How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  The government accepted control of its first territory in 1784, when Virginia gave up its claims to a large swath of land north of the Ohio River. This cession came not two months before the United States formally received its independence when Britain ratified the Treaty of Paris. This meant that, from day one, the United States of America was more than just a union of states. It was an amalgam of states and territory.

  By 1791, all Atlantic states except Georgia had followed Virginia and given up their far western claims. As a result, in that year only slightly more than half of the country’s land (55 percent) was covered by states.18

  What was this non-state territory? The Constitution was notably closelipped, discussing the matter only in a single sentence. It granted Congress the power “to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.” Thus the founding document, which went into extravagant detail about amendments, elections, and the division of power, left wide open the question of how much of the land was to be governed.

  Territorial policy was set, instead, by a series of laws, most famously the Jefferson-inspired Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which covered a large part of the present-day Midwest (similar laws covered other regions). The Northwest Ordinance has become part of the national mythology, celebrated in textbooks for its remarkable offer of statehood on “an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever.”19 The territories merely had to cross a series of population thresholds: five thousand free men, and they could have a legislature; sixty thousand free inhabitants (or sooner, if Congress allowed), and they could be states.

  But the operative word was could. None of this was automatic, for Congress retained the power to advance or impede territories, both of which it did. Sometimes it denied, ignored, or deflected statehood petitions. That is why Lincoln, West Dakota, Deseret, Cimarron, and Montezuma—all of which sought admission to the union—did not become states.

  Moreover, Congress’s discretionary authority meant that until territories became states, the federal government held absolute power over them. Initially, territories were to be ruled by an appointed governor and three judges. Even after they gained legislatures, the governor retained the power to veto bills and dissolve the legislature.

  “In effect,” wrote James Monroe, who drafted the ordinance,20 it was “a colonial government similar to that which prevail’d in these States previous to the revolution.” Jefferson conceded that the first stage resembled a “despotic oligarchy.”21

  That was an apt characterization. The first governor of the Northwest Territory, Arthur St. Clair, a conservative Scotsman who’d been Washington’s aide-de-camp, had little patience for the rambunctious frontier. He saw himself as a “poor devil banished to another planet.”22 The territory, in his eyes, was a “dependent colony,” inhabited not by “citizens of the United States”23 but by its “subjects” (“white Indians” is how one of the territorial judges described them).24 Feeling the territorial inhabitants too “ignorant” and “ill qualified”25 to govern themselves, St. Clair used his wide discretionary powers to impede the formation of states.

  The same pattern held in Louisiana Territory, the land Jefferson acquired in 1803 from France. Eastern politicians fretted about the newly annexed land’s inhabitants: Anglo settlers, Catholics, free blacks, Indians, and mixed-race folk. “This Constitution never was,26 and never can be, strained to lap over all the wilderness of the West,” warned Representative Josiah Quincy, the future president of Harvard.

  Jefferson understood the sentiment. The people of Louisiana were as “incapable of self-government as children,”27 he judged, adding that the “principles of popular Government are utterly beyond their comprehension.” Rather than putting Louisiana through the normal Northwest Ordinance procedures, Jefferson added a new initial phase, military government, and sent the U.S. Army to keep the peace. By 1806, the Territory of Louisiana hosted the largest contingent of the army in the country.28

  Jefferson’s appointed governor to Louisiana Territory, like Arthur St. Clair, griped about the “mental darkness” of Louisiana’s inhabitants.29 Allowing them to vote, he believed, “would be a dangerous experiment.”

  Louisianians protested their disenfranchisement. “Do political axioms on the Atlantic become problems when transferred to the shores of the Mississippi?”30 they asked on a trip to the capital. Jefferson shrugged his shoulders and did nothing.31

  *

  Thomas Jefferson wasn’t against expansion any more than George Washington was. It’s just that, like Washington, he envisioned it as a controlled pro cess.

  In his more fanciful moments, Jefferson imagined the United States spreading to “cover the whole Northern,32 if not the Southern continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws.” Yet that vague fantasy was slated, in Jefferson’s mind, for “distant times.” When it came to the pace of expansion, his ambitions were strikingly modest. In his first inaugural address, he marveled at the “wide and fruitful land”33 from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and predicted that it would hold “room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.”

  Despite his seeming satisfaction with the country’s original dimensions, Jefferson came to be known as an expansionist for his acquisition of Louisiana, which extended the country far west of the Mississippi. Yet that was more of an impulse buy than a considered purchase. In sending negotiators to Paris to bargain with Napoleon, he wasn’t even trying to get vast tracts of western land. Rather, he wanted valuable ports on the Gulf of Mexico. The initial response of Jefferson’s emissary to Napoleon’s offer of all of French North America is telling: “I told him no,34 that our wishes extended only to New Orleans and the Floridas.”

