Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Series editors: Kathleen M. Brown, Roquinaldo Ferreira, Emma Hart, and Daniel K. Richter

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

SPECULATION NATION

Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic

Michael A. Blaakman

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2448-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2447-6

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

For my father and mother Marcus and Laurene Blaakman with love and gratitude

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I. The Rapturous Idea of Property

Chapter 1. Certain Unalienable Land Rights

Chapter 2. What the West Could Fund

Part II. Mania’s Moment

Chapter 3. The Logic of Land Mania

Chapter 4. Paper Promises

Chapter 5. This Dirty Business

Chapter 6. Preemptive Property

Chapter 7. Federal Dealing

Part III. The Land of Speculation

Chapter 8. Great Discredit

Epilogue

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Speculation Nation, 1780s–1790s. State and territorial borders shown as claimed by the United States, ca. 1796.

INTRODUCTION

There’s a little slice of the American dream at 61 Harvest Road in Fairport, New York, a quaint canal town in suburban Rochester. Built on half an acre in 1960, within a new subdivision aimed at the swelling ranks of the postwar middle class, the house began with three small bedrooms and a bath. It grew by one of each in the 1990s. Nowadays, a fire crackles in the living room on frigid nights, and the remnants of my childhood treehouse still cling to a beech tree out back.

As a kid, I thought that history—especially the revolutionary American history that interested me most—was something you had to go elsewhere to find. Boston harbor and the Pennsylvania statehouse were hundreds of miles away; even Saratoga was three and a half hours by car. The region where I was raised boasts no extant buildings from the colonial or revolutionary era. In primary school, our local-history curriculum skipped, bewilderingly, from the Iroquois, apparently severed from historical time, to the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal—which my friends and I understood not as a key component of an imperial republic’s economic infrastructure but rather as a stinky ditch with a good bike path alongside, a part of the local landscape we were pleasantly surprised to learn once had some vague national significance. The United States’ revolutionary origins certainly seemed to bear no connection to the place where we lived.

Learning otherwise started me down the path that has culminated in this book, a political and cultural history of the tremendous wave of land speculation that crashed outward from the new United States between the end of British rule and the beginning of the nineteenth century. What ties my childhood home to the American Revolution, I’ve found, is the frenzy of speculation in Native American land that the Revolution launched—and upon which, this book argues, the new republic’s political experiment itself was premised.

In retrospect, the clues were all around me. Presiding over the corner where I waited for the school bus every morning was a sign marking the intersection of Harvest and Crossfield Roads. The street names hearken back to an earlier version of the American dream, an agrarian ideal of self-sufficient yeoman farmers, which was central to the politics of the revolutionary age but is no longer a part of life in Fairport. My hometown and most of the ones that surround it retain the boundaries of tracts that revolutionary-era politicians, merchants, lawyers, planters, bankers, and military officers—speculators, all—bought and sold like stocks. Many of the places I knew growing up still bear their names: towns and villages like Wolcott, Phelps, Gorham, Pultneyville, Rochester, Williamson, and Mount Morris.

And then there’s our family home itself. If you were to visit the Monroe County clerk’s office and begin to trace the title of my parents’ house from their deed up the chain of previous owners, proceeding to a few other repositories as you continued back long before the property was a suburban lot, you’d eventually find that the first two white people to claim that land as property contracted to buy it from a revolutionary government in 1788 as part of a six-million-acre purchase. One, Oliver Phelps, a bumptious former tavernkeeper, provisioned the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War; the other, a fusty merchant named Nathaniel Gorham, cashed in on wartime privateering, succeeded John Hancock as president of the Continental Congress, and signed the U.S. Constitution.

