Students of American foreign policy in the early national period tend to focus on the national government and political parties to explain the internal dynamics of their subject and its successes and failures. Local studies generally have reinforced this historiographical tendency and further illuminated the political center of foreign policymaking and execution. We also have a rich literature on the international context of early American foreign policy, its ideological backdrop, the interplay of personalities, and the views of particular Founding Fathers. What we lack is much understanding of how the outlook in the territorial peripheries related to the course and conduct of external relations in the early United States.In New England and Foreign Relations 1789-1850, Paul Varg states that "historians of American foreign relations concentrate their attention on decision making in the nation's capital and give only slight attention to the role of regions in asserting their foreign policy interests."' Seeking to redress this imbalance, Varg traces in detail New England's changing character and its perspective on foreign policy down to 1850. By then, he argues, New England's outlook had lost its distinctiveness. This article presents another region of the United States-the American borderland along the northern frontier-for similar, albeit briefer consideration. In particular, it surveys the reaction of the more thickly settled and economically developed sectors of this American-provincial borderland to two policies of the Jeffersonian era, the embargo and the War of 1812. The evidence suggests that historians
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