The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny: 1790-1850

"The biggest difference between then and now, is that now the United States is, if not the most powerful, then one of the most powerful nations in the world. That was not the case in the first part of the 19th century. That’s the major point I was trying to make in that book. I explore different vignettes in the borderlands that only make sense if you begin with the realisation that the United States was weak, relative to those competing imperial powers. It was also weak, relative to some pretty powerful Indigenous nations. There were enslaved people who ran away into the borderlands, because the United States couldn’t exercise much power there. It’s not as if the United States was marching in and establishing its sovereignty through imperial military might. They didn’t have the power to do that. They had to win the goodwill of Indigenous people. They were negotiating diplomatically with them, and with imperial powers. Americans who were dissatisfied with the United States in the age of Andrew Jackson moved out into the borderlands, where they put themselves under the protection of either an Indigenous nation or a competing imperial power, usually Mexico. They set up alternative experiments, almost like utopian communities, in a way. I wrote about a guy who went to Texas when it was still a province of Mexico. He wanted to make Texas a haven for freed slaves, and actually got a contract from a Mexican state to establish such a thing. There was a group of missionaries who moved into what’s now the state of Minnesota who, rather than trying to acculturate Indigenous people to American norms, wanted to get away from American norms. They considered the United States saturated by sin. So they went to this remote place and kind of idealised the native people who were there. The Indigenous people weren’t Christians, but the missionaries saw them as unspoiled. They spent decades out there, with very little contact with the rest of the United States. So if you start looking at what was really going on on the frontier, it was a very different place to this simplistic notion of American expansion. They seized on the fact that the United States was weak in those places, and that gave them the opportunity to establish the kinds of communities they wanted to. When I was a very young historian, thirty years or so ago, I accepted the Manifest Destiny idea. Of course the United States was trying to expand west, and it was the dominant power on the continent. I wrote this book because, in the process of writing other books, I would stumble across things that didn’t fit the Manifest Destiny paradigm, take notes on them, and file them away. Over time, I realised these things I was writing up as exceptions to Manifest Destiny were so numerous that the rule didn’t work anymore. We need to think about Manifest Destiny in a different way. It was an idea some people held in the 1830s and 1840s, but not all people, by any means. It has been presented as a kind of answer to American expansion. Why did the United States expand? Well, Manifest Destiny is part of the American character. But the truth is a lot more problematic. As I was saying: people like the past to be orderly and simple. But the more you look at it, the more you realised how complex and disorderly the whole thing is."