Chapter 9 - Modern Bigotry

Summary

This chapter analyzes literary engagements with two linked military campaigns of the 1790s: the wars against the United Indian Nations in the Ohio Country, and the Western Pennsylvania dissidents in the “Whiskey Rebellion.” These two events, considered minor episodes in popular memory of the early republic, mark a major turning point in the US nation-state, one that tells the origin story of the US military complex and how the United States claimed the western frontier as settler-colonial space. In a reading of Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Hendrick Aupaumut, Herman Husband, and others, the author argues that an important subtext further links the war against the United Indian Nations to the Whiskey Rebellion: the struggle to define not only the geopolitical but also the racial-ethnic boundaries of the United States in a moment when Indigenous peoples and backcountry immigrants were often lumped together as “savages” living outside the law of Anglo-Saxon civilization – that is, as enemies of white fiscal-military empire.