Imperium in Imperio

Sovereignty and the American Territorial System

From the passage of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance onward, territories were the official unit of American expansion and, as such, were designed to pass through a process of political tutelage under the federal government's regulatory supervision. The Lockean idea of consent of the governed, coupled with the idea that governments should offer a balance of authority and liberty, provided American revolutionists with rhetorical fodder to rebel against the British system of colonial control. The colonists in America, propagandists insisted, had come of age and had reached a level of political maturity sufficient to be self-governing and independent from England. Following their attaining independence, Americans began to implement their own system of expansion that they hoped would be unlike the British colonial model. The difference between England and the model of the new United States was the antipatriarchal ideology of the republican territorial system, which was to provide governmental education to a territory's inhabitants and establish a path to political maturity and self-government for them. The system of federal management over the territories required the participation of the local population in practicing republican government as federally appointed officials transmitted approved political ideas and practices from east to west. According to the U.S. Constitution, the transference of national sovereignty to state sovereignty could not occur without the assurance that the people of a territory could and would operate a republican form of government. In other words, the Constitution would not allow the admittance of new states formed from federal territory if the people residing within those geopolitical boundaries were deemed incapable of republican self-governance. The establishment of Utah Territory in 1850 formally brought Great Basin Mormons and American Indians under the direct supervision of the federal government and created a scenario wherein competing visions of sovereignty and government emerged and informed an increasing tension between the federal government and the settler community over self-governing capacity.

Territories in the American federalist system were viewed as eventual candidates for statehood and self-government through a preparatory process that included electing a legislature, establishing laws, and operating a republican government as the foundations for admittance to the Union. For the founding generation and Americans that followed, republicanism meant a promise that a collection of self-governing communities would exercise their sovereignty to inhibit consolidated power and the threat of control by the few. Territorial governments on the path to statehood required governors, prosecutors, judges, Indian agents, surveyors, and other officials to enforce and execute the laws of the United States in the territory. The president appointed these officials — subject to Senate confirmation — and gave orders for any U.S. troops stationed in the territories. The president and Congress also had discretionary power to deprive a territory of representative government and change local government when necessary, thereby making the territorial system a colonial arm of the state. Looked at another way, the federal government had the responsibility to raise and educate the territories to be good, loyal states in the Union in the same way that parents have the societal responsibility to raise their children to be good, loyal citizens of the nation. Once a territory's inhabitants proved they could responsibly and loyally operate a republican government, federal authority would give way to state sovereignty.

As the nation expanded, the Northwest Ordinance enabled the national government to exercise its authority and protect its interests in new territories while promising settlers in those lands the opportunity to attain their full rights of self-government when new states were created and admitted to the Union. That ordinance represents foundational American thinking about the nature of a colonial system for a republican empire as the federal government assumed and maintained the ultimate authority in the territories but provided the route toward sovereign equality in the Union. The Northwest Ordinance established the governor as the executive authority in a territory, who served through federal appointment and was restricted to a term limit; however, federal authority could remove the governor at any time. What is more, the Northwest Ordinance first codified federal control over territorial boundaries while it set the terms for territorial governance and power, all of which was later solidified by the Constitution.

The Constitution established a dual or divided sovereignty between the states and the federal government, each of which was sovereign in its assigned sphere, thereby providing a new definition of imperium in imperio, or sovereignty within sovereignty, that was coordinate and not subversive. Though the vision to create a self-governing republic was indeed noble, some entity had to decide what measure of self-government to provide to what people and when to preserve union among many interests, peoples, and states. The Constitution made clear, when it gave Congress power "to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States," that the federal government controlled new territories legislatively as part of a process of integrating new parts into the national whole. The Constitution was the instrument the federal government used to create a particular system of expansion to cast a republican superstructure across the North American continent. These two foundational documents, the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance, provided a blueprint for continental expansion through the territorial system. For the founding generation, the territorial system signaled that the United States would become a flourishing and expanding republican nation.

As the nation added new lands and peoples through the territorial process, the idea of local self-government was increasingly debated. Self-government could occur in new lands only after the parent institution properly instructed the peoples therein to be loyal, self-governing sovereign citizens of the Union. In antebellum-era politics, Americans grappled with reconciling liberty and regulation in the territories,...