Federal Ground depicts the haphazard and unplanned growth of federal authority in the Northwest and Southwest Territories, the first U.S. territories established under the new territorial system. The nation's foundational documents, particularly the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance, placed these territories under sole federal jurisdiction and established federal officials to govern them. But, for all their paper authority, these officials rarely controlled events or dictated outcomes. In practice, power in these contested borderlands rested with the regions' pre-existing inhabitants-diverse Native peoples, French villagers, and Anglo-American settlers. These residents nonetheless turned to the new federal government to claim ownership, jurisdiction, protection, and federal money, seeking to obtain rights under federal law. Two areas of governance proved particularly central: contests over property, where plural sources of title created conflicting land claims, and struggles over the right to use violence, in which customary borderlands practice intersected with the federal government's effort to establish a monopoly on force. Over time, as federal officials improvised ad hoc, largely extrajudicial methods to arbitrate residents' claims, they slowly insinuated federal authority deeper into territorial life. This authority survived even after the former territories became Tennessee and Ohio: although these new states spoke a language of equal footing and autonomy, statehood actually offered former territorial citizens the most effective way yet to make claims on the federal government. The federal government, in short, still could not always prescribe the result in the territories, but it set the terms and language of debate-authority that became the foundation for later, more familiar and bureaucratic incarnations of federal power.

About the Author
Gregory Ablavsky is associate professor of law and of history (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He has published extensively in law reviews and history journals on the history of sovereignty, territory, and property in the early United States, particularly in the early American West. In 2015, the American Society for Legal History awarded his article The Savage Constitution the Cromwell Prize for the year's best article in American legal history.

Reviews
...there is no denying this is a major contribution deserving a wide academic readership. * Nicolas R Parrillo, Yale Law School, American Journal of Legal History *
With uncommon clarity and breadth, Federal Ground reconsiders essential questions of American statehood, federalism, and politics. Revisiting the origins of U.S. territorial practices of property, Native American policies, and 'conditional admissions' for statehood, Greg Ablavsky exposes the centrality of interior lands to the U.S. constitution's implementation. The results are a major addition to the growing historiography on the Northwest Ordinance and a new, revelatory analysis of the Southwest Territory's equally important place in U.S. history. * Ned Blackhawk, (Western Shoshone), Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University *
No trifling sideshow in American political development, the federal government's shaping of the Northwest and Southwest Territories fashioned the template of America and its state for a century to come. In a masterwork of political and legal history, Greg Ablavsky forces us to rethink the meaning of space, empire, Native dispossession and the very nature of American government. * Daniel Carpenter, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government, Harvard University *
Federal Ground is a stunning debut by a gifted historian. Greg Ablavsky's path-breaking study will transform the way we understand the emergence of an expansive American empire in the new nation's western borderlands. Lavishing its largesse on the perpetrators as well as the victims of frontier violence, this new American empire and its adjudicatory regime unleashed the creative and destructive energy of market society on a continental scale. * Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia *
With meticulous research, Greg Ablavsky shows how a complex tapestry of competing land claims led to both nation-building and violence on the frontiers of the American early republic. Written by one of the nation's leading legal historians of property and Native American law, Federal Ground transforms our understanding of federal authority in the territories, and in the process gives us a deeper understanding of the intractable contradictions inherent in today's political world. * Claire Priest, Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law, Yale Law School *
A bracingly original, sophisticated, and convincing recasting of the origins of American governance. By establishing itself as the arbiter between states, Indian tribes, French habitants, veterans, and settlers west of the Appalachians in the wake of the American Revolution, the federal government remade itself. Governments, in Greg Ablavsky's telling, become what governments do. * Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus, Stanford University *


Awards
Winner of Winner, Cromwell Book Prize, American Society for Legal History Winner, J. Willard Hurst Book Prize, Law and Society Association.



Book Information
ISBN 9780190905699
Author Gregory Ablavsky
Format Hardback
Page Count 362
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 612g
Dimensions(mm) 165mm * 236mm * 33mm