A lawless rabble: Henry Clay and the cultural politics of squatters' rights, 1832-1841

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 28, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 337-378

  Van Atta, John R ^a  

^a Brunswick School   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63749097465     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jer.0.0020     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, DC, 1968), 246, 233
2. Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776-1970 (Lincoln, NE, 1976), 91, 90
3. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837 (New York, 1968), esp. 200-20
4. More recently, Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979)
5. Daniel Feller, The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics (Madison, WI, 1984)
6. Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York, 1987)
7. Maurice G. Baxter, Henry Clay and the American System (Lexington, KY, 1995)
8. and John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001) all have provided more balanced consideration of the Clay side, but none of these works explores in detail why he was so unrelenting on the question of squatters' rights
9. For a part of my own view of Clay, see John R. Van Atta, "Western Lands and the Political Economy of Henry Clay's American System, 1819-1832," Journal of the Early Republic 21 (Winter 2001), 633-65
10. Congressional Globe, 25th Cong., 2nd sess., Appendix, 134
11. See in particular, John L. Brooke, "Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic," ibid., 207-250, esp. 229
12. See generally Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980)
13. and Peter McNamara, Political Economy and Statesmanship: Smith, Hamilton and the Foundation of the Commercial Republic (DeKalb, IL, 1998)
14. On the meaning of "Indianness," see Brooke, "Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere," 232
15. On post-Revolutionary land policy, see Peter S. Onuf, "Liberty, Development, and Union: Visions of the West in the 1780s," William and Mary Quarterly 43 (Apr. 1986), 179-213
16. See also Cayton, '"Separate Interests' and the Nation-State: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West," Journal of American History 79 (June 1992), 39-67
17. McNamara, Political Economy and Statesmanship, 116-18
18. See also Peter J. Kastor, The Nation's Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven, CT, 2004)
19. and Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, VA, 2000)
20. Humphrey Marshall, quoted in Paul W. Gates, Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier: Studies in American Land Policy (Ithaca, NY, 1973), 14
21. Stephen Aron, "Pioneers and Profiteers: Land Speculation and the Homestead Ethic in Frontier Kentucky," Western Historical Quarterly 23 (May 1992), 179-98, esp. 197
22. On the occupying claimant laws, see Gates, Landlords and Tenants, 25-28
23. On Kentucky's loss of population, see Thomas L. Purvis, "The Ethnic Descent of Kentucky's Early Population, A Statistical Investigation of European and American Sources of Emigration, 1790-1820," The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 80 (1982), 253-66
24. "Remarks on Payment for Wartime Property Losses," ibid., 2nd sess., Jan. 6, 1817, 426-28, esp. 426
25. On land distribution in Lexington, see Aron, How the West Was Lost, 139-43, esp. 140
26. For Clay's political constituency in the West, see Donald J. Ratcliffe, "The Role of Voters and Issues in Party Formation: Ohio, 1824," Journal of American History 59 (Mar. 1973), 847-70
27. Also, editorial note, in Hopkins, et al., Papers of Henry Clay, 3: 47
28. On the "forty-acre law," see Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 213-14
29. Dwight, quoted in Robert W. McCluggage, "The Pioneer Squatter," Illinois Historical Journal 82 (Spring 1989), 47-54, esp., 48-49
30. "Conventions for Adopting the Federal Constitution," The North American Review 25 (Oct. 1827), 249-78, esp. 273
31. "Rain. A Colloquial Lecture," The New-England Magazine 9 (Oct. 1835), 247-52, esp. 248
32. On "middle-class" values in the early republic, see Jennifer L. Goloboy, "The Early American Middle Class," Journal of the Early Republic 25 (Winter 2005), 537-45
33. and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), 347-69
34. On the opposing class "languages" of Jacksonians and Whigs, see Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, VA, 1992), 60-95
35. On preemption legislation before 1830, see Feller, Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics, 24, 126-29
36. also, Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, 219-48
37. Roy M. Robbins, in Our Landed Heritage, associated Clay with "the rising strength of Hamiltonian forces" (36-37)
38. "Application of Missouri in relation to the adoption of a new system for the permanent disposition of the public lands," Feb. 22, 1833, in American State Papers, Public Lands, 6: 612-13
39. For a suggestive interpretation of the motivation of many western migrants, especially those from the South, see Andrew R. L. Cayton, "Continental Politics: Liberalism, Nationalism, and the Appeal of Texas in the 1820s," in Pasley, Robertson, and Waldstreicher, Beyond the Founders, 303-27, esp. 304-9
40. On Evans and other New York radicals, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: Nexu York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984)
41. and Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800-1862 (Stanford, CA, 1999)
42. Also, Thomas Skidmore, The Rights of Man to Property (New York, 1829), 137-44, 273-83
43. On the expansion of the public sphere in the early republic, see Brooke, "Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere," 224-30
44. Still one of the most perceptive treatments of the political culture of Jacksonianism, see Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford, CA, 1957)
45. See also Rush Welter, The Mind of America, 1820-1860 (New York, 197,5), 77-104
46. and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), 181-518
47. On the "corruption" theme, see Michael A. Morrison, "Distribution or Dissolution: Western Land Policy, Economic Development, and the Language of Corruption, 1837-41," American Nineteenth Century History 1 (Spring 2000), 1-33
48. For Clay's remarks on the Walker bill, and for Walker's response, see Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 1st sess., 1028-30
49. For the land policy statement of Walker's Senate committee, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Committee of Public Lands on graduating and reducing the price of public lands to actual settlers, S. doc. 402, 24th Cong., 1st sess. (serial no. 283)
50. Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 2nd sess., 360-76
51. Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 2nd sess., 662-63 (esp. 662)
52. "Application of Wisconsin for the extension of the pre-emption laws to the lands recently acquired from the Indians," Jan. 23, 1837, American State Papers, Public Lands, 5: 928
53. On the Panic, see Reginald C. McGrane, The Panic of 1837: Some Financial Problems of the Jacksonian Era (Chicago, 1924)
54. Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (New York, 1969)
55. Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1961)
56. Stuart Weems Bruchey, The Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861 (New York, 1965)
57. Bruchey, Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People (Cambridge, MA, 1990)
58. and Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jachonian America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991)
59. Cong. Globe, 25th Cong., 2nd sess., Appendix, 1,5-17 (esp. 16)
60. For the public lands part of Van Buren's First Annual Message, see Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 3: 384-89
61. See Clay's reported comments in Gong. Globe, 25th Cong., 2nd sess., 142-43
62. Colton, Works, 8: 92
63. See Peter W. Parish, "Daniel Webster, New England, and the West," Journal of American History 54 (Dec. 1967), 524-49
64. and Peterson, Great Triumvirate, 267-68
65. "How Stands the Case," United States Magazine and Democratic Review 3 (Sept. 1838), 10, 4
66. "Speech in Nashville," Aug. 17, 1840, ibid., 439-41, esp. 440
67. On Bingham generally, see Nancy Rash, The Painting and Politics of George Caleb Bingham (New Haven, CT, 1991)
68. For similarly negative characterizations of squatters after 1841, see "The Life and Character of Thomas Paine," The North American Review 57 (July 1843), 1-58, esp. 4
69. "Scotch Squatters," Littell's Living Age 6 (July 19,1845), 152
70. "Everstone," The American Whig Review 11 (Jan. 1850), 77-98, esp. 95
71. On land auction prices, see Feller, Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics, 194
72. See Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, 1999), 136
73. Tipton, "Speech on Pre-emption Bill," Jan. 27, 1838, in Blackburn, Robertson, and Riker, John Tipton Papers, 3: 519, 51