Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, And The Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy by John Suval

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, And The Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy by John Suval Kenneth R. Coleman DANGEROUS GROUND: SQUATTERS, STATESMEN, AND THE ANTEBELLUM RUPTURE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY by John Suval Oxford University Press, New York, 2022. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 296 pages. $35.00 cloth. In his first book, John Suval makes a novel contribution to the literature on settler colonialism (and Civil War causation) by replacing the term “settler” with a largely overlooked nineteenth-century term for the hordes of farmers, planters, and speculators who ventured west to occupy land without legal title: squatters. In the 1830s, Andrew Jackson’s new Democratic Party rebranded squatters from lawless interlopers to Indian-fighting heroes who enlarged the nation at little cost to the federal government. Democratic politicians promoted land-for-votes policies that allowed squatters to bypass auctions and purchase the land they occupied at fixed prices. This strategy, deeply rooted in White supremacy, allowed the Democrats to forge a national coalition of planters, farmers, and immigrants that transcended social class. But according to Suval, a specter haunted this squatter-statesman alliance: slavery. The emergence of the Free Soil ideology among many squatters put them at odds with pro-slavery Democratic politicians. Suval argues that this contradiction, at the heart of what he calls Squatter Democracy, led directly to Bleeding Kansas, the fracturing of the Democratic Party, and the Civil War itself. In the book’s early chapters, Suval describes how squatters transitioned from figures of scorn to veneration. In the early republic, most Federalists abhorred squatters for intruding on public land they envisioned as a future source of revenue for nation building. With the rise of Jackson, many elites promoted squatters as a cost-effective means to clear land for future settlements. Democratic politicians promoted pre-emption legislation that worked in conjunction with Indian removal policies, ensuring that White men would dominate Jacksonian Democracy and the American West itself. Even the Whig Party, founded in opposition to Jackson’s policies, had to embrace squatterism or perish at the polls. Chapters four and five describe how squatters in the 1830s and 1840s drove the national agenda. The Anglo-Americans who entered Texas and Oregon occupied land outside of U.S. public domain, risking potential conflict with Indigenous communities as well as Mexico and Great Britain. The Polk administration backed these squatters by annexing Texas, claiming Oregon via treaty, and invading Mexico. By 1848, U.S. possessions extended to the Pacific Ocean. Suval cites the acquisition of Oregon Territory and passage of the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Act as the “high water mark of Squatter Democracy” (p. 113). Indeed, in Oregon (and later Kansas), squatters successfully claimed land before the federal government extinguished Indigenous title, a violation of U.S. legal precedent. Yet Oregon’s status as a free territory represented a turning point, as pro-slavery Democrats realized they had created a monster they could no longer control. The book’s final chapters chronicle the dis-integration of the squatter-statesman alliance. While southern elites hoped newly acquired California would legalize slavery, the scores of antislavery squatters who entered the region to claim Mexican land had different plans. Sectional temperatures rose further in 1854 when Stephen A. Douglas proposed popular sovereignty in Kansas, allowing squatters to decide the issue of slavery for themselves at the polls. The result was a violent clash between pro-and anti-slavery forces, triggering a backlash against what detractors [End Page 98] called “squatter sovereignty.” Unable to reach a compromise on slavery in western territories, the Democratic Party soon split along sectional lines and all but guaranteed the election of Abraham Lincoln and southern secession. Dangerous Grounds is an extensively researched, convincingly argued, and readable political history with a fascinating dash of cultural history. Readers of this journal will be particularly interested that Suval makes the U.S. colonization of Oregon a key moment in his narrative. The book might have been strengthened by more robust discussions of property rights and democracy itself. Indeed, Suval’s use of the upper-case Democracy in the title and elsewhere is somewhat confusing. By “Democracy,” Suval does not refer to a system in which the masses...