Epilogue

Abstract

Abstract Three federal systems coalesced from the ad hoc practices of governance in the Northwest and Southwest Territories—over land, Indian affairs, and the territories themselves. The foundations for the federal land system laid in these early struggles persisted and survived through the Civil War and beyond, as federal adjudication of land rights expanded. The federal government also codified its earlier experiments in compensation, formalizing its payments to Natives and whites even as it also continued to pay for brutal, even genocidal violence against Native peoples from the federal treasury. Finally, even Congress continued to use conditional admission to try to control newly admitted states, the territorial system entrenched the expectation that the plural sovereignty and ownership of the borderlands was temporary; statehood represented the moment when these preexisting claims supposedly passed away. Statehood also helped doom the flawed vision that the federal government would serve as a neutral arbiter between Natives and whites. Rather, statehood gave the former territories perhaps the most effective way yet to make claims on the federal government. As these new states increasingly became the federal government—in Congress, in the cabinet, and in the presidency—they turned their goals into federal law. This result occurred within the federal lands, where states successfully bent federal land policy to serve their expansionist aims, and in Indian affairs, where state representatives successfully persuaded the federal government to back their assertions of sovereignty against the compelling sovereignty claims of the Cherokee and Native Nations in the struggle known as Removal. This effectiveness at exploiting federal power allowed these former territories to rapidly remake these former borderlands to satisfy their long-standing settler colonial aspirations.