University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 The Adjudicatory State: Sovereignty, Property, and Law in the U.S. Territories, 1783-1802 Gregory Ablavsky Ablavsky University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Indigenous Studies Commons, Law Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Ablavsky, Gregory Ablavsky, "The Adjudicatory State: Sovereignty, Property, and Law in the U.S. Territories, 1783-1802" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1571. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1571 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1571 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Adjudicatory State: Sovereignty, Property, and Law in the U.S. Territories, 1783-1802 Abstract “The Adjudicatory State” traces the collision between the federal legal vision for the early American West and the preexisting laws and customs that governed the region. To administer the vast region it obtained in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the United States created the territorial system, under which federal officials would temporarily govern western “territories” until they achieved statehood. The federal government would also survey and sell the public domain to private purchasers. But these grand plans ran afoul of territorial realities. Both the Northwest Territory, encompassing much of the present-day Midwest, and the Southwest Territory, encompassing present-day Tennessee, were borderlands, places where Native peoples, French settlers, Anglo-American intruders, and land companies contended for sovereignty and property. Instead of crafting a new legal order, federal officials found themselves barraged with preexisting claims.