begin this chapter about the history of land struggles in the United States, it would be fair to again note that the following proprietary injustices were only made possible through the similarly unjust usurpation of the continent by white settlers. By the second generation after colonization, however, little blame could realistically be placed on American residents whose luck had them born onto a stolen continent. Poverty-stricken pioneers moved westward in search of affordable habitation (and occasionally in search of profit) and they were subject to the whims of a fickle federal government that struggled to balance legislation as both lucrative and fair to republican ideals.
Since the arrival of Europeans in North America, land and power have been conflated concepts—the goal of capitalist settlers being to procure as much land as possible. In the New World’s colonial days, the Crown insisted on relatively formal methods of land acquisition, preferring internationally recognized treaties with Natives to bloody conquest. The British did not rule out violence as an option, but according to their Doctrine of Discovery, it was to be used as a last resort should Indians respond poorly to the offer of a treaty agreement. This is not to suggest that the hands of the British colonizers were clean; indeed, their ideas about how a “New World” should be utilized are markedly objectionable by today’s human rights standards.
Ward Churchill writes in his essay “Perversion of Justice” that “a person or a people [was] ultimately entitled to only that quantity of real estate which s/he/they convert from ‘wilderness’ to a ‘domesticated’ state. By this criterion, English settlers were seen as possessing an inherent right to dispossess native people of all land other than that which the latter might be ‘reasonably expected’ to put to such ‘proper’ usage as cultivation.”[3] This practice would nearly always eliminate Native Americans’ claim to land. In 1763, however, King George III broke the conflation of land and power in his proclamation that no land further west than Appalachia was to be settled by colonizers for fear of disrupting the fur trade and risking further Indian warfare.[4]
Possibly anticipating the Revolution of 1776, in 1773 George Washington, among others, defied the king’s proclamation in order to pursue land speculation further west. At this point, the motives of the burgeoning new nation became possibly more dubious than those of Great Britain. The new Americans did not respect treaties to the extent that many international players appeared to; they frequently assumed land title without consulting Natives at all, and even when they did sign treaties, the settlers regularly neglected the terms and later breached the contracts (with few repercussions).[5]
This bulldozer approach of the new Americans proved lucrative after the revolution when the former colonies offered to admit the Western states into the now-independent United States, in exchange for the use of Western lands. Fearing that taxes would drive Eastern residents west and cause the federal government to lose money, Eastern bureaucrats plotted to absorb and develop everything west of the Mississippi and then collect revenue by selling off large parcels of public land to speculators. In turn, the speculators would divide that land into smaller parcels and flip them to settlers at an inflated price.[6] The Land Ordinance of 1785 dictated how these lands would be divided. Counterintuitively, auctions for land in the West were only held in Eastern cities, and bidders could only buy 640 acres or more at $1 an acre or more. Because of this distribution framework, the settlers themselves could not buy land outright; only speculators, or “land-jobbers,” had that privilege.[7] But, as Mike Davis would write of such unfathomable capitalist monstrosities as Dubai two centuries later, “What is too often flipped, some economists predict, may someday flop.”[8] And the same was true in eighteenth-century America.
Squatting on the frontier was a problem for institutions from the onset. With little enforcement structure in place to prevent illegal occupation, settlers grabbed land where they saw it not in use—which compelled the Jefferson administration Congress to craft strict laws against illegal settlements. With the act of March 26, 1804, squatters north of the Ohio River (which was Indian territory) or in Louisiana were subject to a $1,000 fine or a year in prison. The act also authorized the army to use its force toward ejectments. With the act of March 3, 1807, came more penalties for squatters. But it also made for one of the first legal leniencies in regard to land: If settlers were already living on a plot, they were permitted to retain up to 320 acres of it as long as they registered at the land office and signed a statement claiming no right to the property and pledging to leave when it was sold. Squatters who refused this deal would be fined $100 and risked a prison sentence of six months.[9]
Squatting wasn’t exclusively a Western phenomenon, however: In 1726, there were upwards of 100,000 squatters in Pennsylvania alone. In 1784, Pennsylvania as well as Massachusetts began a series of preemptive measures to transfer title to squatters in those states. Massachusetts (still in possession of Maine at the time) recognized occupancy rights of squatters who had improved the land, particularly in the Maine territory, which Massachusetts had hoped to settle.[a] Not having title to land was common, at one time, particularly in the original colonies and before the revolution. In 1776, Virginia handed out 400 acres free of charge to each settler, and the next year North Carolina gave away 640 acres of unclaimed land to any settler who wanted it. The faster land was transferred to private ownership, the faster the government could accrue revenue from it.[10]
The United States continued to voraciously consume land. In 1819, the federal government acquired Florida from Spain. In 1845, it acquired Texas from the Republic of Texas. In 1846, it acquired Oregon territory from Great Britain by treaty. In 1848, the Mexican Cession granted the United States California, Nevada, New Mexico, most of Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Utah. The 1853 Gadsden Purchase transferred the rest of Arizona, and in 1867 the U.S. acquired Alaska from Russia. Over the course of fifty years, the country padded itself by 300 percent. It was described at the time as being the “best system in the world.”[11]
There was something fishy about the pattern of land distribution, however. With the government continuously selling the public domain in order to fund its ever-expanding presence, matters of equitable distribution were overlooked. By 1792, for example, only six people owned half of the current state of New York.[12] According to historian Paul W. Gates, “In New York, revenue and even promotion of settlements were of minor importance. Instead, the emphasis was on large grants of members of the governor’s council and other favorite individuals and families, with all settlement or improvement requirements quite generally disregarded.”[13]
Gates explains further that independence from Britain scarcely impacted the course of land management in the state. At the time of the first national census in 1790, New York was significantly stunted in terms of population and economic growth when compared with Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, and North Carolina, despite its longer history. This was because a small number of land barons owned a very large acreage of land.[14]
One of the most incredible stories to come from New York’s bizarre history of land tenure—and resistance to its injustices—is that of Rensselaerwyck and the Anti-Rent War, which began on July 4, 1839, and marked the beginning of a new era in land law in the Hudson River Valley. The twenty-four square miles of Rensselaerwyck (which is now Albany and Rensselaer Counties) was owned by Stephen Van Rensselaer III, and had been in the family for 207 years since New York was New Netherland. The Van Rensselaers ran their manor as a patroonship—an archaic form of feudalism rooted in Dutch property law. Under the patroonship, each of the 3,063 families on the manor signed leases that lasted “forever” and amounted to, in their own words, “voluntary slavery.” The Van Rensselaers had successfully peopled their land by offering prospective settlers the first seven years rent free. Many of the contracts had also been signed by very poor or illiterate settlers who did not understand the outrageous terms of the lease.[15]
When Stephen III, whom many had regarded as the “richest man in America,” died in 1839, his tenants were relieved to think that their unpaid rents might be forgiven. They were infuriated to learn that his son, Stephen IV, intended to collect the back-rents, or rents in arrears, and apply them toward his own personal debt.
