsin [1787–1848], Utah [1850–1896], and New Mexico [1850–1912]). At the same time, the federal government enhanced its mechanisms for displacing Native people and created a colonial administrative apparatus that undertook the long-term governance of Indigenous peoples through Indian agencies, reservations, annuities, and trust funds. Scholars have highlighted how the federal government combined military force, diplomacy, economic pressure, and bureaucratic administration in carrying out its constitutional authority over Indian affairs. Congress also endorsed and aided efforts by individual states by providing federal funding for state and local forces' violent assaults on Native people.³

Federal officials thus aimed to administer a sophisticated colonial state. However, this was rarely what emerged in practice. A closer investigation of federal management of Indian affairs, for example, reveals [End Page 89] the gap between officials' aspirations and their ability to effectively and efficiently carry out policy. Colin Calloway has estimated that between 1778 and 1871 the U.S. government made more than 400 treaties with Native people. These treaties, or at least those Congress ratified, not only transferred massive amounts of land to the United States but also committed the U.S. government to providing financial compensation and to fulfilling other obligations to tribes. It is common knowledge that the U.S. government often failed to deliver on its treaty promises. Federal officials regularly proved incapable of keeping white settlers from squatting on lands guaranteed to Indians by treaty. They failed to provide annuities in the quantities and at the times they had promised. Federal officials' failures to fulfill treaty obligations revealed both their lack of concern for Native people and the corruption in and manipulation of the treaty system. At times, officials intentionally withheld promised land, money, and annuities to coerce Indians into renegotiating treaty terms. But these failures were also sometimes symptoms of the weakness of state power. It was not just that federal officials did not want to uphold treaties but also that they often could not fulfill the promises that they or their predecessors had made. The failings and inefficiencies of the federal government were further exacerbated by corrupt traders and officials. In a few cases, some Indians were able to take advantage of these weaknesses to negotiate for better terms or to forestall removal. For instance, John Bowes has shown how, in Michigan Territory, after the government bungled the survey and sale of their lands, some Saginaw Ojibwes managed to purchase additional property that enabled them to remain in Michigan. In many other cases, Indian leaders pointed to the government's pattern of reneging on treaty promises to justify their resistance to signing treaties. However, in most cases, the limitations of the federal state only meant greater suffering for Native people who bore the brunt of corruption, inefficiency, and unfulfilled promises.⁴

Federal authority revealed similar weaknesses in other realms as well. In both the north and the south, U.S. officials struggled to survey, demarcate, and control movement across the nation's borders. Although the federal government claimed authority over all of what is now the [End Page 90] continental United States by the 1850s, much of the West remained controlled by or susceptible to raids by Native people. Despite promising to do so in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States proved unable to prevent Indians from raiding into Mexico. As a result, James Gadsden negotiated to abandon that obligation in the Gadsden (Mesilla) Treaty in 1853. In New Mexico Territory, federal attempts to manage Indian affairs foundered due to the lack of effective agents, adequate funds for goods and food, and cooperation between civil and military officials.⁵

The weakness of the federal government was similarly apparent in the state's inability to maintain a monopoly on violence. It took decades following the acquisition of western territories for government officials to extend the reach of U.S. law to the territories it acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, Adams–Onís Treaty, Oregon Treaty, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and Gadsden Purchase. In New Mexico Territory, Indians and Hispanos engaged in slave raids on Native communities through the 1860s. In Gold Rush California, Indians, finding little to no security in state-sponsored reservations, faced genocidal attacks and enslavement. These assaults took place within a broader context of prevalent vigilante violence. From San Francisco and Los Angeles to the mining camps in the Sierra foothills, Californians formed lynch mobs and doled out violent punishments that defied state-sanctioned law enforcement and judicial proceedings. Meanwhile, on the Pacific Northwest Coast and in the southern Great Plains, as Joshua Reid and Pekka Hämäläinen have shown, Makahs and Comanches continued to dispense justice.⁶ [End Page 91]

