“Imagined White Nation” — Forging a Nation of Whiteness on the American Frontier
Chapter Five of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
As the American Revolution reached its conclusion, many of my American ancestors found themselves drawn to the bleeding edge of a brand new empire. They were part of a steadily growing flood of White migrants, Anglo-American and Euro-American settler colonials impoverished by the war, who moved into the trans-Appalachian back country seeking land and a fresh start.[i]
Family history can be full of surprises, some pleasant and some appalling. Many things I learned from researching my family history made me proud and many others made me sad. In a few cases, I uncovered events evoking all of these conflicting emotional responses at once. So it was as I investigated the lives of Stites ancestors who were among the first White people to claim land and establish homes in the hostile and frequently bloody environment of the old Northwest Territory.
The Revolutionary War as experienced by my colonial American ancestors was brutal and destructive, but it only lasted for a few years. After the relatively short war with the English ended in 1783, the long war with Indigenous nations for control of the American interior continued. The savagery and terror of the long war to build an American empire in the old Northwest had profound effects in shaping my ancestors’ (and my own) sense of identity as part of an American family, an American community, and an American nation.
One lasting effect of the trauma experienced by my ancestors and other White settlers in the old Northwest Territory in those early decades of the existence of the United States was the forging of a strong link between Whiteness and American national identity. My ancestors learned (and later, my family and community taught me) to think of the United States as a quintessentially White nation. We learned to trust and to give our allegiance to a nation comprised primarily, if not exclusively, of other White Americans.
Modern nations are built on trust and loyalty to others we do not know and might never meet but with whom we share a sense of shared identity and community. This is what Benedict Anderson meant when he defined a nation as “an imagined political community.” Within a nation, communal bonds are strengthened by an assumption of equity for all who are part of it. As Anderson explains:
…regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.[ii]
The “past two centuries“ Anderson mentions is in reference to the era that began at the time of the American Revolution, continued through the post-WWII era of wars of national liberation, and persists to the present. Today’s news is full of examples of people who are eager to kill and willing to die in the cause of nationalism.
With lives at stake, the key question becomes this — which people are included in the nation and which are excluded?
For my late 18th century ancestors struggling to survive in the wilds of southwestern Ohio, the answer to the question of what sort of people were included within the new American nation was crystal clear. They imagined a political community of White people. Black people, most of whom were enslaved, were not considered part of the nation. They were seen as inherently inferior to White people and although the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in the territory, the presence of free Black people was restricted by law and by common practice.[iii]
When it came to Indigenous peoples, the answer for my ancestors was even more obvious. Indigenous nations, whether hostile or friendly, were not part of the United States.
Members of the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 held differing attitudes toward “Indians” and about the morality and necessity of enslaving Black people, but they were united in their vision of the United States of America as a nation to be governed solely by propertied White men like themselves. The twenty-seventh and final justification for armed rebellion against the British monarch in the Declaration of Independence identifies the twin pillars of racial hatred and fear driving White Americans to revolution.
He has excited domestic Insurrections among us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions. — Congress of the United States (1776)
The phrase “domestic Insurrections” is a clear reference to the founders’ fear of revolts by enslaved Black people. The reference to “merciless Indian Savages” is noteworthy for the fact that it lumps all Indigenous Nations into a single category of people. This failure to differentiate between friendly and hostile Indigenous peoples was a relatively recent development in colonial America and was an attitude far more universally shared among White inhabitants of the American interior than it was among the gentile propertied men residing in the coastal colonies.
In an essay published online, “Anti-Indian Radicalisation in the American West: 1774–1795,” historian Darren Reid describes a marked change in attitudes toward Indigenous peoples among White people around the time of the founding of the United States:
Anti-Indian prejudices [among White settler colonials in America] had certainly existed before the 1770s, but events during and after that decade turned what had been a divisive and inconsistent philosophy into a widely held, deeply pejorative belief which appeared, to those cultures which developed in the west, to be a self-evident truth.