Those two men joined thousands of others in a surge of land speculation that began to swell during the War for Independence and crested in the 1790s, a dramatic historical process that swept up millions upon millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and from the Great Lakes to Georgia. Widely known but less widely understood, this development is rarely investigated by historians as a single, national event. To be sure, land speculation has been a theme throughout American history, from Puritan proprietors and Jamestown adventurers through the railroad barons of the Reconstruction era to a real-estate mogul in the twenty-first-century Oval Office. But land speculation in the 1780s and 1790s was a chapter apart, defined by its entanglement with revolutionary ideas, politics, and state formation. Throughout these two decades, thousands of speculators and dozens of land companies bought and sold huge tracts of land—recently expropriated from or even as yet unceded by its Indigenous owners—expecting to resell it for astronomical profits. This was a period when it seemed like anybody with capital or access was getting involved in the land business and when fortunes were being won and lost apparently overnight. It was an era when ambitious investors, the already wealthy as well as those on the make, mobilized public and private initiative to dispossess Native people and to convert their territories into private property at breathtaking speed and scale. The land market’s promise seemed so certain that it led people to leverage large purchases upon the profits they expected to make from other speculations, still in progress. It led some failing financiers to try to speculate their way out of insolvency from within the walls of debtors’ prison.

This map originally appeared in a 1791 London pamphlet, published to market Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) homelands in present-day western New York to European capitalists. Carved by U.S. speculators into commodified townships, the region retains many of the boundaries depicted here; range 4, township 12, is the village of Fairport and town of Perinton. Plate from The Documentary History of the State of New-York, ed. E. B. O’Callaghan (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1850), vol. 2, facing p. 646. Author’s collection.

By 1795, the passion for land speculation had reached the floor of Congress. Late that year, Robert Randall and Charles Whitney traveled to Philadelphia in hopes of finding a fortune. They hailed from Maryland and Vermont, respectively, and though their background and the origins of their partnership are unclear, their intentions were plain. In cahoots with a group of British merchants at Detroit, they sought to purchase from the federal government a right to the entire lower peninsula of present-day Michigan—some twenty million acres, all told, of Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi homelands. After several weeks of surreptitious lobbying, offering lawmakers money and shares of the land, they claimed to have clinched the support of a third of the House and most of the Senate. Corruption so bald could not survive the sunlight. The wild land-jobbing scheme was laid bare on December 28, when several congressmen interrupted the chamber’s proceedings to disclose the ongoing attempt at bribery. Whitney was quickly apprehended at a nearby tavern. Randall, loitering that day in the lobby of Congress Hall, at first attempted to flee. When the doorkeeper pointed him out to the city marshal for arrest, he seemed taken aback. After all, the United States was teeming with speculators; searching for powerful partners in the nation’s capital, Randall and Whitney thought they had come to the right spot. The scandal consumed Congress for more than a week. The press, for its part, chalked the affair up to the spirit of the age, the phrenzy of speculation that stretched across the republic. Randall and Whitney belonged to a speculating tribe that numbered in the thousands, all of them chasing romantick projects by wheeling and dealing in tracts of land so large, so distant, and so unknown to the U.S. governments and citizens who claimed them that they could only be imagined in abstract terms.¹

You might even call it a mania. And in the eighteenth century and ever since, many observers have done just that. In the 1780s and 1790s, the land business was a rage, some said—a Vortex, a deranged madness, a ravaging flame.² George Washington, himself a substantial speculator, marveled at how the burgeoning land business seemed to numb its participants’ minds to numerical scale. Men in these times, he noted in 1784, talk with as much facility of fifty, a hundred, and even 500,000 Acres as a Gentleman formerly would do of 1000 acres. In a Philadelphia magazine in 1798, one writer framed this historical moment quite succinctly. The Land Mania is a frequent disease in every part of America, he wrote, a bit tongue-in-cheek. It broke out with peculiar violence in most of the states immediately after the peace [in 1783], and has continued to be more or less the epidemic of our country ever since.³

Such talk is telling evidence. It captures the ambition and frenzy of the era’s land business, the promised profits of dispossession, the metastasizing complexity of land transactions, the soaring rhetoric and spin. When people reached for the language of mania, they revealed not only that they saw the enthusiasm for land speculation as a single, national trend but also that they perceived its increased pull and prevalence as something new to their place in time—something they could not quite explain. In some ways, the puzzle inherent in this language persists to our own day. For although speculators have loomed large in histories of the revolutionary era, we lack an account that explains the unprecedented intensity, structural origins, and national scale of the land business itself.⁴ Historians often reproduce the era’s language of mania to describe land speculation in the early republic. Now as then, this vocabulary marks the phenomenon as irrational, inexplicable, and ultimately unknowable.