  Jefferson cared more about the ports than the land because he wasn’t searching for room for settlers. Even after annexing Louisiana, he didn’t see it as a home for whites. Much of the land still fell under Indian title, and “the best use we can make of the country for some time,”35 Jefferson wrote, was to keep it that way. In his vision, all the land except an area around New Orleans would be “shut up”36 against whites “for a long time to come.” Instead of rushing out to the edges of the new territory, whites would slowly populate the Mississippi Valley, “advancing compactly as we multiply.”37 Jefferson imagined the West would be settled not by nomadic hunters, like Boone (and like some Indians), but by small farmers. So long as they kept to their allotted territory and didn’t multiply too rapidly, they could be accommodated.

  This was the founders’ vision. And, with the Louisiana Purchase, it seemed easily realized. If eastern Indians could be induced by treaty to move west of the settlement border and if whites could be kept east, “advancing compactly,” there’d be room for all, down to Jefferson’s imagined “thousandth and thousandth generation.”

  *

  Jefferson and Washington assumed that whites could be guided to settle the land, as they both put it, “compactly,” meaning that their growing numbers wouldn’t require too much room. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption, especially given how slowly European populations had grown in the past.38 Between a.d. 1 and a.d. 1000, Western Europe had increased by only 6 percent. Things picked up in the next seven centuries, when its population more than doubled. But that still wasn’t exactly fast. By 1700, the best available statistics suggested that England was on track to double only once every 360 years.39

  The North American colonies weren’t much different, at least not at first. Disease took so many lives in Britain’s first permanent North American settlement at Jamestown,40 established in 1607, that it wasn’t until the 1690s that births outpaced deaths there. In the first century and a half after Jamestown’s establishment, the frontier of white settlement had crept west slowly, at one to two miles a year.41

  But by the mid-eighteenth century, something was changing. Ben Franklin was the first to notice it.42
In 1749 he organized a census of Philadelphia and began to collect population numbers on Boston, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. What he saw was startling. Not only was the colonial population growing, it was doubling once every twenty-five years. If that continued, Franklin predicted (with more than a little giddiness), in a century colonial North America would contain more Englishmen than Britain itself.

  This was a revelation. Franklin is best remembered for his experiments with electricity and his many inventions (bifocals, the lightning rod, the circulating stove, the urinary catheter), but his demographic research was a large part of his legacy, too. His numbers quickly made the rounds in Europe, only sometimes with his name attached, and entered the thought of such philosophers as Adam Smith and David Hume. The grim prediction by the economist Thomas Malthus that food supply could never keep pace with population growth was largely based on Franklin’s North American calculations (which, Malthus gasped, indicated “a rapidity of increase probably without parallel in history”).43 Malthus, in turn,44 was an important influence on Charles Darwin, both of whose grandfathers knew Franklin well. The copy of Malthus’s book in Darwin’s library has the Franklin passages underlined.

  Not only was Franklin influential, he was right. Shockingly right. More right than he had any reason to be. Full population figures for the United States were first collected in 1790, the year of Franklin’s death. A hundred years later, the 1890 census registered that the population had increased sixteenfold—i.e.,45 a doubling every twenty-five years—Franklin had been off by less than one-seventh of a percent. And in 1855, exactly a hundred years after Franklin published his prediction that North American colonists would outnumber Britons in a century, the U.S. population surpassed that of Britain for the first time.46

  What Franklin had recognized, earlier than anyone else, was that a small population of English-speaking whites and their black slaves was going supernova. They inhabited a continent substantially cleared of its indigenous population by disease, they possessed powerful agricultural technologies, and they enjoyed close economic ties to Britain, the center of the Industrial Revolution. The combination was explosive.

  The population of France at the time of U.S. independence was around thirty million.47 In 1900 it was slightly more than forty million. By contrast, the population of the United States at its independence was between three and four million—roughly one-tenth the size of France. And yet by 1900 it was seventy-six million, nearly twice France’s size. Although the frontier had advanced by fewer than two miles a year in the 150 years following Jamestown’s establishment, in the first half of the nineteenth century it shot west at nearly forty miles a year,48 stopping only when settlers reached the Pacific Coast.

  This was growth like no one had ever seen. Part of it came from influxes from Europe and Africa,49 though in no decade in the nineteenth century did immigration ever account for more than a third of the increase. As Franklin pointed out, the bulk of it was handled the old-fashioned way, a fire hose of fecundity spraying settlers up and down the North American continent. With arable land stretching to the horizon, settlers spread like bacteria.

  “Wave after wave has rolled on,”50 wrote a nervous Ojibwe thinker, “till now there appears no limit to the sea of population.”

  You could see it in the cities the settlers built.51 Cincinnati, a village in 1810, had a nine-story steam-powered mill by 1815 and a fleet of 150 steamboats by 1830. Chicago grew from a settlement of fewer than a hundred people (and fourteen taxpayers) in 1830 to a towering megalopolis with the world’s first dense cluster of skyscrapers and more than a million residents in 1890—despite having burned to the ground in 1871.