My fourth great grand uncle, commonly known as Major Benjamin Stites (1746–1805), is lionized in Cincinnati as the founder of the first permanent settlement of White people there. In 1788, Major Benjamin was instrumental in convincing John Cleves Symmes, a former judge and New Jersey delegate to the Continental Congress, to arrange a land deal with Congress for the purchase of one million acres of land on the north side of the Ohio River in the old Northwest Territory, lands that the British Crown had promised to keep free from settlement by White people and maintain as a homeland for their Indigenous American allies.
After the British were defeated in War of Independence, all bets were off on restricted settlement in the Northwest Territories. Within just a few decades, White American chain migration west led to the creation of three new states to add to the union, first Ohio in 1803, then Indiana in 1816, then Illinois in 1818.[iv]
Fighting and killing Indigenous people was a dominant theme in the life of Major Benjamin Stites, starting with his father’s service fighting in the French and Indian War (1754–1763), followed by his own and all four of his brothers’ turns as soldiers and frontier scouts during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), and continuing as he and his brothers became “Indian fighters” during the Northwest Indian War (also known as the Battle for Ohio) (1786–1795).
There is a record of an interview of Major Benjamin’s son conducted by a man interested in documenting the early history of the Presbyterian Church in Ohio. But, according to the interviewer’s account, the topic of the conversation focused instead on relations with Indigenous people in the region:
In 1844 I spent an evening with Benjamin Stites, jr., of Madisonville, Ohio, … who [as a boy] settled at Columbia, near Cincinnati, in 1788. […] he said the settlers of Columbia, agreed to pay thirty dollars for every Indian scalp […] The frontier men of those times spoke of “hunting Indians” as they would of hunting wolves, bears, or any other wild animal […] With most of these Indian hunters, the bounty was a minor consideration. The hatred of the red man was a much stronger motive.[v]
In June 2018, I visited the Cincinnati History Library and Archives, part of Cincinnati Museum Center housed in the Union Terminal. Restoration of the terminal, a stunning example of art deco architecture built in 1933, was nearing completion at the time of my visit. The glass tiles of the original mosaic murals in the main hall of the old terminal were newly cleaned and vibrant.
Before taking the stairway leading down to the library and archives, I marveled at the larger-than-life representation of Cincinnati history circling the gigantic half-dome ceiling of the rotunda. The mural begins on the left with three Indigenous men standing, holding their ground it appears, as a White pioneer family, lead by a well-armed father, approaches from the right.
The central figure in the Indigenous group, a leader judging from the large feathered headdress and elaborately decorated calumet (“peace pipe”), is holding up a hand in a sign of greeting, or perhaps, more in keeping with historical events, of warning. In the late 18th century the area on the northern banks of the Ohio River between the Greater and Little Miami Rivers was sometimes marked on maps as the “Slaughterhouse” because of the frequent and deadly clashes between White settlers and Indigenous peoples that took place there.[vi]
I couldn’t help but think of the White pioneers in the mural as a depiction of Major Benjamin Stites and family. That impression was reinforced after I descended into the archives and told one of the archivists about my interest in researching my ancestors’ experience during the early history of White settlement in Cincinnati. Upon learning my last name was Stites, she laughed and said: “You’re like some kind of royalty!”
Even though the archivist was obviously joking, I confess I felt some pride in hearing her acknowledge the part the Stites family played in the creation of Cincinnati. On the other hand, the more I learned about Major Benjamin Stites, the less inclined I felt to think of him as being in any way heroic. In addition to his apparent eagerness to hunt and kill Indigenous people, he was a serial bigamist who was married to three women at once. He sued his first wife for divorce and publicly accused her of adultery, though it was pretty clear that he was the guilty party.[vii]
I’m not at all sure how I feel about my great grand uncle Major Benjamin Stites. Is he a hero or a villain? The general opinion in Cincinnati seems to tilt toward the former. But knowing what I know now about Benjamin does not make me feel at all special (even in Cincinnati). Benjamin’s legacy is far too complicated and blood-soaked to evoke anything like simple pride in the family connection. What I feel about Benjamin is primarily fascination, something like the unshakeable desire to gawk at the scene of a bad car crash.
