Intimate Governance: Sex and Settler State Formation from Ohio to the Gulf Coast, 1787–1825

This poster foregrounds the often-quotidian work by settlers and state officials to define and regulate sexual behavior and desire during the formation of states in the Trans-Appalachian West region of the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. Much scholarship about this period rightly highlights the violent and traumatic realities of indigenous displacement and cultural alteration the federal government and local settlers undertook to enable settlers and the new nation to claim land and construct new states in this region after 1783. Additionally, gender and sexuality scholars have cemented the significant roles these topics have played in the work of colonization and nation building from the American colonial era to the present – through the policing of bodies and desires, delineating “others” from a “normative,” and justifying state and settler actions. However, they have not given the Trans-Appalachian West during the early national period the attention it deserves and scholarship that does focus on American settlement and settlers' lives in this region heavily concerns itself with the establishment of democratic government by and for white men and their harnessing of natural resources and labor for a capitalist economy.

When one combines and counts the variety of laws and legal actions in this period of state formation that dealt with sexuality, from registering marriages to the diversity of methods for divorce and criminal and civil suits in courts, one can easily notice the regularity that sexuality became a part of the actions of the new settler states and how frequently setters themselves demanded the state to concern itself with sexual behaviors and desires, which in turn helped to legitimate these new states in the eyes of settlers. An additional finding is how men continuously found their sexual behavior and desires being policed by the state and community at a time when scholars typically note state interest in sexuality fell disproportionately on women.

A poster is ideal for presenting this historical data and argument because of the reliance on quantitative data that is better understood via visual formats like the tables and graphs included on the poster. Additionally, providing images of example records will allow viewers to grasp direct connections in language, format, and processes between selected locations in the region. Ohio and Mississippi will serve as the example locations, and not just because of connections when each became organized under American rule of timing, people, and laws. Focusing on these two states challenges the common framing of a divide between North and South, and even East and West, when it comes to Untied States history and society. Instead, juxtaposing these frequently contrasted places reveals how the work and legal tools for regulating and defining sexuality frequently was similar across the vast physical space of North America that settlers transformed into the new nation. This actuality even extended to the Gulf South, where distinct colonial conditions fostered communities and cultures that differed from the predominantly British-influenced United States, yet still shared important similarities in sexual mores and legal traditions.