Land in their minds: Noah Stengl, The Meaning of Land in Nineteenth-Century American Political Thought, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Land in their minds: Noah Stengl, The Meaning of Land in Nineteenth-Century American Political Thought, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2024

03Sep24

Abstract: This dissertation explores an aspect of existence that is often taken for granted or dismissed as mundane: land. Its four substantive chapters trace the way different conceptualizations of land underwrote and articulated with two ideals in nineteenth-century American political thought: sovereignty (chapters 1 and 2) and freedom (chapters 3 and 4). The first chapter analyzes the treaty-making activity and official correspondence of one of Thomas Jefferson’s frontier emissaries, a young William Henry Harrison. It shows how a specific logic of sovereignty, termed “benevolent dominion,” structured settler-Indigenous relations on the colonial border and was predicated on a unique configuration of land as “terrain,” or a landscape with rigidly hierarchal borders, a unidirectional temporality, and promoting specific, “fetishized” land uses. The second chapter takes up the matter of land and sovereignty from the perspective of one of the tribes Harrison dispossessed. Life of Black Hawk (1833) is an autobiography dictated by the Sauk warrior, Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk or Black Hawk, that lays out a logic of sovereignty as “interdependence” and a notion of land as the source of all biological and cultural life. According to Black Hawk, “land cannot be sold” because intratribal cooperation and intertribal reciprocity, not exclusive possession, is the appropriate mode of relating to land. The third chapter pivots from sovereignty to freedom and jumps forward in time to 1852: the year a homestead bill first gained real traction in Congress. Rebutting standard “negative liberty” defenses of private property, this chapter shows how homestead advocates in the House of Representatives believed a grant of empty, vast, and abundant land could liberate urban laborers from structural domination and the social resentments that undermined moral autonomy, as well as assuage a palpable male panic by reinforcing patriarchal families. The fourth chapter reexamines homesteading, land, and freedom through the children’s novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Although the novels tend to reify patriarchal and settler-colonial ideologies, Wilder’s prairie settings provide the literal space for her protagonist to experiment with “reflexive” freedoms: seeing and being differently on enveloping, peripheral, and “queer” landscapes. The concluding chapter briefly brings these nineteenth-century theories to bear on the land politics of the twenty-first century.

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