How did the supposedly “weak” American state create a vast settler empire? With a few notable exceptions, scholarship in American political development (APD) has had surprisingly little to say about this question. Most of our theories about American state development are drawn from research on the social welfare state and the development of federal bureaucracies. The arrival of Paul Frymer’s Building an American Empire, then, is a welcome addition to the literature. With the publication of this book, APD now has a clear and persuasive account of US territorial expansion.
In this masterful study, Frymer highlights how federal land policies were used strategically to manufacture white majorities and push indigenous people off their lands. Homesteading laws that provided free or subsidized land to white Americans and European immigrants allowed the state to expand its dominion with little coercive power. It did this, Frymer writes, not through military power but by facilitating settlements on the frontier to avoid “being stretched too thin while maintaining strength through compactness” (p. 36).
Frymer covers a lot of ground in this book, but he does so skillfully, detailing the expansion of the United States from 13 to 48 states and the annexation of Hawai‘i. He moves through the history of US expansion geographically and chronologically, beginning with expansion east of the Mississippi, and, later, the Louisiana Purchase and lands in the Southwest acquired from Mexico. The history of black colonization, a chapter of US history that is far too often neglected, is covered in great detail.
Much more than a work of synthesis, Frymer gathers evidence from congressional debates and roll-call votes, which he supplements by examining territorial records, periodicals, and some archival sources. This allows him to pay careful attention to shifts in partisan control, sectional tensions, changes in the capacity of the American state, and indigenous resistance. His incorporation of pioneering scholarship in Native American and cross-border history is particularly welcome (e.g., Richard White, The Middle Ground, 1991; Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire, 2015).
As one might expect, Frymer begins by considering the incorporation of territory east of the Mississippi. Rather than permitting settlers to move across the continent on their own, US officials carefully laid out townships that allowed the state to “secure contested frontiers by being ‘full on this side’ before forging farther into vast geographic spaces” (p. 10). This strategy was born out of the state’s inability to overpower Native American resistance through military power. White settlers, Frymer argues, were used to establish a frontier that was easy to protect. What is more, settlers remained tied to American metropolitan centers that assured their security and fidelity to the United States. The low visibility of government power likely contributed to a still-common view that the American West was a largely stateless space.
Although the low-capacity American state used land purchases and exploitive treaties as its primary tools of dispossession, coercive force played a role as well. Under Andrew Jackson’s direction, the infamous Removal Act of 1830 forced Native Americans to settle west of the Mississippi. Not only did mass resistance from indigenous people deplete the government’s resources but Frymer also argues that the sheer horror of this policy—one that led to the death of roughly one-fourth of the Cherokee nation—led to political opposition among northern activists.
In a detailed section on Louisiana, Frymer explains how the territory’s mixed-race population initially led some to oppose its incorporation into the union, an episode that reveals the tension between the American state’s twin goals of expansion and racial homogeneity. The “solution,” which was implemented by Louisiana’s legislature in 1806, was to establish Black Codes to place whites above free and mixed-race people of color.
Territories with diverse populations, Frymer argues, could be incorporated only if strict racial hierarchies were enforced. Although the North and South differed over slavery, there was overwhelming support for the United States as an exclusively white settler nation. In this way, Frymer demonstrates the importance of looking beyond the traditional divide between the North and South to uncover how westward expansion also shaped US racial attitudes.
In one of the book’s major scholarly contributions, Frymer shows the importance of internationalizing research on the American state. Drawing on a rich body of cross-border historical scholarship, he argues that the Mexican government’s failure to settle lands north of the Rio Grande made those lands attractive to the United States as a place for white settlement. By contrast, the more densely populated areas of present-day Mexico ultimately prevented their incorporation. Cuba and Santo Domingo were never annexed for similar reasons. One hopes that other APD scholars will be inspired by this example to pay more attention to how events in Latin America and the Caribbean affected US political development.
In a stand-alone chapter that enriches his story of territorial expansion, Frymer pays particular attention to the long-standing project of black colonization. Although there is an enduring misconception that this was a fringe project, Frymer shows that it had significant support among many political elites including James Madison and Abraham Lincoln. Rather than allowing African Americans to move westward, which threatened the racial demography of territorial expansion, northern leaders developed ill-conceived plans to create black colonies in Africa, Latin America, or the Caribbean. Most of these schemes were never implemented, but their popularity among a wide variety of US elites reveals the state’s commitment to white supremacy across the continent.
The book concludes with a brief look at the acquisition of Hawai‘i, the final site of American settler empire. Despite vigorous opposition from Native Hawaiians and concerns about the archipelago’s diverse population, the white oligarchy managed to overthrow Queen Liliʻuokalani. The annexation of Hawai‘i was in doubt until the American rebels could convince Congress that the islands were suitable for white settlement. Although this section could have engaged more directly with the extensive literature on Native Hawaiian resistance (e.g., Noenoe Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 2004), Frymer still makes a persuasive case: Hawai‘i may have been located thousands of miles from the North American continent, but the logic of demographic dominance still applied.
Any scholar of empire, state development, race, or indigenous politics will benefit from a close reading of Building an American Empire. With this fine study, Frymer paves the way for more nuanced understandings of the nineteenth-century American state and its foundational political project of territorial expansion. He also fills a gap in APD scholarship, which has too often neglected the importance of territorial expansion and indigenous resistance in shaping US institutions. In tracing the history of US settler colonialism, he establishes the centrality of land policies that allowed the American state to expand its control with little direct coercive force. But Frymer’s careful research reveals more than the underlying institutional mechanisms of empire building. He also uncovers the tensions between expansion and white supremacy that have always been at the heart of American empire.
