their land. At auctions, if a speculator attempted to purchase the squatted land, he would be “knocked down and dragged out” of the room. As a last resort, squatters threatened to “burn powder in their faces.” If squatters went to jail for these types of actions, everyone in the association would chip in to pay the bail. If squatters went to court, a jury of their peers would consistently acquit.[22]
Settlers’ associations—also known as “squatters’ associations” or “claimants’ clubs”—became so popular beginning in 1824, that on March 31, 1830, Congress banned group intimidation tactics, threatening potential lawbreakers with $1,000 fine and two years in prison. One attendee of an Alabama auction at which claimants’ club members were present wrote, “The general opinion is…that these men will murder any man, or set of men, who bid for this land against their body.” Because of this mean reputation, many settlers’ associations earned the respect of land officers, moneylenders, speculators, and potential claim-jumpers, and eventually formed a larger Squatters’ Union in 1936.[23]
Settling on federally owned land had been criminalized by the Jefferson administration in 1804, and squatters were threatened with fines and imprisonment. Yet, “there is little evidence that Western people were intimated by the laws.”[24] Easterners tended to view squatters as “lawless land-grabbers,” a result of the growing absentee landlordism that was problematic both to squatters and legal settlers of the West alike. Absentee landlords consistently failed to improve their land, preferring to wait until tenants or squatters did it for them. Furthermore, owner-occupied lands tended to yield more affluent communities because residents felt a sense of direct investment in their surroundings, while absentee-owner properties made way for poorer communities, even decades later.[25]
In response to the problem of absentee landlords, local governments began to write their own property law as a method of undermining federal policy. Examples of this included raising taxes on unoccupied land and requiring the taxes to be paid in coins only, which was near impossible for absentee owners. Lawmakers also sometimes compelled landowners to reimburse evicted squatters for any improvements that they made to the land during their occupancy under color of title.[26]
Eduardo Moisés Peñalver and Sonia K. Katyal posit in their book Property Outlaws that disgruntled settlers were actually able to alter the written law by pushing the envelope in a tenuous social climate. Without squatters intentionally breaking the law, legislation like adverse possession would have never been accepted into the legal compendium. Further, all of the legislative alterations that comprised a series of preemption acts from 1815 until the most famous in 1841 were brought about through petitions and general public unrest.
The preemption statutes incrementally awarded illegal settlers land on a case-by-case basis according to certain conditions, including but not limited to the magnitude of improvements made on the land by those settlers. Between 1820 and 1829, the federal government awarded 179,717 acres to settlers without title in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida, and Alabama (data on other states is not available before 1830). Between 1830 and 1836, the government awarded over two and a half million acres in Alabama, Missouri, Louisiana, Michigan, Arkansas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Mississippi—the highest number in any individual state in one year being Alabama in 1824 with 338,985 acres awarded.[27]
The argument against preemption was that such allotments “would forgive and reward men who had violated anti-intrusion laws.” The Premption Act of 1830, however, addressed this concern by requiring that settlers pay $1.25 an acre for land that was not already reserved by another buyer—though these preemptive measures only lasted for one year. What settlers really wanted was land for free and to be able to compensate the government later after they had drawn income using the land’s resources. Conditions such as this one prompted settlers to appeal to the government with petitions and stories of poverty. In many cases, a profusion of objections to land legislation actually effected change: In 1815, for example, James Madison attempted to eject all illegal settlements in Indiana, but overwhelming public outcry compelled him to legalize every settlement in the territory. In Thomas Jefferson’s proclamation in December of the same year, he decried occupiers of the public domain as “uninformed and evil-disposed persons,” threatening them with military force. Few squatters were intimidated by such proclamations, and a delegate from the Indiana Territory, Jonathan Jennings, argued to Congress that squatting resulted from the government’s own failing to put the land on the market.[28] So in 1819, Congress passed the Occupancy Law, which mandated that squatters either get paid for the improvements they made on a property or have an opportunity to buy it minus the cost of the improvements.[29]
Application of the adverse possession statute, too, was popular during this time—and not only in the West, but also in Maine, which was sparsely populated and in many ways also considered wilderness. In the nineteenth century, Maine, along with the states of the West, used local courts to piecemeal rewrite American property law to favor occupants over owners. The majority of land in Maine was owned by a handful of wealthy land speculators known as the Great Proprietors, the corollary of which were the Liberty Men—the gang-like organization that led the resistance effort in the region. Similar gangs developed in other localities—such as the Wild Yankees in northeastern Pennsylvania, the Whiskey Rebels in Western Pennsylvania, the Green Mountain Boys in Vermont, the Liberty Boys in New Jersey, and the Berkshire Constitutionalists in Massachusetts—resulting in uprisings such as Ely’s Rebellion, Fries’ Rebellion, and Shays’ Rebellion (also known as the New England Regulation). Between the 1740s and the 1830s, settlers also revolted against landlords and speculators with riots and gang warfare in South Carolina, Ohio, and New York. These settlers “believed in a different American Revolution, one meant to protect small producers from the moneyed men who did not live by their own labor, but, instead, preyed on the many who did,” writes Alan Taylor in Liberty Men and the Great Proprietors. “Agrarians dreaded prolonged economic dependence as tenants or wageworkers as the path to ‘slavery.’”[f]
In Maine, land was constantly disputed on account of conflicting patents. The three major patents were drawn up by British lawyers who had never even seen the territory, so they were often imprecise and overlapping. These three major patents were claimed by the Great Proprietors, but they were further in conflict with ten other, smaller land patents. To make things more confusing, tracts of land were frequently sold and resold by local Indians to white settlers who didn’t understand that several other people were also under the impression of ownership. Consequently, property titles were unclear in most of the region—though the Great Proprietors could more easily back their unfounded claims with wealth and sued settlers who purchased land from the competition.[30]
Despite being the original developers of schools, meetinghouses, gristmills, sawmills, and roads in their towns, the settlers were compelled to pay the Great Proprietors for their use of the land. “Because wilderness land was virtually worthless without men to improve it, the settlers created the value that the proprietors demanded from them.” This should not suggest that settlers were opposed to private property; instead, the “cultural expectations of rural equality taught that a man should hold only what his family could improve,” which was usually about 50–150 acres per working male.[31]
The Great Proprietors, on the other hand, maintained the illusion that they were intellectually superior and that it was their moral obligation to guide the backcountry pioneers into a mode of civilization and sophistication. With disdain, they viewed the frontier as “an escape hatch that allowed men and women to evade discipline, morality, and law. So long as that outlet existed, the poor would remain saucy and uncooperative, and the frontier would sustain a squatter anarchy where quasi-Indian whites squandered nature’s bounty to live in idle dissipation.” The proprietors’ measure against this threat of sustained backcountry ignorance and degeneracy was to impose an “entry fee” to the frontier, limiting settlers to only those upright citizens who could afford pioneering, and molding the enlightened Maine that they envisioned. After all, if they failed, squatters might “preempt the vast American frontier for an asylum of the turbulent poor lost
