Intimate empires: Domestic order, property relations, and the law in the western country, 1760--1830

The expansion of African-American slavery and the renegotiation of racial and social order under law were critically connected to the process of indigenous dispossession and the creation of an "Empire for Liberty" in the imperial American west. American racial consciousness in the Old Northwest developed in a context of deep and lasting intercultural violence, where a white man's claims to contested ground were fused at law with the control of the labor and bodies of his wife, children, slaves, and servants. In the eighteenth century, territorial control and trade relations in the Old Northwest had been bound together through ties of intercultural kinship; in the nineteenth century, Americans would systematically rework the laws of property, family, and labor relations as a means of imposing a different---and contested---political and legal economy. Imperial hegemony would be realized through the management of the intimate empire, the white patriarchal household. By analyzing the interconnections between slavery, indigenous dispossession, and the refiguring of the political economy of the early republican household, I hope to restore slavery to its rightful prominent role in understanding the history of post-revolutionary western empire-making, to demonstrate its centrality to the evolution of household relations and law (formal and unwritten) in the western country, and to analyze the process by which the Midwest became "white space" in the American civic imagination. The first chapter focuses on the transition from British to American occupation, outlining the significance of domestic order to the extension of empire in the Northwest Territory. The second chapter examines the ways in which American common law emerged through a process of creative invention and negotiation with existing indigenous and French conceptions of domestic order, categories of property, and customary justice. The third and fourth chapters analyze the struggle to define both alienable and inalienable property right in persons, places, and things, demonstrating the ways in which the empire of liberty and the intimate empire came into being simultaneously. In my conclusion, I reflect upon my findings and explore their significance for the study of the post-Revolutionary period, the trans-Appalachian frontier, and American legal history.