| Drawing on research conducted at the Minnesota History Society, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and the Newberry Library in Chicago, this dissertation explores the constant interplay between the politics of family and questions of governance in the early nineteenth-century Upper Midwest. Americans came to the Upper Midwest armed with the belief that the family was best organized around a male head of household who entered civil society on behalf of his dependents---his wife, children, servants, and slaves. The political system of the United States was predicated upon this vision, reserving suffrage, jury service, elected office, membership before the bar, and judicial appointments to propertied, white, male heads of household, and limiting the legal rights of all other persons by their degree of separation from that ideal. As my research demonstrates, however, these ideas clashed forcibly with conceptions of kinship and social order among the region's long-established Dakota, Ojibwe, and mixed-heritage communities. In their resistance to the vision of 'appropriate' gender and familial roles advocated by military personnel, Indian agents, and missionaries, Native people frustrated the process of American state-formation in the Upper Midwest. Rather than gaining swift ascendancy in the region, many Americans were forced to compromise their own beliefs about marriage, divorce, and political propriety in order to create circumstances in which they could remain in the region.; As politicians and men of power in the settled east debated territorial expansion, slavery, and the limits of Native sovereignty throughout the early-nineteenth century, the inhabitants of the region that would one day become Minnesota tussled over the same questions in their interpersonal relationships and day-to-day acts of trade and diplomacy. Daily trade logs, the professional and personal correspondence of area missionaries, records of government agents and military personnel, documents from regional clerks of court, and the personal records of American settlers all illuminate the political nature of personal circumstance. These individual circumstances were inextricably bound up with questions of national identity, offering us a fresh perspective on the key questions of the age. |
