| Abstract | “A Frontier of Ambition and Intrigue: The Neutral Ground Agreement and the Louisiana-Texas Borderland, 1803-1824” examines the Neutral Ground Agreement and the geopolitical struggle to define, observe, and enforce borderlines between Louisiana and Texas following the Louisiana Purchase. In November 1806, the Neutral Ground Agreement averted war between Spain and the United States by declaring the region between the Arroyo Hondo and Sabine River as neutral and outside the sovereign control of either Spain or the United States. My dissertation argues that the Neutral Ground was never truly neutral. Individuals on both sides of the borderland manipulated its existence to pursue their own interests and ambitions even when their schemes ran afoul of imperial designs. The ambitions, exchanges, and interactions between local populations in the Louisiana-Texas borderland amid this extended dispute demonstrate the limits of both state authority and notions of loyalty in the borderland as local populations sought to manifest their own desires in the borderland. Anglo Americans, French Creoles, Tejanos, enslaved people, Indigenous groups, and free blacks all sought to influence or manipulate the borderland tensions to their own desires or ambitions. This project demonstrates the limits of state authority in Early American borderlands and how local populations pushed imperial governments and militaries to engage with their own designs and desires.
“A Frontier of Ambition and Intrigue” employs a borderlands history methodology to uncover cross-border connections that tied people, horses, and markets together across the region. This project offers intriguing insights into the pivotal role of local borderland populations in shaping the contours of imperial authority during the Early American Republic. Readers interested in Early America, Colonial America, and North American Borderlands will find this scholarship insightful in its approach to borderland commercial markets and state authority. In contrast to narratives of imperial authority, this project complicates borderland narratives in Early America by demonstrating fluid notions of loyalty and identity that resulted in conflicting commercial interests which defined cross-border markets and often defied imperial interests. This project seeks to join other borderlands scholarship emphasizing the power of local peoples to chart their own histories in contested spaces either to the support or detriment of imperial authorities in Early America. |
