Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770-1820

The expansion of slavery on the North American continent under the newly independent United States was both remarkable and unprecedented. In 1770, European settlers, European empires, and African American slaves had only the barest presence west of the Appalachians. While scattered settlements of European Americans held slaves in places such as the British Illinois country, British West Florida, and Spanish Louisiana, African American slavery on the North American continent was largely confined to the strip of British colonies that hugged the Atlantic Coast. Outside of the Chesapeake and Low Country plantation cores, there were seven times as many slaves in the northern colonies (47,000) than there were in the entire Ohio and Mississippi Valleys and along the Gulf Coast (7,000). Finally, while European empires staked claims to the trans-Appalachian West, Native Americans continued to control the vast interior of the North American continent. Over the next half century, the expansion of European American sovereignty and African American slavery would produce dramatic changes in the continental interior. By 1820, the United States exercised sovereignty over the long contested Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri Valleys. It also oversaw an enormous empire for slavery that stretched from the Chesapeake to Florida, from the Atlantic to the Missouri, and from the Gulf of Mexico to St. Louis and the Illinois country.1Historians typically attribute the growth of slavery in the continental interior to the emergence of an independent United States and the dominance of the federal government by southern planters and their partisan allies. As slaveholders from the Atlantic states sought to exploit the advantages offered by growing demand for cotton and sugar, they used the powers of the federal government to create a western empire for slavery that provided new lands for plantations and new markets for slaves. In many ways, the literature on slavery and expansion in the early republic remains exceptionalist and nationalist in that it analyzes the growth of slavery in the interior of the North American continent as a uniquely American phenomenon, occurring in distinctively American places and historical periods, and involving the westward expansion of American institutions and peoples. Over the past decade, historians have moved beyond the confines of the United States as both nation and nation-state by situating the growth of slavery in broader Atlantic and imperial worlds, and by highlighting the resistance of Native Americans and African Americans to slavery's expansion. But despite these additions the expansion and growth of slavery in an ill-defined trans-Appalachian West remains a phenomenon linked closely with the westward expansion of the United States.2 Treating the expansion of slavery as a phenomenon that was concomitant with the emergence of an independent United States and assuming that the United States was exceptional in its commitment to encouraging slavery's growth and expansion create numerous interpretive problems. Historians typically begin their analyses of expansion with the flurry of ordinances passed and rejected by the United States in the 1780s. But in doing so, historians tend to neglect the presence, persistence, and significance of the slavery and empires that predated the expansion of the United States into the continental interior. At the same time, by focusing on the changes wrought by the expansion of the United States, historians have minimized the significant continuities that characterized slavery's growth and expansion from the 1760s through the 1810s under French, Spanish, British, and American regimes. Other problems abound. Even as historians have emphasized the significance of growing Atlantic world demand for cotton and sugar in driving slavery's expansion into the southern interior, they have isolated the growth of slavery from other factors that shaped the history of the interior of the North American continent. …