My dissertation studies Jackson-era elites’ adoptions of young Southeast Indian men into their households between the Creek War and the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Andrew Jackson, a Southern General and, eventually, President of the United States; Thomas Loraine McKenney, Superintendent of Indian Affairs; and John Henry Eaton, Secretary of War during Jackson’s Presidency, counted themselves amongst the pro-slavery politicians who adopted Southeast Indian “sons” while advocating for or enabling the expansion of U.S. plantation slavery into Southeast Indian territories. By considering these adoptions as a shared practice rather than as novel events, this project looks at how interrelated policies and practices relating to Anglo-Indian warfare and borderland relationships, racial slavery, and ideas about “liberal” family life made adopting Indian men both imaginable and important in the shifting cultural, political, and territorial landscape of the United States. Situating these adoptions within the imperialistic “domestic” and international political economies of the late Republican and early antebellum period, I argue, allows us to uncover the diverse and unexpected ways in which early U.S.-American political thinkers relied upon the racialized and gendered space of the household to reflect, as well as to further, the violence of U.S. policies. In bringing the household into the center of my analysis of U.S. imperialism, I also hope to better understand the contexts in which “domestic” captives negotiated personal and political sovereignty.