“We Are upon Our Own Business”: Hendrick Aupaumut and the Consequences of US Imperial Power in the Early Republic

This paper traces the dynamic relationship between the U.S. War and State departments, Quakers, and Hendrick Aupaumut, a Mohican, in order to examine the ways in which Native individuals and nations used their connections with U.S. officials and missionaries to negotiate for power within the emerging American empire. Aupaumut served as a diplomat during the 1790s War for the Ohio Country, a federal employee in Ohio just prior to the outbreak of the War of 1812, a petitioner seeking redress after a suspect land sale in 1818, and a representative of the Stockbridge nation seeking charity during the late 1820s. While somewhat of an exceptional figure, his experiences, and those of others like him, force us to interrogate the ways in which Native peoples used U.S. policies and bureaucracy to their advantage, and it encourages us to reconsider the political significance of the American Revolution on the edges of American empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 

While most scholars position the 1795 Treaty of Greenville and, later, the War of 1812 as the death knells for Native sovereignty in the Ohio Country, Aupaumut's adventures suggests that such events did not render Native Americans vanquished foes but rather required them to alter their tactics when confronting the imperial United States. Rather than wage war or migrate westward, many Native peoples manipulated U.S. policies to their advantage and secured a place for themselves within the early republic. This paper, then, highlights the experiences of and opportunities available to Native peoples and their neighbors in the early republic.