Throughout the West, federal officials veered between the inability to assert much power at all and drastic overreaches of their authority. Notorious today for his violent and unscrupulous efforts to strip Native peoples of their land, Washington governor Isaac Stevens was controversial in his own time for suppressing local opposition to his policies with declarations of martial law in two counties. Both military and civilian officials demonstrated a propensity for infighting that both demonstrated institutional weakness and further undercut their authority. During the U.S. military's occupation of Southern California, the commanding officers engaged in what John Mack Faragher described as "a sordid contest for power characterized by egotism, calumny, and recklessness." In Utah, federally appointed judges complained that Mormons, under the leadership of Governor Brigham Young, refused to recognize their authority. Corruption and incompetence were widespread among officials who often secured their appointments in the West through political patronage and in pursuit of personal advancement.⁷

Faced with the reality of their limited power, federal officials in Washington, DC, often delegated authority to local people. For instance, in the conquest of New Mexico, the U.S. government depended on Santa Fe traders like James Magoffin and Charles Bent to use their economic and kinship ties to ease acceptance of U.S. authority by the local population. The United States' reliance on local power brokers signified an unspoken acknowledgment that the far-off state held little sway in much of the West. As Anne Hyde has argued, "During a time when no one knew which nation or empire would finally impose control, effective trade was the sole source of power. And [the West] continued to be a world defined by personal connections."⁸ [End Page 92]

The delegation of state power to local people extended the government's reach, but could also limit federal officials' power to dictate policy and control resources. In some cases, outsourcing government authority led to a reliance on people of questionable loyalties who threatened to undermine U.S. sovereignty. James Wilkinson, who served as both governor of Louisiana Territory and the senior officer of the U.S. Army, was also a paid agent of the Spanish Empire who engaged in schemes that worked to separate the trans-Appalachian West from the United States. In the 1840s and 1850s, President Millard Fillmore, recognizing Mormon dominance in the Great Basin, appointed Brigham Young as governor and superintendent of Indian affairs of Utah Territory, despite concerns that Young and the Mormons might break with the United States. Tensions between Young and the federal government worsened over the 1850s, culminating in the Utah War of 1857–58 in which President James Buchanan sent troops to Utah to replace Brigham Young as governor and re-assert federal authority.⁹

By the time Buchanan dispatched troops to secure federal supremacy in Utah Territory, James Wilkinson had been dead for more than a quarter century and the Mississippi frontier on which his machinations had focused had largely passed through the stage of weak federal authority and onto statehood and a system of governance that was at once both more local and less contested. Meanwhile, federal authority remained tenuous in much of the far western region reaching from the Great Plains to the Great Basin and from the Salish Sea to the Chiricahua Mountains.

Over the remainder of the century, the federal government, gradually and unevenly, but persistently, expanded its authority over the trans-Mississippi West. In doing so, federal officials followed patterns and policies that their predecessors had established on the trans-Appalachian frontier. But they also innovated. In Indian affairs, the government shifted from removal to reservations and then abandoned treaties entirely in 1871. To force Native acquiescence, policymakers relied on the U.S. Army, which had emerged from the Civil War as a more professional, powerful, and deadly force. Through the late nineteenth century and [End Page 93] into the first decades of the twentieth century, Congress introduced an array of laws intended to transfer public lands into private hands. In the face of uneven results, legislators developed a wide range of new agencies charged with managing public lands and resources. Federal officials gradually overcame many of the early federal state's weaknesses, not just expanding their purview, but also improving their capacity to carry out the more basic responsibilities that the federal government had long claimed, but failed to achieve. That postbellum West, which Richard White aptly called the "kindergarten of the American state," was where federal officials developed mechanisms for policing territorial borders, subordinating minority populations, managing land and resources, and performing other modern acts of states-craft.¹⁰

Even as this federal administration took form, new state governments emerged across the West. However, in contrast to the trans-Appalachian frontier experience, the transition from territories to statehood in the trans-Mississippi West in the second half of the nineteenth century did not significantly diminish the role of the federal government. While federal officials played a temporary and transitional role east of the Mississippi, to the west their experiences led them to develop a federal state apparatus that gradually became not just more active and powerful, but also more persistent. It was this stronger, more efficient, and more capable late-nineteenth-century federal state that provided a model for the rest of the nation and that remains one of the most striking features of the modern U.S. West. [End Page 94]