William Henry Harrison's Indiana: Paternalism and patriotism on the frontier, 1795--1812.

摘要

My dissertation describes how Americans in the Early Republic set about extending American culture and government across the great expanse of the Trans-Appalachian West, using Indiana Territory as a case study. The first decades of U.S. history saw considerable tension between the ideological goals of the American Revolution and the realities of nation building. Americans had to contend with both the psychological burden of a belief in their own exceptionalism---their moral superiority over the older, decadent states of Europe---and the real world pressures of statecraft. Americans grappled to reconcile the Rights of Man with the difficulty of administering vast territories for a rapidly growing population.;I argue that Americans prior to the War of 1812 maintained practially the same ideology that had driven them through the Revolution, i.e., a tendency to attribute all social or political ills to British influence. The Declaration of Independence had blamed George III for slavery, Indian wars, and political corruption, and the next generation of Americans continued to do so. While previous authors have correctly attributed much of this attitude to President Thomas Jefferson and other national leaders, key figures on the frontier, like Indiana Governor William Henry Harrison, have received less credit for their impact on these issues. Governor Harrison, his free citizenry, and those excluded from politics---blacks, women, and Indians, all shared in creating the American West.