Settlers, Elites, and the Standing Army: On the Origins of America’s Indian Wars

• In Event: Making US Foreign Policy

Abstract

For U.S. policy-makers in the 18th and 19th centuries, relations with American Indian groups were an important part of the nation’s foreign policy. In contrast with the view of conflict initiation as an elite-driven process, however, such political elites often only reluctantly entered militarized disputes with Native groups because of settler aggression. I argue that this puzzling phenomenon—the outsized power settlers had to shape the nation’s foreign policy—can best be explained by the lack of a large standing army, which provided settlers with sufficient opportunity to initiate and escalate conflicts that elites preferred to avoid. To compare this explanation with alternative arguments, I conduct process tracing that relies on analysis of debates found in the Congressional Record, archival documents, and interviews with current members of relevant tribes. I study this process within the context of three major wars spanning the first century of independent U.S. existence—the Northwest Indian War, the Second Seminole War, and the Great Sioux War—and I conclude that scholars of U.S. Foreign Policy ought to pay closer attention to the means by which citizens can make policy-making more improvisational than elites would like.

Author

• Andrew A. Szarejko, Georgetown University