My goal, therefore, is to approach land mania not as a diagnosis but rather as a set of historical questions—to look beneath its alleged irrationality in search of its political, cultural, and economic roots, and to square the apparent absurdity of such unbridled speculation with its deeply consequential meaning. Why did an emerging market in Native American lands grow to such maniacal heights during the nation’s first quarter century? Why and how did American capitalists and governments create a property regime so prone to speculation? And what does the speculative rage reveal about the outcome of the American Revolution, its implications for Native people, the nature of the new republic, and the scope and character of the early U.S. state?

The prevailing narratives of early American history and settler-colonial studies do not provide ready answers to these questions. The familiar explanation for the young United States’ aggressive expansionism is that the Revolution created a republic uniquely responsive to the interests of belligerent frontier settlers. Specifically, according to this now-standard interpretation, the U.S. state emerged as the instrument of settler land hunger, as poor and middling men and their households swarmed onto Native territory, sparking violent conflicts that forced national authorities to react.⁵ This account rests on the assumption that settlers’ appetite for land was voracious and unyielding. A ubiquitous but rarely interrogated idea, land hunger has come to denote white settlers of lower status, just as mania is often ascribed to elite speculators. It runs through histories of North America like an elemental force, a dammed-up momentum perpetually ready to flood new regions at the earliest opportunity. In fact, settler demand for land ebbed and flowed over time, and as we will see, perceptions of it could diverge from reality. On its own, moreover, the land hunger of ordinary settlers cannot explain why the new republic was consumed by elite land speculation and financial manipulation on such an extraordinary scale.

The notion of land hunger also forms a central premise in the global scholarship on settler colonialism, a term that describes imperial incursions in which colonizers attempt not to exploit Indigenous people’s labor (as in, say, New Spain or British India) but rather to eliminate them and take their land. According to its leading theorist, settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, because what sets it apart from other types of colonialism is that while traders, missionaries, and armies may come and go, settlers make dispossession a permanent condition. Over the last two decades, scholars across disciplines have seized on this concept as a useful way to draw comparisons among empires. They often point to the early U.S. republic as an archetype of the phenomenon.⁶

If anything, though, revolutionary-era land speculation suggests that settler colonialism, like land hunger, is a category in need of rethinking. As some historians have cautioned, settler colonialism can often seem a static concept—an always-already condition that appears the same in all regions and periods to which it applies.⁷ Theorized as a structure that runs constant from early modernity to the present, settler colonialism does not easily account for an event as momentous as the speculative frenzy of the 1780s and 1790s. In truth, technologies of dispossession have evolved profoundly over time. Settler colonialism has a history—a trajectory steered by political events more than theorists generally acknowledge. The American revolutionary era was one such watershed moment, a turning point when long-standing processes of dispossession and settlement blended in new ways with speculative finance. As several comparative studies have observed, but not fully explained, the United States created a real-estate market that treated land like an abstract financial commodity decades before similar dynamics took hold in other settler societies.⁸ If we wish to understand why wealthy lawyers, merchants, and bankers, many of whom never stepped foot on the land they claimed, came to stand alongside farmers, planters, ranchers, and soldiers as key drivers of dispossession around the nineteenth-century globe, then we must first explain why settler colonialism took the particular form it did in the early U.S. republic.

