Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This introduction outlines the central argument of Federal Ground. Federal authority in the Northwest and Southwest Territories, the book contends, stemmed less from foundational texts like the Northwest Ordinance than from the demands of territorial residents, who looked on the federal government not as an institution but as a resource and successfully pushed it to serve their ends. The introduction explores the contrast between the formal, nearly unchecked authority that the U.S. Constitution granted the federal government in the territories and the reality that these supposed territories were Native homelands and borderlands where imperial powers had come and gone with little change in control. It then grapples with the amorphous nature of federal government in the territories, divided among cabinet officials, local territorial officers, and key intermediaries like Governors Arthur St. Clair and William Blount, and recounts how these diverse officials believed themselves constrained to try to understand the territories’ inhabitants. It also explores the difficult question of how to measure federal state power in the early republic, contrasting the fiscal-military state with the alternate model of an adjudicatory state, in which territorial citizens turned to federal law to claim rights. It notes the benefits of considering the two territories together and previews the individual chapters and their arguments.