The American National State and the Early West by William H. Bergmann (review)

Abstract

The nature of white expansion into the trans-Appalachian West during the early republic has long been a fertile field of study. Recent scholars have emphasized race, violence, family and gender relations, ethnicity, and socioeconomic factors as determinants of EuroAmerican expansion. In pointing to broader cultural or social patterns, some scholars have deemphasized the fledgling and flailing early federal government as an agent of active state building in the Northwest Territory, Kentucky, and Tennessee. William H. Bergmann seeks to reorient the story. Rather than stressing “laissezfaire, liberalism, state ineptitude, or complacency” as social and political determinants of expansion, Bergmann emphasizes the role of the federal government in “cultivating partnerships with state governments and local businesses, thereby fostering a commercial economy” (2). According to Bergmann, the fact that most American citizens at the time viewed the early federal government as “invisible” in promoting expansion does not accurately measure the central state’s actual influence in the new nation. Indeed, expansion is better viewed as the result of commercial partnerships that threaded deliberate federal policies into the goals of local merchants, state and territorial officials, and farmers. In most cases, Bergmann finds that federal bureaucracies played an integral role in economic and intercultural developments during western settlement between 1775 and 1815. Native and Euro-American economies lay at the center of Bergmann’s argument. He uses the concept of intercultural and internecine “property wars” in the 1770s and 1780s, much discussed by recent military historians, as a starting point. White settlers and Indians west of the Appalachians made land and livestock the targets of their expanding conflicts. Fort-based “garrison governments,” sent by the army into Kentucky and Ohio to enforce Indian treaty terms and police settler immigration, quickly came into conflict with anti-Indian local and state militias and eventually Native Americans. Because garrisons and armies needed food and Book Reviews