Settlers are squatters (squatters are settlers): John Suval, Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2022 | settler colonial studies blog

Settlers are squatters (squatters are settlers): John Suval, Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2022

16Jul23

Description: White squatters in the American West propelled the Jacksonian Democratic Party to dominance and the United States to the shores of the Pacific. Yet, in the lead-up to the Civil War, they became foot soldiers on the front lines of clashes that sundered the Union. These dynamics have been largely overlooked. Dangerous Ground tracks squatters across antebellum America, from the Mississippi Valley and cotton lands of Texas, to Oregon, Gold Rush–era California, and, finally, Bleeding Kansas, revealing how claiming western domains became intertwined with partisan politics and fights over slavery extension. Unlike previous generations of politicians who condemned settlers who lacked title to the lands they occupied, Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party built a strong base by celebrating white squatters as pioneering yeomen and encouraging their land grabs through preemption laws, Indian removal, and hawkish diplomacy. As America expanded, the party’s power grew. But the US-Mexican War proved a step too far, leading many to ask whether these squatters were genuine yeomen or forerunners of slavery expansion? Some northern Democrats bolted to form the Free Soil Party, while southerners denounced any hindrance to slavery’s spread. Faced with a fracturing party, Democratic chiefs promoted “squatter sovereignty,” allowing territorial inhabitants to determine whether new lands would be slave or free, leading to a destabilizing transfer of authority from Congress to frontier settlers. Squatters thus morphed from darlings of the Democratic Party and agents of Manifest Destiny into combatants in battles that ruptured the Party of Jackson and the nation.

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