By the terms of the Pinckney Treaty signed with Spain in 1795, the United States acquired its first territory, the region lying between the Tennessee River and the thirty-first parallel and later called the Mississippi Territory. However, Spain immediately sensed that she had needlessly ceded a great deal of territory, and her ministers attempted at least to delay, if not to prevent, the United States from securing possession of the ceded area. After thwarting Spanish efforts to delay the cession, American officials would still face the tremendous task of unraveling a tangled web of conflicting land claims before the territory could attract enough settlers to assure permanent possession. In addition to these rather unique problems, the United States faced the problems of gradually extending the principles of democratic government to the new frontier region, a region where republican principles had not been recognized but where the citizens were very anxious for more local control. The attempts made by the American government to solve this problem, and the reaction of the local inhabitants to its efforts will be the subject of this study. Historians have only recently begun to study territorial governments even though a knowledge of territorial period can furnish valuable insight into the early history of a state. For example, the Mississippi constitution of 1817 can not be understood without a knowledge of the political history of the Mississippi Territory. Indeed, southern attitudes and opinions of the ante-bellum period can be comprehended only by knowing the type of immigrant who first settled the deep South and by studying the struggles of the new settlers to control the raw environment and to create a civilization there. While the keynote of frontier life was newness and change, the newness can, and has been, over-emphasized. Immigrants into the territory had not moved from a vacuum. Instead, they had brought with them their conservative as well as liberal political techniques. A great deal has been written about the general concept of the frontier, but surprisingly little has been done on specific aspects of the southern frontier. Even the followers of Frederick Jackson Turner have ignored the lower Mississippi Valley. On the other hand, enough valuable work has already been written for the historian to test certain theories as they apply to the deep South. These works are evaluated at some length in the Bibliographical Notes, although here we might note the very useful studies of early Mississippi by Dr. William B. Hamilton and Dr. Charles Sydnor and the work on Alabama by Dr. Thomas P. Abernathy; Dr. Arthur P. Whitaker has clearly described the complicated history of the Spanish Southwest.

North Carolina had never been a docile colony. She was rough-hewn, populated by ambitious men whose interests often clashed with those sent to govern them. Yet she was a reluctant revolutionary and her citizens, so suspicious of authority, so covetous of personal independence, were slow to embrace the message of the Sons of Liberty. Between the French and Indian war and the American Revolution, between the end of salutary neglect and the beginning of independence, Carolinians witnessed a domestic revolution which altered internal politics for the decades following renunciation of British sovereignty. Before 1763 Carolina's colonial government was dominated by "gentlemen," by individuals who had become accustomed to deference from those whose birth or fortunes placed them lower on America's somewhat informal social scale. Yet in the wake of England's attempts to make her colonial policies more responsive to her own needs and as an unintended consequence of resistance to those attempts, Carolina's domestic politics drastically and permanently changed. Initially, the Albermarle hegemony was shared with men from the Cape Fear region. However, that ascendancy was destined to erode. Piedmonters were suspicious of the intentions of both easterners and gentlemen. As a result of legislative neglect, overt corruption, and reaction to the regulator controversy, they came to view Albermarlians as personifiers of both, as men who cared little for western needs. Consequently, a new political alliance, one composed of men from the central coastal plains and of their less cosmopolitan contemporaries in the west emerged simultaneously with Carolina resistance to what was perceived as British oppression. By late 1776 two dominant forces in North Carolina had been replaced: the colony had formally declared independence from Britain and informally withdrawn support from the Albermarle aristocracy. However, the local political coalition forged among those groups deteriorated as the impotence of the new government became obvious. The state was derelict in her obligations to the war effort. She was unable to field an effective militia. She could not control the deterioration of her economy, could not restrain her citizens from outrages against loyalists, nor could she moderate a growing quarrel between the bench and the state bar. Those men accustomed to prominance before 1776, men whose political sympathies were decidedly conservative, men who were uneasy with the prospect of democracy, men like Samuel Johnston, James Iredell, and Archibald Maclaine, began to realize that if they were to challenge those radicals in control of the state house they too would have to become organized. What had been a casual desire to cooperate before the Revolution became a conscious decision to form a political party thereafter. Factions which had once been despised as contrary to the common good became a political necessity. Thus, some Carolinians joined forces with other Americans who sought to amend the Articles of Confederation in the hope that national alterations in government would influence local changes. The ensuing struggle between Carolina's Federalists and Anti-Federalists dominated the years between 1787 and 1789. Ultimately, the forces supporting the Philadelphia constitution won, and that victory proved the last hurrah of the state conservatives. The political confrontations which ensued as a result of the ratification controversy, the open acknowledgement of competitive politics, ushered in a new, a modern, concept of political science in North Carolina.