I also feel a deep sense of regret. The exclusion of Indigenous peoples and of Black people and of so many others from White American ideas of nationhood was not an inevitable outcome of American history. As a nation, we could have chosen a different path, a path to multiracial democracy. That path remains open, but in order to take it we must leave behind deeply ingrained (often subconscious) racialized ideas about American national identity tied to Whiteness.
Perhaps Major Benjamin Stites could not help but hate and demonize all the people he saw as “Indian Savages.” He witnessed many acts of cruelty committed by Shawnee and Lenape and other Indigenous antagonists. In 1788, his sixteen-year-old nephew Nehemiah Stites, was killed by Indians (probably a Shawnee or Miami hunting party) while gathering wood in the forest near Mayslick, Kentucky. Later that same year, Benjamin’s younger brother, Nehemiah’s father, Henry Stites, also died on the frontier. Henry was just 38 when he died. The cause of his death is unknown. Henry was my fifth great grandfather. Like his brother, Henry had developed a reputation on the frontier as an expert “Indian killer.”
Whether Henry died of disease or accidentally or was killed by an Indigenous hunter does not really matter to me. What matters is that he left behind a mixed legacy of racial hatred and of courage and persistence in the face of long odds. I choose to recall both sides of Henry’s legacy. I choose to not ignore and to subvert the racial animus and I choose to embrace the courage to take another path.
NOTES
[i] For an excellent account of the early days of White migration to the trans-Appalachian west see Stephen Aron’s (1996) book, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
[ii] Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Revised and extended. ed.). London: Verso. 1991. pp. 6–7.
[iii] My home state of Illinois adopted “Black Laws” to restrict African-American emigration into Illinois and prohibit African-Americans from serving on juries or in the militia. The 1848 Illinois Constitution required the state legislature to prohibit African-Americans from moving to Illinois, which it did in 1853. The law was not repealed until 1865. See Illinois State Archives, Illinois Black Law (1853).
[iv] White settlement and population growth in the northernmost lands of the Old Northwest Territories was a bit slower. Statehood came for Michigan in 1837 and for Wisconsin in 1848.
[v] This interview segment is reported in an essay by Charles Whittelsey, “White Men as Scalpers,” Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society, Number 22 (August, 1874).
[vi] As reported on the History page of the website of the Columbia Tusculum Community Council. Columbia Tusculum is a neighborhood on the east side of Cincinnati, Ohio near the Little Miami River.
[vii] When Major Benjamin Stites led the Stites Expedition to found the town of Columbia (now part of Cincinnati) in November 1788 he was accompanied by his second wife, Mary “Polly” Mills. His first wife, Rachel Muchmore (the last name is not well-documented) was left behind at their home on Tenmile Creek (near Redstone, now Brownsville, Pennsylvania). Not long after arriving in Columbia, Polly became aware her husband was a bigamist and returned to her family in New Jersey. In 1792, Benjamin married again to Hannah Ferris Waring. The story was aired in newspapers of the time. Here is an excerpt from a piece appearing in 1790 in the New Jersey Journal (collected by Audrey Hancock): “Mary Stites, Westfield, in a lengthy letter to the Editor tells of the baseness of her husband who has advertised that she departed his house on the Miami [Columbia]. Before her marriage he had seduced a young girl who he deserted leaving her to provide for his child. He was known, although improperly, as Major Stites. He was previously married and had a number of children at Redstone, but he produced a bill of divorcement from the State of Virginia. On our way to the Ohio country when we were at Fort Pitt he put me on board a boat to go down the Ohio while he took passage on another, for the sole purpose of having the company of another woman, and after difficulties and dangers innumerable, I arrived at the Miami. When on the Miami, his former wife set upon him for the injustice he had done her at which time it was found that his bill of divorce was a forgery. She, the writer, then took her child, only one year old, to return to her parents which he permitted not from a principle of obliging her, but from the great probability of her being killed by the Indians thus sparing him the necessity of forging another bill of divorce. In the event she arrived safely at Fort Pitt and came from there to her parents. Some months since Mr. Stites called to see her and among other things presented her with a nutmeg which nearly poisoned herself and her mother…”
