Nothing to Smile About: Quaker Capitalism and the Conquest of the Ohio Valley

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• Nothing to Smile About: Quaker Capitalism and the Conquest of the Ohio Valley
• Daniel J. Burge (bio)

Lori J. Daggar, Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 264 pp. $45.00.

If you travel throughout the region of the Ohio Valley today, you are likely to come across a variety of monuments, counties, and street names that honor an assortment of figures who helped conquer the region for the United States. In Kentucky’s capital city of Frankfort, you can visit the Old State Capitol by driving down St. Clair Street. This street was named in honor of Arthur St. Clair, a Revolutionary War veteran and governor of the Northwest Territory. Frankfort also boasts a Shelby Street, created in honor of Isaac Shelby, who served both as the first and fifth governor of Kentucky. Although most associated with Kentucky, Shelby is also honored with counties in several states in the Ohio Valley, including Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee. Travelers to Harrodsburg, a city about thirty miles south of Frankfort, will be unlikely to miss a monument that is “Dedicated to the Pioneers of Kentucky.” Carved in granite, the massive frieze depicts six figures: four men, dressed like Daniel Boone, carry guns and stare off heroically into the vast expanse. In the far left, a woman clutches her child.

The modern historian can learn much by studying the archetypes depicted in this frieze. John Mack Faragher in Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (1993) and Stephen Aron in How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (1999) have explored Boone as man and myth, while literary scholars and historians have examined the frontiersman in popular culture.¹ A vast literature abounds on frontier violence, conflicts between Indigenous peoples and the U.S. military, and the War of 1812.² A growing historiography, as well, highlights the role that women—or ideas about women and their role in society—played in the conquest of the Ohio Valley.³ These men and women hardly resembled the stoic figures carved into granite in Harrodsburg, but they nonetheless enabled the United States to establish a foothold in the Ohio Valley region. [End Page 345]

More recently, however, historians have begun to shift their gaze away from individuals and have instead highlighted the role of the state in the conquest of the Ohio Valley.⁴ Notable works in this vein include Eric Hinder-aker’s Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (1997), William Bergmann’s The American National State and the Early West (2012), and Rob Harper’s Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley (2018). These scholars have rejected the thesis that the Ohio Valley was conquered by hearty individualists sporting coonskin caps and long rifles—or bonneted women holding children—and instead have shown how the U.S. government deployed armies, forts, post offices, taxes, and a host of regulations to tie the region closer to the coast. It is into this growing literature on the tentacles of U.S. empire that Lori J. Daggar’s Cultivating Empire: Capitalism, Philanthropy, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism in Indian Country wades.

Instead of focusing on military leaders, politicians, or high-ranking bureaucrats, Daggar centers her work on a group that has been largely overlooked: Quaker capitalists. Daggar argues that religion has been downplayed as a factor in the expansion of U.S. empire but that it nonetheless played a pivotal role in enabling the growth of the United States. She contends that “ideas and policies of race, benevolence, civilization, and removal were intertwined in the early nineteenth-century United States, and each were implicated in the making of the American empire” (p. 3). Although previous works have explored many of these factors individually, Daggar adds the missing ingredient of religion. “Cultivating Empire analyzes the history of missions and the U.S. civilization plan,” she explains, “in an effort to better understand each of these phenomena and how they reinforced one another. By doing so, it also charts how U.S. missions in Indian Country both borrowed...