PRE OREGON TRAIL : Preliminary foundations of racial exclusion in the “Northwest” 

AMERICAN NORTHWESTS: RACIAL GENEALOGIES OF EXCLUSION ACROSS THE WESTS

INTENTION: 

• Connect the anti-black and anti-indigenous origins of space making to the formation of the “Northwest” as a successive movement westward. 

As American society transitioned into a nation, the concern of land became increasingly important to exporting private property as both an ethic of American identity and an unattainable reality for the plurality of Americans unable to afford, or the unhuman materiality of transforming that land into private property (indigenous and black communities). At the turn of the 19th Century, the Louisiana Purchase assumed a vast area of land, but even prior to that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set forth a logic of developing this ‘newly’ freed land into serviceable parcels for American identity. Core to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the dualism of Westward expansion: a place of vast opportunity, at the exclusion of the individual’s land it was based upon, and through the exploitation of the labor of those who were considered property along with the land itself. 

• “The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set out a process by which land was to be organized as dependent territories and then as states fully equal in status to those already in the union. The right to vote was to be extended to almost all free white males. Rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury and religious freedom were guaranteed. Slavery was prohibited, in principle. (Effective prohibition of slavery was settled on state by state.)” 

• Library of Congress, “The Northwest and the Ordinances, 1783-1858” in Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820 to 1910. 

At a great distance, cartographers, surveyors, and politicians carved up modern day Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio into distinct geographic areas that changed boundaries from 1784-1818. All of these lands were considered ‘public,’ or under the authority of the federal government. The context of distance clearly articulates the complexity of land management and allocation being greatly devolved into the lawlessness of those individuals who set forth to the territories and what rudimentary standards of conduct underscored the virgining state. While slavery was outlawed by policy, the practice was often taken up by settlers moving from the east, and bringing uninformed African captives to a land that actually constituted their freedom. When this law of the prohibition of slavery was upheld, a sentiment of exclusion brewed, as opposed to a pursuit of the egalitarian promise of an open, untamed, and hopeful landscape that had not even properly commanded the presence of Native nations within it. 

• “The virtues of independence and self-sufficiency in farming are difficult to reconcile with farmers' desires and needs for manufactured goods, even for a great rationalizer like Jefferson. Jefferson himself certainly could not have lived the luxurious style he maintained at Monticello without the benefits of commerce."

• Malone, Linda A, “Reflections on the Jeffersonian Ideal of an Agrarian Democracy and the Emergence of an Agricultural and Environmental Ethic in the 1990 Farm Bill” College of William & Mary Law School, William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository, 1993. Faculty Publications. 597.

A principle of the anti-slavery, pro-exclusion formation of the first American NW was the Jeffersonian ideal of the agrarian society as the moralistic livelihood of the nation’s political economy, and the belief that independence, agency, and sovereignty for the white citizen was contingent upon a local nobility of land-tending farmers. The trouble that corrupted this ideal in the South had been the outfall of African enslavement that provided the mechanism for transforming land, but also produced an irreconcilable socio-political reality of the physical and ideological presence of Blackness. The scourge to the white citizen began mediating the ‘public’ society with contestations, or considerations of the inclusion of these mechanisms into a collective citizenry. The NW presented an untainted territory in which Blackness could not corrupt, and the true perfection of the white man could be realized without the undo dependency on African captive labor to execute the production of space. Agrarianism became a conciliatory method to justify mass colonization, and to further entrench a rather fringe constituency of non-property owning white citizens into a center of landowners to curb a potential evolution of American political economy that could realize the proximity of non-private property ownership with second class, or non-citizen status. To their fault, the fleeing non-private property owners swiftly replicated a hierarchy of land, person, labor, and productivity that situated a notion of their own self-sufficiency and tending as a progressive movement of American progress. It was in the NW Ordinance, in which anti-slavery and exclusionary land owning set forth the development ethic of the production of space in the formation of the modern states: indigenous genocide and dispossession, black exclusion or invisibilized exploitation, and a white entitlement to private property ownership. 

More complexly, the systemization of parcel allocations took the legal ordinances and laws of land ownership into a method and not a practice. Therefore, there was an inherent errancy to the formation of these new lands and laws that opened up opportunities for Black and indigenous communities to lay claim to the promise of land in the West that had equally meant their erasure and exclusion-captivity. It is in this fraught, decisive, interpersonal, and site-specific practices of laying claim through lawsuit, occupation, and simple living in space that the intention of erasure and exclusion were never formidable realities in these states, despite complex legal structures.