Settlers as conquerors

En savoir plus sur le livre

In early America, the idea of granting undeveloped land for free gained traction among rural poor and social reformers. However, Congress viewed this demand as fiscally irresponsible until the Jacksonian era, leading proponents to frame it as a military necessity: land grantees would replace troops in efforts to expand the continent at the expense of Native nations and rival colonial powers. The book explores the debates over free land from the 1790s to the 1850s and examines the settlement experiences under the donation laws for Florida (1842) and the Oregon Territory (1850). These laws aimed to align the interests of poorer whites with government goals, explicitly excluding African Americans and displacing Native peoples. Utilizing new records, the author details how these settler-imperialist experiments ultimately failed, as settlers fled Florida due to malaria and violence in Oregon undermined their reliability as agents of government aims. This work provides a comprehensive analysis of free land in antebellum America, highlighting the limitations of settler colonialism in Florida and the appeal of settler occupation in Oregon to federal legislators. The government’s promise of free land to encourage squatter sovereignty is a compelling argument, revealing the complex interplay between land policy, Indian Removal, and race in the antebellum American West.