Situating Governor Arthur St. Clair as the central figure of and focusing on his administration of the Northwest Territory present an accurate and cogent account of America's first experiment in colonialism. The frontier was not static, but amorphous; it changed over time and brought new challenges to the territorial government. St. Clair is the instrument through which to understand this change. His military and civil careers are the story of the frontier. Throughout his life, St. Clair wanted to be the "father of a country." But in the end, he was rejected by his "subjects" and as a result later historians overlooked his contributions to western expansion. Examining St. Clair's governorship shows the process by which the region that became the state of Ohio in 1803 was transformed from a colony populated by natives to a state inhabited predominately by white agriculturalists who were connected to the world markets via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. St. Clair, working under the direction of the federal government, was the architect of this change. He implemented the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which served as the blueprint for expansion in the approximately 250,000 square mile region that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While in office he presided over the settlement of the region, negotiated Indian treaties, campaigned against the Ohio Indians, opened diplomatic relations with colonial representatives from Great Britain and Spain, determined the locations of county boundaries and county seats, implemented a government based upon the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance, created a judiciary, and put laws into operation through the territorial legislature. The governor managed the territory during the formative years of U.S. expansion and set precedents for future generations. St. Clair's ultimate downfall occurred when he opposed the movement to create the state of Ohio and instead sought to redefine the territory's boundaries to prevent the eastern section from meeting the criteria necessary to call a constitutional convention. In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson removed the governor from office because of his actions at the Ohio constitutional convention, when he had called the Enabling Act a nullity and questioned Congress's authority to legislate for the territory without consulting the territorial government. The comments were thought by many to border on treason. His departure symbolized the success of the Revolution of 1800-- the ascendancy of a new generation of political figures who dominated the nation's affairs and determined the fate of the West. Defending the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance, St. Clair was the embodiment of the Federalist vision of expansion, a conservative political philosophy that was out of favor with many of the residents and politicians in Washington.

Relatively little attention has been paid to American military history between 1783 and 1812—arguably the most formative years of the United States. This encyclopedia fills the void in existing literature and provides greater understanding of how the nation evolved during this era. This encyclopedia offers a comprehensive examination of U.S. military history from the beginning of the republic in 1783 up to the eve of war with Great Britain in 1812. It enables a detailed study of the Early Republic, during which ideological and political divisions occurred over the fledgling U.S. military. The entries cover all the important battles, key individuals, weapons, Indian nations, and treaties, as well as numerous social, political, cultural, and economic developments during this period. The contents of the work will enable readers at the high school, college, university, and even graduate level to comprehend how political parties emerged, and how ideological differences over the organization, size, and use of the military developed. Larger global developments, including Anglo-American and Franco-American interactions, relations between Middle Eastern states and the United States, and relations and warfare between the U.S. government and various Indian nations are also detailed. The extensive and detailed bibliographies will be immensely helpful to learners at all levels.

In 1791, General Arthur St. Clair led the United States army in a campaign to destroy a complex of Indian villages at the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio. Almost within reach of their objective, St. Clair's 1,400 men were attacked by about one thousand Indians. The U.S. force was decimated, suffering nearly one thousand casualties in killed and wounded, while Indian casualties numbered only a few dozen. But despite the lopsided result, it wouldn't appear to carry much significance; it involved only a few thousand people, lasted less than three hours, and the outcome, which was never in doubt, was permanently reversed a mere three years later. Neither an epic struggle nor a clash that changed the course of history, the battle doesn't even have a name. Yet, as renowned Native American historian Colin Calloway demonstrates here, St. Clair's Defeat--as it came to be known-- was hugely important for its time. It was both the biggest victory the Native Americans ever won, and, proportionately, the biggest military disaster the United States had suffered. With the British in Canada waiting in the wings for the American experiment in republicanism to fail, and some regions of the West gravitating toward alliance with Spain, the defeat threatened the very existence of the infant United States. Generating a deluge of reports, correspondence, opinions, and debates in the press, it produced the first congressional investigation in American history, while ultimately changing not only the manner in which Americans viewed, raised, organized, and paid for their armies, but the very ways in which they fought their wars. Emphasizing the extent to which the battle has been overlooked in history, Calloway illustrates how this moment of great victory by American Indians became an aberration in the national story and a blank spot in the national memory. Calloway shows that St. Clair's army proved no match for the highly motivated and well-led Native American force that shattered not only the American army but the ill-founded assumption that Indians stood no chance against European methods and models of warfare. An engaging and enlightening read for American history enthusiasts and scholars alike, The Victory with No Name brings this significant moment in American history back to light.

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest recovers the agrarian village world Indian women created in the lush lands of the Ohio Valley. Algonquian-speaking Indians living in a crescent of towns along the Wabash tributary of the Ohio were able to evade and survive the Iroquois onslaught of the seventeenth century, to absorb French traders and Indigenous refugees, to export peltry, and to harvest riparian, wetland, and terrestrial resources of every description and breathtaking richness. These prosperous Native communities frustrated French and British imperial designs, controlled the Ohio Valley, and confederated when faced with the challenge of American invasion. By the late eighteenth century, Montreal silversmiths were sending their best work to Wabash Indian villages, Ohio Indian women were setting the fashions for Indigenous clothing, and European visitors were marveling at the sturdy homes and generous hospitality of trading entrepots such as Miamitown. Confederacy, agrarian abundance, and nascent urbanity were, however, both too much and not enough. Kentucky settlers and American leaders—like George Washington and Henry Knox—coveted Indian lands and targeted the Indian women who worked them. Americans took women and children hostage to coerce male warriors to come to the treaty table to cede their homelands. Appalachian squatters, aspiring land barons, and ambitious generals invaded this settled agrarian world, burned crops, looted towns, and erased evidence of Ohio Indian achievement. This book restores the Ohio River valley as Native space.

Frontier Democracy examines the debates over state constitutions in the antebellum Northwest (Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin) from the 1820s through the 1850s. This is a book about conversations: in particular, the fights and negotiations over the core ideals in the constitutions that brought these frontier communities to life. Silvana R. Siddali argues that the Northwestern debates over representation and citizenship reveal two profound commitments: the first to fair deliberation, and the second to ethical principles based on republicanism, Christianity, and science. Some of these ideas succeeded brilliantly: within forty years, the region became an economic and demographic success story. However, some failed tragically: racial hatred prevailed everywhere in the region, in spite of reformers' passionate arguments for justice, and resulted in disfranchisement and even exclusion for non-white Northwesterners that lasted for generations.