Frederick County, Maryland, in the early eighteenth century had three qualities which made it highly attractive to German, Huguenot, and Scotch-Irish settlers in Pennsylvania who acutely felt the rising costs of land in that colony. The abundance of unoccupied land which was at once cheap and fertile, a legal system which offered a large measure of civil and religious liberties, and the guarantee that property rights would be protected and secure were strong magnets for those seeking better opportunity for themselves and their families. By 1790 Germans formed fully fifty percent of the county's population. Case studies of selected German settlers and their descendants who acquired land between 1738 and 1767 in the region which constitutes today's Frederick County form the basis of this study. The skills and abilities, as well as the timely arrival, of these settlers enabled them to participate in the development of this prosperous inland county and to take full advantage of its special opportunities. Official records--land, probate, tax, court, military, and church documents--provide considerable detail about this generation of Germans in the various aspects of their lives: cultural, social, economic, and political. The underlying theme of this dissertation is the subtle balance between cultural persistence and accommodation that these settlers achieved. In Frederick County the process of integration was complex and uneven. Even though Germans came at a time when they were welcomed and held many values and characteristics in common with the English, they still spoke a different language, observed different religious practices, and had a different cultural hertiage. The eighteenth century was a period in which toleration was only beginning; Germans, who were trying to preserve elements of their cultural identity while participating in the new society, encountered both prejudice and formal barriers to the acquisition of full legal and social status. In time the normative effect of the legal and economic structures influenced and modified German behavior. Yet in the process Maryland society was also affected, so that following the American Revolution, which most Germans of this study supported, there was greater toleration of diverse groups. The heterogeneity of our society, long recognized as a hallmark of American cultural life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, actually had its origins in the Middle and Southern Colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The dissertation is a close examination of the changes and continuities in law applied to prostitutes, bawdy houses, and the application of state police power by cities to segregate both into municipal vice districts. Throughout American history, moral reformers and social commentators recognized prostitution as a social, moral, and urban problem. The debate over the best policy to deal with prostitution was never louder than in the Progressive Era when states passed red-light abatement acts, when newspapers reported on white slavery, when purity crusaders were in full voice, and when cities shut down their vice districts. But prostitution as a criminal offense within the legal context of the courts and the legal traditions of American law has not been explored. If a moral reform group hired a lawyer to do something about a local prostitution problem, the lawyer would find actions in criminal law against prostitution and the keeping of disorderly and bawdy houses and he would find actions in equity to stop and prevent the immoral use of property for disorderly and bawdy purposes. And how did the red-light abatement acts change the law's procedures and standards against bawdy houses and how effective were the acts in closing bawdy houses, vice districts, or stopping prostitution? Furthermore, the turn-of-the-century lawyer might have found himself confronted with a city's policy of districting its bawdy houses and prostitutes into a specific area of the city. The seven chapters of the dissertation begin with a review of some of the writings on prostitution control in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Then the prostitute-as-vagrant, the theory used against prostitution, is examined. Disorderly houses--the property used for an immoral purpose--provides the focus for chapter three while how the courts actually dealt with disorderly house cases is reviewed in the fourth chapter. Municipalities using state police power to district their immoral houses and women, especially St. Louis and New Orleans, is considered in the fifth chapter, with Houston's decision to district its houses (and to later segregate by race those houses) provides the topic for chapter six. In 1917, Houston closed its vice district and chapter seven covers the reasons for the closing and the events leading to the shutting off the red-lights in Houston.

