Another Kind of Representation: Territorial Delegates and the Politics of Territorial Incorporation, 1851-1875
Open AccessThis dissertation is a study of territorial delegates who represented Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah in the U.S. House of Representatives and their impact on the territorial incorporation process. I describe the “politics of territorial incorporation,” an analytical model that enables the reader to judge a delegate’s effectiveness. In the first chapter, I explain the politics of territorial incorporation model and how it affected the western territories. In chapters two through five, I examine how this process worked in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah during the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. I also consider how broader changes in national politics affected the western territories’ chances for statehood.In this dissertation, I argue that delegates represented their constituencies based on the political culture of their home territories. Second, I argue that events external to the territories such as the Wilmot Proviso of 1846 or 1864 presidential election could have a significant effect on this incorporation process. Third, I show how Congressional partisanship could become an important catalyst for the politics of territorial incorporation. My research sheds new light on federal-territorial relations and illustrates the challenges the federal government had with guiding western territories toward statehood. Finally, we see that American state building in the nineteenth century was a continental process that entailed compromise and conflict between Euro-American settlers, American Indians, and federal government officials.
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