My book-in-progress, Federal Indian Agents of the Early United States,is a study of the early republic’s little-remembered ambassadors to Native American nations. Building upon an emerging scholarly wave arguing for the importance of Indigenous polities to early US foreign policy, I argue that these ambassadors, known as “Indian agents,” were far more significant than historians have recognized. Agents served four main functions: they were diplomats, civil servants, politicians, and local patriarchs, particularly in the numerous cases where agents married Indigenous women. At times, agents were able to blend these distinct roles harmoniously; more often, contradictions and tensions resulted. The United States’ complex interactions with Indigenous nations as transacted by Indian agents constituted their own form of international relations and impacted foreign policy as traditionally understood, including Anglo-American relations, Spanish-American relations, and, eventually, dealings between the Union and the independent Republic of Texas.
To understand agents, their relationships, and their contexts, I visited archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. My methods combine traditional policymaker-centric diplomatic history with historical ethnography and some modest quantitative analysis of changes over time in such matters such as agents’ pre-service backgrounds and their rates of intermarriage with elite Indigenous families.
The project began as a 2022 Yale University doctoral dissertation. In its early stages, the study focused on the Great Lakes region. Now, I take a national approach, venturing as far south as Florida and as far west as present-day Oklahoma. Beginning with pre-revolutionary precedents, I start my main narrative with the creation of the federal government in 1789 and conclude in the era of Jacksonian Indian Removal, which saw the partial eclipse of the Indian agent as diplomat, especially east of the Mississippi. The book will be published in 2028 as part of Columbia University’s Press’s Global America series on the history of US foreign relations.
Dr. Zachary Conn 