The Mississippi planter and poet William Alexander Percy (1885-1942) is best remembered for his autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (1941), which was a bestseller and remains a seminal book in the study of the American South. Although scholars have traditionally portrayed Percy as an iconic provincial, he maintained an ambivalence towards his region---particularly towards local values regarding masculinity and sexuality. Percy left the South regularly and traveled across the world, and his encounters abroad informed his views about gender, sexuality, and race at home. Cosmopolitan Southerner maps connections between the American South and the broader world by tracing Will Percy's travels across the globe: from Mississippi to the Mediterranean, to such places as Paris and Japan and Samoa, back to Mississippi. Will Percy's life story invites consideration of how one man became a sexual liberationist, cultural relativist, white supremacist in late Victorian Mississippi. I engage the paradox of Percy's life and personality to make three main arguments. First, I examine the ways the experience, performance, and construction of gender and sexuality were connected to the concept of place. Will Percy's heterodox views of sexuality and what it meant to be a man---namely, his belief that love between men was not only legitimate but a superior form of love---can only be understood by studying the ways he experienced reality in different cultural contexts. Second, I examine the ways Percy participated in an international intellectual tradition centered on the idea of ancient Greece as a kind of spiritual "home" for men with gay desire. The nostalgia that many have interpreted as Percy's longing for the Old South was, in fact, an important imaginative vehicle many men used to express homoerotic desire in a culturally sanctioned idiom. Finally, I examine Percy's essentially racist critique of modernity---a critique also grounded in values of cultural relativism and sexual liberation. In situating Percy's view of racial difference in the context of his cross-cultural encounters. I find that his interpretations of race and "primitivism" worked to simultaneously critique bourgeois sexual ethics and reinforce the structures of racial inequality in the American South.

Alexander Hobbs's diary records, from a Union perspective, the excitement of enlistment, impressions of southerners--both black and white--the confusion of combat, and the depression and helplessness of a prisoner of war. Hobbs, serving the Union as an infantryman in Louisiana and Texas, also preserves his experiences at a critical change in Civil War policy concerning parole and exchange. He is one of the last Civil War soldiers to be incarcerated as a parolee under the Dix-Hill Cartel by his own government. Never exchanged, he finally returns to Massachusetts. Originally from Canada, Hobbs enlisted with the Forty-second Massachusetts Regiment in September 1862, fought in the Battle of Galveston on January 1, 1863, and was captured there. After being imprisoned in Houston, he was marched as a parolee from Texas to Louisiana, where he was held in a Union parole camp until discharged in July 1863.

Created in 1902, the United States District Court, Southern District of Texas quickly grew into one of the nation's largest and busiest federal trial courts. Serving the rapidly maturing region of southeast Texas, the Court soon had a large and unmanageable docket of public and private cases. Despite the addition of a new judge in 1942 and two new judges in 1949, the Southern District's extensive caseload constantly exceeded the ability of the Court's judges to effectively adjudicate all the business before them. Faced with caseload gridlock, the judges were forced to set priorities between the Court's various public and private functions, giving some categories of action precedence over others. The resulting choices shaped both the actions of the Southern District Court and its wider social, economic and political effects. During the Court's first sixty years, one choice predominated. Pressed by various political, economic, social, personal and legal forces all stressing the need to promote the rapid economic development of southeast Texas, the Court's judges emphasized service to the private economic needs of regional and national businesses. They did this despite the presence of a strong public agenda demanding strict enforcement of government economic and social regulations. The end product of this private emphasis was that the Southern District Court served as a tool for businessmen in their drive to dominate southeast Texas's social, political and economic development. Though only one of many tools utilized by proponents of private economic development, the Southern District Court was especially effective in promoting the stable patterns of growth necessary for private control of southeast Texas's future. As a relatively independent institution able set its own agenda, the Court quickly adapted its services to meet the changing needs of businesses for stability or expansion. In tough economic times, the Court protected vulnerable and failed business from collapse; in times of expansion, it promoted strict standards of ethical business behavior needed for stability. The end result was that the Court played an important, perhaps key, role in promoting business's domination of southeast Texas in the twentieth century, and hence, in shaping southeast Texas's development.

