Andrew Isenberg’s Age of the Borderlands should be required reading for anyone interested in the territorial expansion of the United States. The book takes on a slew of myths about the American past, including the once-popular Frederick Jackson Turner thesis as well as the more recent “settler colonial” thesis, both of which cast westward expansion as an inexorable, perhaps inevitable campaign of settlement and conquest. (P. 12.) Isenberg throws this idea into question by positing that from 1790 to 1850, America was a “relatively weak” nation surrounded by “powerful European imperial competitors, even more powerful Indigenous societies, and formidable enclaves of fugitive slaves.” (P. 4.)
The result was that the United States lacked the military force to impose its will “vertically” onto the borderlands and was left having to impose itself “horizontally” through “diplomacy or commerce.” (P. 4.) This, in turn, meant that the prophetic concept of manifest destiny—the notion that God gave North America to white people—“was but one of many ways early nineteenth-century Americans imagined the future of their borderlands.” (P. 4.) To illustrate his point, Isenberg excavates five stories from the borderlands, each of which constitutes a chapter that, in turn, challenges the idea that manifest destiny drove American settlers across the continent like a horse-drawn steamroller.
In his first example, Isenberg focuses on Florida, a Spanish colony that attracted African Americans escaping slavery and Native Americans escaping settlement. Both groups joined with Spanish garrisons and British traders to form an armed, multiracial society that “terrified southern slaveholders” and drew the attention of Major General Andrew Jackson, who invaded the colony in 1814 and again in 1818. (Pp. 50-51.) However, Jackson’s incursions failed. In both instances, the Seminoles refused to engage Jackson in open combat, melted into the forest and – when he finally left – “moved back into the villages that Jackson destroyed.” (P. 59.) Though Jacksonian historians tend to portray these escapades as an important step in American Empire, Isenberg makes the startling claim that his campaigns were futile. He suggests – plausibly – that Jackson’s Florida adventures “hindered” the transfer of Florida from Spain to the United States by delaying negotiations that had already begun between John Quincy Adams and Spanish envoy Luis de Onis. (P. 59.)
In his four subsequent chapters, Isenberg tells similar stories that do not fit conventional narratives. For example, Chapter Two recounts the rise and fall of the factory system, an effort by the federal government to “win the good will of indigenous people” by selling them goods at low cost, a project that did little to advance American sovereignty but did much to materially benefit the Osage Nation. (P. 80.) Chapter Three excavates the startling tale of a federal program designed to vaccinate Native Americans. Chapter Four introduces us to Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker who founded a colony for free Black people in Texas, and Chapter Five gives us white missionaries who ended up integrating into Dakota culture.
Together, Isenberg’s narratives give us a crazy quilt of experiences on the southern and western frontiers, a set of narratives that complicate prevailing ideas about westward expansion, settler colonialism, and American empire. However, these are not simply anecdotes. Isenberg’s first chapter coincides with recent work on the interracial society that existed in Florida during the early nineteenth century, a topic that Jane Landers, Nathaniel Millett, and Matthew Clavin have all covered.
Meanwhile, Isenberg’s second chapter confirms the argument that Native nations remained much more powerful than historians had once thought, a claim made recently by Pekka Hämäläinen, Kathleen DuVal, and Ned Blackhawk. Native power forced the federal government to intersect with Indians horizontally rather than vertically, through trade and immunization projects for example, rather than simply military conquest. Indeed, military conquest does not play much of a role in the book, a point that coincides with Stuart Banner and Claudio Saunt’s detailed descriptions of the convoluted process of removal that played out over the course of the 1830s.
Three conclusions follow.
First, the idea of manifest destiny was less a motivating ethos than an ex post facto narrative aimed at obscuring what was otherwise a complex process of experimentation, negotiation, and military failure. Isenberg shores up this point by explaining that the idea of manifest destiny did not become “anointed” by historians until the 1890s, when revisionists sought to rationalize American imperialism abroad. (P. 22.)
Second, the consolidation of the American continent did not really begin to take place until the Civil War, when the Republican Party seized control of Washington, sponsored a transcontinental railroad, and put to the sword anyone who dreamed of other sovereignties within the continental boundaries of the United States. The Civil War did not simply vanquish Confederate dreams of independence, in other words, but Native American ones as well–a point that Eric Foner, Heather Cox Richardson, and Kathleen DuVal have all made.
Third, and most important, if the narrative of manifest destiny does not explain American history during the first half of the nineteenth century, what does? Isenberg offers a compelling alternative, a story of experimentation and innovation that reflected the “richly complex, contradictory, and rapidly changing” United States. (P. 17.) His book is not simply a tale of racist white settlers trampling Native Nations and enslaving African Americans, in other words, but a cacophony of diverse voices and peoples who traded, experimented, and – ultimately – co-existed. Ironically, this might be a more useful way to think about America even today, for despite the imperial flexing and racist tub-thumping that came to characterize the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the past half century has yielded a much more complex, contested, and variegated national landscape. While some undoubtedly still yearn for the days of manifest destiny, others decidedly do not. Many Americans have a more manifold destiny in mind.
