Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Freeman, Joanne
Abstract
This dissertation investigates sites of state activity in the early United States which have received far less attention from historians than executive mansions, legislative halls, courtrooms, military outposts, or overseas embassies: the numerous embassies the federal government maintained on, or adjacent to, lands belonging to North America’s sovereign Indigenous polities. At the helm of each of these embassies, known as Indian agencies, sat a presidentially appointed ambassador known as the Indian agent. I argue that Indian agents were monarchical officers within a republican system, compelled to follow diplomatic scripts originating in the centuries of contact between European monarchies and Indigenous peoples’ non-state, kinship network-based democracies which preceded the creation of the United States. These scripts, revised but not discarded by American officers, required that ambassadors use language, gift exchanges, rituals, and personal relationships to model a form of monarchical “fatherhood” in the name of Native people’s so-called “Great Father,” the President of the United States. Long into the nineteenth century, it was also common for federal agents to assume a form of literal fatherhood in Indian Country by marrying into influential Native extended families. While constituting a distinct form of monarchical international relations, encounters between federal Indian agents and Indigenous leaders also became entangled in American foreign relations as traditionally understood: relations between the United States and other empires or nation-states. The Ambassadors: Indigenous Democracy and American Monarchy after the War of 1812 draws upon archival research from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom to provide a multi-scalar account of diplomacy at early federal Indian agencies. Each chapter narrates part of the career of one Indian agent—Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an ambassador to the Ojibwe people of the western Great Lakes region who was simultaneously one of the republic’s leading proto-anthropologists—while making a larger point about Indian agencies and the broader geopolitical, political, and cultural contexts in which they were embedded. My diverse findings about everyday relations between Native peoples and the early United States as transacted at Indian agencies will provide valuable insights to historians of American foreign relations, the early United States’ experimental republican political culture, and Native Americans’ assertions of sovereignty and independence in the face of imperial aggression. After a narrative prologue about Henry Schoolcraft’s youth and young manhood, I seek to divorce the stories of Indian agencies in general, and Henry Schoolcraft’s eventual diplomatic labors in particular, from American exceptionalism by unearthing important precedents for U.S.-Indigenous relations in the millennia-long history of relations between states and non-state, kinship network-based polities (“tribes) in general, and in particular the centuries of relations between European empires and Native peoples in eastern North America before 1776. Second, I contextualize the story of Schoolcraft’s initial attempt in 1822 to assume the monarchical role of federal Indian agent by exploring the efforts of early U.S. administrations to establish the American presidency as a direct rival of, and analogue to, European monarchies in Indian Country. The geopolitical challenges faced by Schoolcraft and other American ambassadors in the Great Lakes region then take center stage. The United States’ dealings with such Great Lakes peoples as the Ojibwe, the Dakota, the Sauk, and the Odawa took place on what was effectively a pre-war footing, with American, British, and Indigenous leaders alike assuming that the War of 1812 was likely to be followed by a third major Anglo-American war into which borderlands tribes would factor heavily. Next, I explore the complex connections between diplomatic history and the history of capitalism by documenting the tensions created by Indian agents’ simultaneous occupancy of the roles of law-enforcement officers, trade regulators, economic actors on behalf of the state, and (in cases like that of Schoolcraft, who married into a prominent mixed-race fur-trading family) representatives of kinship networks with their own economic agendas. Finally, I show that Indian agencies were sites of intellectual activity and cultural exchange, usually undertaken less for reasons of disinterested inquiry than for the sake of career-building and intelligence-gathering, both of which motivated the scholarly activities of Henry Schoolcraft, who used his connections with the highly cultivated mixed-race Johnston family to publish prolifically in the emerging field of anthropology.
Recommended Citation
Conn, Zachary, "The Ambassadors: Indigenous Democracy and American Monarchy after the War of 1812" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 811.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/811
