Gray H. Whaley

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Gray H. Whaley | Oregon, Illahee, and the Empire Republic: A Case Study of American Colonialism, 1843–1858 | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.2 | The History Cooperative

Oregon, Illahee, and the Empire Republic: A Case Study of American Colonialism, 1843–1858

This article builds on recent efforts to employ imperialism in the study of western history by reinterpreting westward expansion as colonialism. It examines the ideological and practical aspects of American colonialism, particularly in relation to the politics of national expansion and Native sovereignty.

IN RECENT YEARS, HISTORIANS SUCH AS María Montoya and Patricia Limerick have noted the similarities between the American West and European colonies, and others, such as Jeffrey Ostler, have used colonialism and imperialism to reevaluate Native experiences in the West. This article similarly reevaluates westward expansion as colonization, using western Oregon as a case study. It examines the imperial policies of treaties and land disposal, Native sovereignty and identity, and the ideological and practical components of American colonialism: race, republicanism, and the liberal economics of land. Broadly defined, imperialism is an abstract ordering of power, an accumulation of high-level decisions, policies, and treaties that systematize expansion. Colonialism is the ground-level reality of imperialism: actions, local decisions, and their consequences, which can defy or support empire, a process that Richard White has described as shaping the metropole from the periphery.¹

The nineteenth-century United States was both nation and empire. Both terms describe the organization and maintenance of power: nation is internal order, and empire is external projection and arrangement. Constitutional framers conceived of the United States as a republic in which territorial and commercial expansion would maintain unity and integrity. In so doing, they helped create the modern western world, particularly, in American Studies scholar Amy Kaplan's words, the "mutually defining" and "historically co-terminus" creations of nation and empire. American expansion was one form of imperialism among several, including the feudalisms of Spain and Russia, the constitutional monarchies of Great Britain and Prussia, and the dictatorship of Napoleonic France. The United States was an empire republic. The Constitution presupposed additional states, early national laws ordered the public disposition of Northwest lands, and American diplomacy almost exclusively concerned foreign trade. Still, Americans thought themselves exceptional. Republicanism promised to eliminate imperial tyranny by making colonies into territories, which would be eligible for statehood, and colonists would be citizens not subjects.² The diffuse nature of the democratic republic fostered a range of colonialisms: squatters and eastern investors pushed the resettlement of indigenous peoples' lands with absolute title for citizens, but they squabbled over policy and practice. Northeastern Whigs sought neutral foreign commerce to capture overseas trade, but often argued against territorial expansion. Evangelicals founded missions to convert the world and spread Euro-American civilization, but decried the denigrating influences of settlers on indigenes. The central government was somehow supposed to sort out these conflicting demands and support, but not dictate. The citizenry drove expansion and, in their differences, slowed and limited the empire republic.

Western Oregon of the 1840s and 1850s brought together many characteristics of American continental imperialism: internationally contested territory, entrepreneurship, Christian proseltization, settler-colonialism, and national incorporation. Citizens stimulated expansion and conflicted with the cumbersome imperial apparatuses of treaties and land laws, striving to manipulate empire from the periphery. Colonization was further complicated by the politics of the empire republic: expansion and the slavery question threatened national unity and contributed to the racialization of the Americanized West. Viewing western Oregon as a product of imperial history restores both the global context of the Oregon Country and reveals the mechanics of American colonialism.

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