Settlers’ Republic: Land, Infrastructure, and the Emergence of New Technologies of Government in the United States, 1789-1862

In April 1792, George and Rachel Ewing packed the whole of their household belongings onto a flat boat and set out on the Ohio River. Among their party was Thomas, just over two years old. Together the Ewings—George, Rachel, Thomas, and Thomas’s older brother and sister—floated one hundred miles downriver to settle near Olive Green Creek in what is now Ohio. There, in the midst of the Northwest Indian War and living on land speculatively purchased and resold to Revolutionary War veterans like his father, little Thomas would be raised. A little over fifty years later, Thomas Ewing would be appointed the first Secretary of the Department of Interior. This book tells the story of how settlers like the Ewings built the American state and, in the process, contributed towards the making of political and economic modernity. It puts land at the center of American state formation to rethink the meaning of the United States’ founding and make visible the settler origins of American political and economic development. Its chapters trace the evolution of federal land policy, the emergence of early administrative agencies such as the General Land Office and the Department of Interior, and the increasingly fraught conflicts over territorial governance in the pre-Civil War period to chart the rise, fall, and afterlives of the United States as a settlers’ republic.
This analysis shows how it was through managing land that early Americans developed the administrative institutions, special expertise, and mode of seeing like a state that allowed the concrete management of land to turn into the abstract government of economy and society. Today, we take for granted that we live in territorial nation-states governed by bureaucratic apparatuses empowered to make decisions in the name of a public good. Settlers’ Republic demonstrates the settler colonial origins of this modern state, and makes visible the contradictions, trade-offs, and exclusions constitutive of how this political and economic formation came to be.