I learned a lot from this book. I’ve taken college courses and read many books about the American expansion west, but this was by far my favorite. It brings up motivations that are rarely explored in fascinating detail. It’s well researched with engaging writing. I’ll be using it in my classroom.

This review was originally published on NetGalley.com. I was given an ebook freely by NetGalley and the book’s publisher in return for a voluntary and honest review.

A Reframing of Racism to Protect the Racists as Frightened Victims
Andrew C. Isenberg, The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, April 2025). EBook. 304pp, 6X9”, 6 halftones, 4 maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-1-4696-8384-3.
**
“A new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. Isenberg takes readers to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that the architects of American expansion faced significant challenges from the diverse groups of people inhabiting each region. In other words, while the manifest destiny paradigm begins with an assumption of US strength, the government and the agents it dispatched to settle and control the frontier had only a weak presence. Tracing the interconnected histories of Indians, slaves, antislavery reformers, missionaries, federal agents, and physicians, Isenberg shows that the United States was repeatedly forced to accommodate the presence of other colonial empires and powerful Indigenous societies. Anti-expansionists in the borderlands welcomed the precarity of the government’s power: the land on which they dwelled was a grand laboratory where they could experiment with their alternative visions for American society. Examining the borderlands offers an understanding not just about frontier spaces but about the nature of the early American state—ambitiously expansionist but challenged by its native and imperial competitors.”
A new perspective on stealing land from Native Americans during America’s “expansion” is needed, as I was taught the propagandist version across my high school and college years a couple of decades ago, and history textbooks still sell the fictitious grand-narrative. Though this book does not focus on the theft, but rather on the weakness of the Americans, describing the natives as “challenges”. The use of the outdated “Indians” term also hints this is not a progressive book. “Indigenous” people are portrayed as aggressors, instead of as defenders of their homes. Settlers are described as experimenters, as if they were scientists and not just taking somebody else’s land, and reselling it to whites before making it safe for settlement by making sure past residents did not violently object to having their land confiscated without compensation or cause. And the blurb keeps repeating these ideas, unashamedly…
The chapter that attracted my attention first is “Vaccinators”. The chapter begins with a description of a European who sets out to vaccinate a few hundred Lakotas. There’s a description of past mass-deaths from Old World diseases among Natives. There’s a mention that the Lakotas were a dominant people in the region. And then there’s a strange paragraph about “Swedes and Japanese” specifically regarding “the Saami and Ainu… as savages”, while “white Americans… considered Indigenous people” in general “to be an inferior race”. This is a strangely racist and irrelevant point to insert here. This seems to be to claim that “Martin” seemed like an “isolated do-gooder… operating outside of government authority”, but was indeed a “government agent”. An 1832 law had required agents like Martin to go out there and issue vaccinations. Still more absurdly the following paragraph asks why the American government was bothering to vaccinate natives as they were fighting wars to exterminate them. That’s not something I was asking myself… There was a law that required them to vaccinate, as they just stated. And it was illegal for them to be slaughtering and relocating all those natives off their land… The usual narrative is that most natives died of infectious diseases to “clear the land” for the invading whites, but this is presented here as if its some kind of a new scientific discovery. Then, it’s argued that the whites were just trying to stop smallpox from killing themselves and that’s why they were also vaccinating natives. And the small number of vaccinations technically meant these were token vaccines to meet the law, when the law required them to have vaccinated millions. A point is raised that the Americans deliberately “withheld the vaccine from Indigenous people who resisted removal”. But this rational argument is immediately countered as untrue with a few isolated cases of vaccination, as if a propaganda needs to be defended (98-105).
I cannot continue to read this book. It is disturbing, and terrifying because it is brushing over abuses, while excusing them. There might be interesting content in parts of it, but it is too poorly researched to be believable, and too contentiously worded to be readable.
Pennsylvania Literary Journal: Spring 2025 issue: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-spring-2025

Rarely am I immediately convinced by the thesis of a book from its introduction. Yet such was my experience when reading Andrew Isenberg’s The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850.

The author began with an 1836 speech in the House of Representatives by former President John Quincy Adams, for the moment successfully arguing against annexation of Texas as part of the United States. By means of this speech the author casts aspersion on our tendency to read the premise of manifest destiny back into our history: we now imagine the United States was fated to fill and maintain all the territory it now possesses from the land of the original colonies to the Pacific Coast. As Adams’ speech well illustrated, during the first seventy-five years of the nation’s history, American authority and presence in its borderlands proved very tendentious, and by no means provided a guarantee of what would eventually take place.