Contributing to the movement to separate church and state in revolutionary Virginia, John Leland formed a unique discourse that utiltized the similarities inherent in evangelical religion and republican ideology. Building upon the language of his New England brethren, which stressed the inconsistencies of republican rhetoric and religious persecution, Leland merged this language with the evangelical movement in Virginia. Through his actions in Virginia, Leland became an important Baptist leader and political ally. He joined the Baptist associations fighting to disestablish religion in that state and became immersed in the politics affecting the region. This involvement included influencing his congregations at the polls and affecting the elections of prominent constitutional figures such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

The American regular army gained permanence in the early nineteenth century after overcoming numerous social and political obstacles, most notably a strong militia tradition. The War of 1812 and its aftermath established conditions for professional reform. The army now had a mission: to prepare for another seaborne attack from Europe. That sense of purpose allowed the officer corps to grow in collective ability, institutional autonomy, and corporate identity. The army developed an ethic of responsibility to the state. Intellectually, however, officers derived professional expertise primarily from French sources, mainly in military engineering. The U.S. Military Academy reinforced those trends and fostered "a system and habit of thought" in the officer corps. The profession, maturing quickly in other ways, remained intellectually adolescent. In 1855 Secretary of War Jefferson Davis dispatched Major Richard Delafield, Major Alfred Mordecai, and Captain George B. McClellan to Europe and the Crimean War to seek the newest professional expertise. The Delafield Commission was the most ambitious military observer mission to date, the first sent to observe on-going war. During the year-long tour they traveled throughout Europe and exemplified the characteristic traits of the professional officer corps--corporateness and responsibility. The Delafield Commission was a milepost in the history of American military professionalism. Most noteworthy were the reports that the commissioners wrote after their return, wherein they published a wealth of information useful to their respective branches. Yet the reports manifest the limits of antebellum professionalization: "a system and habit of thought" circumscribed their efforts. The commissioners demonstrated a narrow particularity that focused attention on technical details. They discarded the army's francophile paradigm, but quickly replaced it with an equally uncritical adoration of the Russians. They made reform suggestions, but mostly reaffirmed the status quo, especially the felt necessity for preparing for a European invasion. They refused to reach outside parochial branch interests to collaborate on a single report addressing broad issues of military policy and strategy. The mid-nineteenth century army's best minds were as yet incapable of synthesizing their European observations with their own experiences to create a uniquely American professional expertise.

Texans, native and adopted, have continually broadcast the advantages of moving to their state. Over the years they believed an investment of time and energy meant they could influence this flow of migration. A prodigious outpouring of such enticement literature, as identified in this research, documents the enthusiasm such endeavors possessed. Newspapers around the state, almanacs, business pamphlets, railroad brochures, both personal and published letters, as well as government documents, all contributed to this outgoing flood of information. The multiple campaigns of boosterism were fueled in some sense from the heavy migration into the state--this migration justifying by its presence the perception that the written words did in fact move people. The desire to entice immigrants (a term defining people not by their ethnicity but by their mobility) to Texas found voice immediately after the Civil War. The chaos resulting from war and the freeing of the slaves seemed overwhelming to landowners and they called for cooperative efforts to encourage immigrants to "Come to Texas." As the early turmoil settled out into the rhythm of agricultural seasons, urgent pleas for immigrants became a more steadied ongoing effort at advertising the values in moving to Texas. The Texas Bureau of immigration, born through the 1869 constitution, served as an official state agency facilitating immigration. When the 1876 "redeemer" constitution became law, it included a prohibition against using tax money "for any purpose of bringing immigrants to the State." Research indicates that such an interdiction was not evidence of anti-immigrant feeling, but rather a desire for fiscal retrenchment. Private initiative stepped into the vacuum thus created, as the flow of written material continued. Immigration societies published material, individuals wrote letters, businesses produced pamphlets, newspapers generated columns of information, and books of many shapes and sizes joined in the effort to entice newcomers. Yet, another part of the story was the determined work of Galveston's citizens to promote their bay as the premier port for the state and the ideal entryway for the immigrant. The value placed on words by Texans was substantial and the resulting migration into Texas sustained that work.