In her first book, Catherine Denial chronicles the racial-ethnic and gendered applications of marital law between 1820 and 1845 in portions of the Northwest Territory that are now Minnesota and Wisconsin. Denial argues that “marriages…were inextricably bound up with questions of nation and identity for the Dakota, the Ojibwe, mixed-heritage individuals, and Americans alike,” and that through such unions, “we can trace the uneven fortunes of American expansion in the early nineteenth century and the nation-shaping power of marital acts” (4). Denial places marriage and the household at the center of early Western history, sharing ideological ground with scholars such as Sarah Carter, Anne Hyde, and Peggy Pascoe. In the context of today's conversation about marriage equality as a fundamental civil right, Denial's discussion of the historical imposition of state-sanctioned forms of marriage as an imperial mechanism is provocative.
Readers in different historical fields will benefit unevenly from Denial's introductory chapter. Historians of indigenous and fur-trade history will find an accessible and thorough review of the basic principles of coverture and patriarchy embedded within American marital law, but gender historians will miss an equally important survey of the Northwest Territory's legal history. Despite this uneven start, Denial's subsequent chapters offer richly detailed inquiries into marital practices among the indigenous, mixed-race, missionary, military, and slave households of the Upper Midwest.
Chapter one explores the unique case of “Pelagie Faribault's Island,” land granted to a Dakota-French woman in an unratified 1820 treaty and debated in the United States Senate between 1837 and 1858. Pelagie had partnered with fur trader Jean-Baptiste Faribault in the “custom of the country,” a common form of unsanctioned marriage within the fur trade that could be easily dissolved, and allowed both partners to maintain individual property. Denial successfully argues that such indigenous and fur-trade marital practices offered wives greater independence than the American marital model, but she does not fully complicate federal legislators' view of such unions. Denial expects legislators to deny Faribault's property claim on the grounds of coverture, but without a legal marriage, coverture does not apply. She should have considered that congressmen honored Pelagie Faribault's land claim because they did not recognize the legitimacy of her extralegal and inter-racial marriage, and they regarded her as an Indian, not necessarily as a wife.
Chapter two expertly analyzes male and female Protestant missionaries' perceptions of marriage, pointing out that despite their emphasis on the sacred aspects of marital union, their rituals carried the weight and force of husbands' and wives' “designated, gendered relationships to the state” (61). Denial then chronicles the trend of indigenous and fur-trader couples seeking state-sanctioned marriages, even as they rejected Protestant conversion, a phenomenon she attributes to adaptability learned over the course of imperial power struggles within the region's recent past. Denial should also have considered that their motives had something to do with the importance of legally sanctioned marriages in the transmission of property to indigenous and multiracial heirs, a point that became increasingly important as the American legal regime took hold in the West.
Chapter three turns its focus to the military and slave families who occupied Fort Snelling in modern-day St. Paul, Minnesota. Denial makes clear the link between marital regulation and imperial supremacy in the project of establishing American authority in a formerly French and British and still indigenous territory. Denial also argues that slaveholders relaxed their restrictions on slave mobility and marriage to uphold the supremacy of marital relations, but that elites zealously regulated class distinctions between themselves and those they deemed inferior, whether free or slave, white or black. Puzzlingly, Denial gives short thrift to the implications of slavery in a free territory, although the widely known Dred Scott case is the focus of one of her Fort Snelling case studies.
Chapter four returns to couples outside of the military, but shifts from marital union to dissolution, and features the divorce petition of fur trader Joseph R. Brown and his Ojibwe-French wife Margaret McCoy, before the territorial Wisconsin legislature. Denial artfully explains that “[L]egislating marital dissolution was one way in which legislators sought to impose Euro-American social control on a region that defied it; that despite material hardships, the signing of treaties, and the slow pressure of increased Euro-American settlement in the region, this was an Ojibwe and Dakota place whose inhabitants were engaged in resistance to the plans of traders, government officials, and missionaries alike” (113). In an unusual gesture, Wisconsin's politicians approved the divorce, requiring that Brown provide McCoy with a third of his estate and legitimate their children as his heirs. Denial's explanation leaves readers to wonder whether Wisconsin lawmakers approved the dissolution of Brown and McCoy's marriage because of its inter-racial nature.
Overall, Denial convincingly demonstrates that the “Dakota and Ojibwe had their own sense of order and duty that did not answer to American [marital] law” (125), and that “laws could indeed help create a new world…but they could not legislate away patterns of living that had existed in the region for centuries” (128). Readers seeking a racially diverse exploration of antebellum marital practices in the Upper Midwest will enjoy Denial's book. The study does not, however, make connections to the broader histories of marital regulation in the American West or the antebellum period, which readers might expect. For example, she ignores antimiscegenation statutes, although Minnesota and Wisconsin Territories stand out as the only territorial legislatures that never passed racialized marriage laws, an anomaly she might have discussed. Occasionally, her explanations for legislators' choices in regulating marital practice in the Upper Midwest are questionable, but Denial has certainly brought valuable evidence of racial-ethnic marital diversity in an oft-homogenized region to light, and readers will thank her for it.