The author spends the majority of the time considering various episodes demonstrating the limited presence of America at its borderlands. We hear of “maroon” settlements in Florida of the Seminole, and how America could not well project its strength into Florida throughout the early nineteenth century. We see the story of traders among the Osage in what was theoretically American territory in the Louisiana Purchase, but with the Osage very much remaining the real authorities in the land. The author chronicles the vaccination program Americans attempted to use in order to gain favor among the Indigenous people in the then peripheral areas of upper Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota/the Dakotas, trying to gain influence at the expense of the British and others. The author spends not a little time on how Texas got populated, and the colonization schemes regarding former slaves which some attempted to establish in Texas or areas further south. His final portrayal involved some “missionaries” who really wanted to get far away from what they saw as debauched American society, learning Dakota and living among them in what is today Minnesota before it became more heavily populated with Europeans.

In all of these narratives one can perceive how the Americans were not the strongest group of people around, and how the Americans had to compete for influence among the Indigenous people as did the British and Spanish. Yes, the French would eventually cede their holdings in America to the United States; yes, the Spanish would take an opportunity to divest themselves of West and East Florida; yes, the Mexicans would overthrow the Spanish, the Texans would revolt, establish their own state, and then join the United States; yes, Polk would get elected and instigate war with Mexico, which was not overwhelmingly popular, and would seize the northern third of Mexico; and yes, eventually the British and the United States would come to terms and formalize the border between the United States and Canada as it is now maintained. But all of that was in process, or yet to be imagined, in most of the period from 1790 to 1850. Yes, it happened the way it happened. But it did not have to. It could have ended up at least somewhat differently. And our perspective on our own history would do well to keep that in mind.

U.S. expansionism in the 19th c., although characterized by conquest, colonization and a self-serving sense of superiority, it was hardly a sweeping victory. Isenberg argues that to describe it as such is to erase the industry and defensive efforts of numerous native tribes, slave fugitives and freedmen that called the borderlands home.

First is Andrew Jackson's illegal and ineffectual campaign to remove entrenched Seminoles in Spanish Florida. Then in Missouri and Upper Louisiana, the U.S. failed to establish regulated trade with the Osage and other natives, disbanding the system after losing the War of 1812. Even the smallpox vaccination programs - referred to as "permissive acculturation," - was introduced by the Spanish and not an American original. Even then, most groups did not abandon their natural healers. Coahuila y Tejas, or Texas, was not an unpopulated territory; with a complex history that was much longer than slaveholder Stephen Austin or antislavery colonizer Benjamin Lundy perceived. Finally, missionaries in Minnesota were flabbergasted when their blindly idealistic faith would not penetrate the fierce Dakota.

As you can see, Isenberg provides a much sharper look at the supposed early "success" of 19th c. America; and rightfully so. However I couldn't give it a higher rating because Isenberg is rather long-winded. Their method of fixating on the misconceptions of one particular white individual and applying that to a vastly broader context doesn't always work. Each chapter is not necessarily in a chronological order, so that you don't see a progression of "manifest destiny" but rather separate, fixed moments in time. You're never sure where the narrative is going until the conclusionary paragraph. However, it is history you rarely learn about!

Thank you University of North Carolina Press for the ARC! Instagram rating: 3.5/5

I will admit, I did choose this book out of personal interest as this fits within and is often part of historical conversations in the topics that I study, either directly or adjacently. Borderlands history is a continually developing field of study, but is becoming an increasing part of the conversation in American history, the American Frontier more specifically, and Native American history, as these communities were often existing in these regions and taking part in cultural, political, and economic exchange.

The author’s main argument revolves around the misconception of Manifest Destiny as the universally accepted ideology within the United States for expansion into the border regions. In fact, The United States did not have a complete consensus on their method of expansion, as shown in the number of “experiments” and challenges faced by the American presence in those regions. By utilizing the perspective of Indigenous people, Free Blacks, missionaries, and reformers/abolitionists across the borderlands, the author shows the extent of US weakness and tenuous authority in the many border regions it encountered.

The book is extensively and thoroughly researched and puts itself thoroughly in the conversation of the outstanding arguments and big names in historical scholarship of the American West. I would highly recommend this book for a college history course of early American history or of the American West. (I had a class specifically taught on the American West and while reading this I thought how great this book would have been as supplementary reading; there were many stories and anecdotes that I hadn’t known about- which is of course the fun part of reading history scholarship!)

This book helps clear up the myth about Manifest Destiny being this unstoppable force sweeping across the United States. Flawed and often stopped by Native American resistance, change was not a given.

The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790–1850, by Andrew Isenberg offers a new way of thinking about American westward expansion. This perceptive book will shift the writing on our early nation and relations with Indigenous peoples who wielded immense power in the borderlands beyond US borders and territories claimed by other colonial powers. "Manifest Destiny" was a slogan created relatively late in the expansionist history of the US, and as this book makes clear, it was never a widely held notion nor a given. I especially found the early history of Florida to be especially revealing, in terms of Native Americans who fled there for multiple reasons, and the numbers of enslaved Africans who escaped into the Spanish territory - which of course was much closer to the Deep South slaveholding states. Fascinating and recommended!