The Frontiers of American Grand Strategy: Settlers, Elites, and the Standing Army in America’S Indian Wars

THE FRONTIERS OF AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY: SETTLERS, ELITES, AND THE STANDING ARMY IN AMERICA’S INDIAN WARS A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Government By Andrew Alden Szarejko, M.A. Washington, D.C. August 11, 2020 Copyright 2020 by Andrew Alden Szarejko All Rights Reserved ii THE FRONTIERS OF AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY: SETTLERS, ELITES, AND THE STANDING ARMY IN AMERICA’S INDIAN WARS Andrew Alden Szarejko, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Andrew O. Bennett, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Much work on U.S. grand strategy focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If the United States did have a grand strategy before that, IR scholars often pay little attention to it, and when they do, they rarely agree on how best to characterize it. I show that federal political elites generally wanted to expand the territorial reach of the United States and its relative power, but they sought to expand while avoiding war with European powers and Native nations alike. I focus on U.S. wars with Native nations to show how domestic conditions created a disjuncture between the principles and practice of this grand strategy. Indeed, in many of America’s so- called Indian Wars, U.S. settlers were the ones to initiate conflict, and they eventually brought federal officials into wars that the elites would have preferred to avoid. I develop an explanation for settler success and failure in doing so. I focus on the ways that settlers’ two faits accomplis— the act of settling on disputed territory without authorization and the act of initiating violent conflict with Native nations—affected federal decision-making by putting pressure on speculators and local elites to lobby federal officials for military intervention, by causing federal officials to fear that settlers would create their own states or ally with foreign powers, and by eroding the credibility of U.S. commitments to Native nations. All of this, moreover, was made possible by the federal government’s commitment to a very small standing army. At times, however, an unfavorable local balance of power and identity-based cleavages between settlers and elites inhibited federal military intervention. To adjudicate between my proposed explanation and plausible alternatives, I identify several observable implications across which iii the explanations can be compared, and I examine three least-similar cases—the Northwest Indian War (1790-1795), the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), and Utah’s Black Hawk War (1865- 1872). I conduct process tracing in each case, for which I rely on records of Congressional debates, archival documents, and interviews with enrolled members of relevant tribes. I conclude with implications for ongoing debates on U.S. grand strategy and International Relations more broadly. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As with any academic project, this dissertation owes much to the people who helped refine the ideas therein and otherwise supported the project. I am undoubtedly missing some people here, and I hope they will forgive my lapse in memory. Those cited below added much of value to this work; any remaining deficiencies are my own. I owe my dissertation committee members—Andrew O. Bennett, David M. Edelstein, and Daniel H. Nexon—the most significant debts. I am especially grateful to Bennett, who served as the chair of my committee and who spent a lot of time guiding me through earlier iterations of this project. A number of other Georgetown faculty members offered advice and encouragement on this dissertation project, including Nolan Bennett, Matthew Carnes, Charles King, and Matthew Kroenig. Beyond Georgetown, Alexander D. Barder, Laura E. Evans, Stacie Goddard, Halvard Leira, Raymond Orr, and Mark Raymond have all kindly taken time to learn about my work and offer helpful suggestions on its framing and content. I have also benefitted from the gracious comments of discussants at conferences and workshops, including Peter Jacques, Paul K. MacDonald, Manuel Reiner, Joshua Shifrinson, Christopher Preble, A. Trevor Thrall, and Joseph M. Parent. I also received very detailed and encouraging feedback from Matthew J. Hoffmann, the late L.H.M. Ling, Laura Sjoberg, and Brent J. Steele at the 2017 ISA- Northeast Methodology Workshop, which was convened by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Laura Sjoberg. Invited presentations at the University of Oklahoma’s Department of International and Area Studies and the Shawnee Tribe Cultural Center were also helpful in the development of this project. I am also grateful to have received funding from Georgetown’s Department of Government and Graduate School of Arts and Science to support this research. v Among my fellow graduate students or recent Georgetown graduates, Anjali Dayal, Gianna Englert, Paul Musgrave, Dani Nedal, Madison Schramm, Alexandra Stark, Megan Stewart, and Laila Wahedi all provided helpful suggestions on this dissertation. It has been especially rewarding to exchange notes and air grievances with Ariya Hagh over the past several years. I also received helpful feedback on this project from Nick Anderson, Igor Kovac, Tobias Lemke, Daisuke Minami, Robert Ralston, and Stephen Pampinella. Outside my field of study, Sebastian Alejandro Echeverri and Zabe Shafi kindly offered listening ears throughout my graduate studies. To any future readers, thanks for spending time with this work. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this project or if you would like to cite the dissertation but are unsure whether I have since published this work in a different format. This project would be greatly impoverished if not for all the archivists, museum staff members, and interviewees who helped me make sense of this subject. I am especially grateful to Marnie Leist of the Shawnee Tribe Cultural Center and Mary Beth Rosebrough of the Ah-Tah- Thi-Ki Museum for all their assistance. As someone without any tribal affiliation, I have sought in this project to avoid being among the extractive “anthropologists and other friends” that Vine Deloria, Jr. ridicules in Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. If I have failed in this effort, it is despite the generous assistance I received from tribe members and institutions. I would not have had the opportunity to work at Georgetown if not for the support that I have received from my parents, Mark and Donna, as well as my grandparents. I regret that I was not able to finish this work before the passing of my paternal grandparents, Jennie and Andy. Both they and my maternal grandparents, Janet and Roger, worked hard to provide their children and grandchildren with greater opportunities, and I am just one of the thankful beneficiaries of their efforts. My sisters, Cassandra and Serena, have also been kindly supportive of my work. vi Finally, between my own extended family and the family into which I married while working on this dissertation, I am grateful for all the support I have received from these relatives. This brings me to the person who has cheerfully and consistently supported my work on this project since its inception—my wife, Camille Balleza. In addition to being the first person to tell me that this sounded like a viable project, she has been an occasional proof-reader and a reliable source of loving encouragement even amid the COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted daily life for the last several months I spent working on this dissertation. I dedicate this work to her. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction, Theory, and Methods ................................................................................1 Chapter 2: The Northwest Indian War ...........................................................................................35 Chapter 3: The Second Seminole War ...........................................................................................70 Chapter 4: Utah’s Black Hawk War ............................................................................................103 Chapter 5: Conclusions: On Grand Strategy and Indigenous Politics .........................................134 Appendix: Interview Information ................................................................................................152 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................154 viii Chapter 1 Introduction, Theory, and Methods There is a large and growing literature on U.S. grand strategy—on its sources and content, on variation therein, and on plausible alternative grand strategies for the United States.1 This literature, however, tends to focus primarily on grand strategy in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. While this makes some sense given the country’s rise to superpower status during the twentieth century, this perspective omits a significant portion U.S. history to our detriment. In this dissertation, I argue that bringing the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into the study of U.S. grand strategy can help us to better understand how political elites have articulated grand strategy across time and why elite plans have not always worked in practice. Specifically, I use the history of U.S. wars with Native American groups—some of America’s most frequent, costly conflicts in its first century of independence—to demonstrate how divergences between the general public and political elites can shape the practice of the state’s grand strategy. Studies

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