Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785–1850 by John R. Van Atta (review)

Abstract

Securing West: Politics, Public Lands, and Fate of Old Republic, 1785-1850. By John R. Van Atta. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. 312. Cloth, $54.95.)Reviewed by Daniel FellerEvery generation or so, someone rediscovers importance of public land issue in early republic. Nearly a century ago, Fr ederick Jackson Turner and his students pegged political interplay of sections and regions as main determinant of federal land policy for seven new western states that entered Union between 1803 and 1821. Historians of New Deal generation, led by Paul W. Gates, accepted Jacksonian class rhetoric more or less at face value and traced a struggle for lands between poor but virtuous settler (the frontier incarnation of common man) and rapacious moneyed speculator. Challenging this view, later studies (including my own) questioned depth of societal disagreement over land policy, seeing more shared assumptions than fundamental oppositions in various policy proposals, more smoke than fire in heated rhetoric that surrounded them, and more creeping evolution than revolutionary overthrow in changes that ensued.John Van Atta's Securing West creatively engages this long-running discussion. He depicts a deep struggle, extending from first days of republic to eve of Civil War, between two starkly divergent visions of western development, which we might label an ordered control model and a democratic libertarian one. The contest between them was fundamental. It exposed intense ideological conflict and momentous class and cultural tensions (3); was a clash of rival economic beliefs and world views (141). In its early versions control model was frankly elitist, featuring land sold in large units and at high prices in order to preclude individual venturing. The idea was to guard frontier from becoming a place where refugee offscourings from civilized society could run riot in savage debauchery. Over years, however, popular pressures waiped system, so that by 1840s government was vending land in small parcels for nearly nominal sums. Instead of evicting and prosecuting trespassers, it now promised them first grab at whatever tracts they wanted. In offing lay Homestead Act of 1862, offering free land to any citizen who would live on it. And as system and order in opening public domain gave way to rule of pell-mell, public image of frontiersmen transmuted from barbarian hordes feared by Revolutionary elites to honest, industrious actual settlers extolled by Jacksonian senator Thomas Hart Benton.The great latter-day exponent of control model was Henry Clay, himself a product of an older West, who modernized elitist precepts to fit a democratized environment. Clay's land policy matched his larger Whig vision-indeed, it was heart of that vision. He did not oppose frontier settlement; but he wanted a measured, ordered opening of public domain that would balance agriculture with industry and commerce, with lands sold to responsible purchasers for what they were really worth and proceeds steered to fund broad programs of national improvement and uplift.Compelling as this vision was to both Clay and Van Atta, it ultimately failed, defeated by the aversion to central authority, assertive individualism, and leveling tendencies of nineteenth-century democracy. …