“Man of Treacherous Charm” is Wellman’s third book examining intercultural marriage in the Northwest, following “Peace Weavers” and “Interwoven Lives.”

Independent historian Candace Wellman has written two previous books on the long-overlooked impact of intercultural marriages between Indigenous women and early white male settlers to the Northwest. Now she turns her attention to the convoluted story of one of those men.

In “Man of Treacherous Charm,” Wellman delves into the business, political, legal and marital machinations of Edmund C. Fitzhugh, a loyal Southerner who spent 10 years on the West Coast, most consequentially in Washington. He was the embodiment of what we have come to call, two centuries later, white privilege.

Born into a Virginia blue blood family but unable to complete the coursework he was offered first at Georgetown and later at West Point, Fitzhugh resorted to studying law less formally.

This week’s book

“Man of Treacherous Charm” by Candace Wellman

Washington State University Press — 338 pp — $32.95

As a young man, he engaged in slave trading and Virginia politics before joining the migration to California in 1849, where he hung out his shingle as a lawyer.

The United States’ westward expansion portended a heyday for legal wrangling, and Fitzhugh was not the only attorney to make his way west. Wellman quotes one lawyer who exults about the “cheering and exhilarating prospects of fussing, quarreling, murdering, violation of contracts…”

The West offered plum new appointments, too, in local, state and federal governments. Fitzhugh was one of many Southern Democrats who wanted to ensure that this rapid expansion elevated policies that were supportive of the Southern economic reliance on slavery.

When coal was discovered in Washington, Fitzhugh traveled north to Bellingham to manage a promising new mine, and to continue promoting the Democrats’ pro-slavery politics of the time.

He took two Indigenous wives, who were sisters, to run his household and to expand his political network. Exerting his force of personality, he got himself elected as Whatcom County’s first auditor.

Fitzhugh continued working his connections to gain appointments as the first local Indian agent during the Treaty War, as aide to ambitious territorial Gov. Isaac Stevens, and as militia inspector. He then served as district and supreme court justice — even though he was elevated to the federal bench while under indictment for murder, and faced a later gambling charge.

Later, Fitzhugh kidnapped his children, one by each of his wives, and relocated them to a far-off white family to be purged of their mothers’ Indigenous culture. The bereaved wives, deprived of any recourse, abandoned him.

Fitzhugh had two later marriages to white women, neither of which lasted long. And when it became clear that the pro-slavery movement was weakening on the West Coast, Fitzhugh traveled back East to join Confederate forces in 1863, where he fought until surrendering at Appomattox.

In this book, Wellman has compiled the history of a man who lived according to a complicated and often corrupt social code. But it was on the foundational work of men such as Fitzhugh that the United States was built. Now isn’t that thorny food for thought?