  That phoenix-from-the-ashes routine was surprisingly common. Constructed with maximal haste and minimal regard for the principles of zoning, settler cities burst into flame with alarming frequency. But not even fire could stop the endless torrent.

  *

  The growth of the white population was like a flash of dynamite, and it would explode the founders’ vision of the country. The great Jeffersonian system that had prevailed in the first decades, with western subjects semicolonized, simply could not hold. There were too many Daniel Boones. The government gave up prosecuting squatters by the 1830s and instead let them buy their land. In the 1860s it began giving away parcels of public land as “homesteads”52 to nearly any citizen willing to live on them.

  The territories with large white populations became states swiftly; California, swarming with gold-seekers, went from military government to statehood in two years. And though the inhabitants of the remaining territories still protested their lack of rights (the territorial system was “the most infamous system of colonial government that was ever seen on the face of the globe,”53 grumbled a delegate from Montana Territory), their cause for complaint diminished. Appointed governors lost some of their discretionary powers,54 and, after 1848, new territories skipped the first stage of government, absolute rule by federal officials, and went straight to having bicameral legislatures.

  The culture changed, too. Rather than being despised “banditti” or “white savages” on the fringes of civilization, settlers acquired a new identity: pioneers. No longer scofflaws, they were the proud flag-bearers of a dynamic nation.

  As squatters became pioneers, Daniel Boone’s reputation surged. After his death, he was retroactively claimed as an honorary founding father. A statue was placed on the steps of the Capitol in 1851: a frontiersman, bearing a conspicuous resemblance to Boone, fighting an Indian. It stood there for more than a century. In the realm of fiction, the immensely popular Leatherstocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper told, over many volumes (The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pioneers, etc.), the tale of Natty Bumppo, also clearly based on Boone. Those novels, published from the 1820s to the 1840s, burned the character of the gruff frontier hero into the national consciousness. Natty Bumppo, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickok—you can trace a chain of Boone figures all the way forward to John Wayne and Han Solo.

  The founders had always expected expansion of some sort, but only now, in the mid-nineteenth century, did outright and rapid continental conquest seem inevitable. In 1845 the United States Magazine and Democratic Review coined an indelible phrase and captured the prevailing mood when it wrote of the nation’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”55

  A country that had started out resembling the British Empire, with centers of power in the East and subordinated territory in the West, had been turned by the population bomb into something different: a violently expansive empire of settlers, feeding on land and displacing everything in its path.

  2

  INDIAN COUNTRY

  The detonation of the North American settler bomb was astounding. But it wasn’t the only striking demographic occurrence. The growth of the settler population was tied to another event in North America: the extraordinary depopulation of the land’s indigenous inhabitants.

  The size of that depopulation is up for debate. It’s hard to know how many Indians inhabited North America before Europeans arrived. Five million for the area now covered by the contiguous United States, calculated by the anthropologist Russell Thornton,1 is a medium estimate, though other researchers have suggested numbers from 720,000 to 15 million.

  What is not in dispute is this: European contact triggered a profound demographic crisis. Old World diseases such as smallpox, typhus, and measles burned through the land like firestorms, moving farther and faster than the Europeans themselves. War and social dislocation followed, causing still more deaths and nonbirths. By 1800, the indigenous population was closer to half a million,2 having endured what may have been a 90 percent decline.

  As catastrophic as depopulation was, it wasn’t fatal. Indians remained a formidable presence. The British had acknowledged this in setting the ridge of the Appalachians as the limit of white settlement—partly to avoid Indian wars
. That was also a reason why the founders sought “compact” white settlement rather than a Boone-style sprint to the outer frontier.

  A bastion of Indian strength was the Cherokee Nation, whose land stretched across parts of Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia. Cherokee numbers had fallen, perhaps by as much as half, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the population started rebounding in the early nineteenth.3

  Not only were the Cherokees growing, they were carving out a place for themselves within the new republic by adopting aspects of European culture. They ran plantations, bought slaves, and built a capital (“It’s like Baltimore,”4 a leading Cherokee bragged). A silversmith named Sequoyah designed a syllabary, turning Cherokee into a written language. It caught on quickly with help from the tribe’s newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, published in both English and Cherokee. In 1827 the Cherokee Nation adopted a constitution, modeled on the U.S. Constitution. Voters elected a mixed-race, wealthy, Christian president, Koo-wi-s-gu-wi, who had fought beside Andrew Jackson and went by his European name, John Ross.

  The Cherokees were, Ross explained to the U.S. Senate, “like the whiteman in manners,5 morals and religion.”

  Not all Native Americans chose that path. Whether to stick to indigenous ways or take up foreign ones was a hard call, and opinions understandably varied. But by doubling down on Europeanization, the Cherokees were calling the government’s bluff. They were “civilized” by every rule of white society. So shouldn’t their land claims be respected?

  In the early years of the republic, their claims had been respected, roughly speaking. The Washington administration, unable to either ignore or dislodge the Cherokees, had signed a treaty with them and had appeared to accept the prospect of “civilized” Cherokees joining the United States as citizens.