Record Keeping: The Expansion of Federal Power in the Reconstruction South and American West

Taking my cue from Edward Said’s notion of “orientalism,” I examine how the federal government collected enormous files about the experiences of both formerly enslaved people in the Reconstruction South and Native Americans in the West. While these copious records reflect the bureaucratic work of federal officials, a closer examination of these documents illustrates the federal government’s anxiety to exert power over these regions. While historians have certainly noted that the federal government used military power to create order in both the South and West during this period, my paper departs from this interpretation by examining how the accumulation of knowledge about these regions contributed to the expansion of federal power. Drawing on Said’s analysis of how British and French authorities collected information about the Middle East as part of their imperialist project, my paper examines how the government’s accumulation of an enormous number of files about the South and the West formed a crucial component in the expansion of federal power during the nineteenth century. American federal officials in the West documented Native American living habits and took take copious notes on the arability of the land, the wildlife, and the flora and fauna, while in the South officials documented freedpeople’s lives and labors and also collected enormous information about the Southern landscape and environment. The South and West became in the federal government’s imagination, places that could be dominated—they were seen as pliable, inferior, and in need of federal help—which had the simultaneous rhetorical ability of turning the federal government into the authority that could transform these regions. The presence of these records, which lined the walls of federal buildings in cardboard boxes, represents not only the work of federal officials but also proof of the discursive mechanisms that contributed to the expansion of federal power.