A crucial clue comes from historians of Native America, who have recently emphasized the persistent power of many Native nations east of the Mississippi River well into the era of U.S. independence. In the late eighteenth century, they have shown, Miamis, Shawnees, Cherokees, Creeks, the Haudenosaunee, and many other Native polities governed their territories as independent sovereigns, interacting with European and U.S. governments from a position of strength. By facing east from Indian country, these scholars have revealed that the young republic’s eventual conquest of the continent was highly contingent and even unlikely.⁹ This book takes a different geographical vantage; it primarily faces west, north, and south from the new republic’s statehouses, countinghouses, manor houses, plantations, land offices, and debtors’ prisons. But it is inspired by recent scholarship on Native American history, which, for me, has raised challenging questions about how white Americans perceived and reacted to Native strength and sovereignty—questions about the beliefs and actions of those ultimately culpable for the theft of Native lands. Why, I wondered, did land speculation mushroom in scale during an era when U.S. colonizers were in many regions rebuffed by powerful Native nations? And why has a period so dominated by elite financiers been so often remembered as a triumph for ordinary, land-hungry settlers? Was it possible these things were linked?¹⁰

Speculation Nation argues that land mania erupted because white Americans staked the success of their revolution on the seizure and sale of land—land that Native people were loath to relinquish and that too few settlers turned out to buy. Patriot leaders believed Native territory would fund the creation of republican governments and fuel the growth of a republican citizenry. Claiming land by conquest or purchasing it for next to nothing through fraudulent treaties, they intended at first to distribute it directly to white settlers. But those democratic plans collided with several hard realities. Native nations pushed strenuously to repel U.S. invasion. The work of apportioning small tracts to white farmers proved difficult for new governments to handle. And the anticipated settler land hunger upon which these plans were based failed to fully materialize. In turn, penurious state and national governments were forced to retool. Ambitious investors sensed in this situation an unprecedented chance for profit—a tantalizing terrain for seeking their own fortunes through the future sale of the early American dream. Speculators rushed to amass huge landholdings under the expectation that Native people would ultimately succumb and that the settler demand that had eluded governments would someday soon arise. They pitched their land schemes as the solution to governments’ fiscal woes and the gateway to an eventual Eden of republican farmers. In short, they banked on the future of settlement, and in doing so they fused dispossession with speculative finance.

This was a distinctive form of settler colonialism, a financialized frontier. It had not appeared out of thin air; by 1776, financial innovation had a long prior history (with some notable manias along the way), quixotic land schemes were nothing new, and British Americans had long since built property institutions that made particular forests, fields, and urban lots into concrete commodities, especially as a basis for credit.¹¹ But the American Revolution vastly intensified the monetization of Native land. During the 1780s and 1790s, amid dogged Native resistance to U.S. incursions and settler land hunger insufficient to generate meaningful public revenue, politicians and speculators hatched new ways of thinking about and using landed property as an abstract commodity. This approach would define the republic long after the founding era, and it would influence other settler societies as well. Its consequences endure and remain contested to the present, both in North America and around the globe.

As Part I of this book explores, what one speculator called the rapturous idea of property was central to the politics of the revolutionary era.¹² Britain’s North American colonies had long served as legal vehicles for converting Native land into colonial property, and when the Seven Years War drew to a close, colonists gazed deeper into the continent’s interior than ever before. But at precisely the same time, King George III’s ministers sought to reform the empire through a series of austerity measures. Among them were attempts to minimize the costs of colonial defense by regulating settlement and centralizing metropolitan control over the frontier. These policies, especially the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and its constraints on the regular colonial practice of privately purchasing land from Natives, posed real obstacles for speculators with designs on the West. As colonial land companies incessantly attempted to circumvent them, Britons on both sides of the Atlantic articulated new ideas about the nature of Native landownership, the sources of legal title, and the relationship between property and sovereignty—ideas that would have important ramifications in the decades that followed. When British officials doubled down on their reforms in the mid-1770s, imperial meddling in the colonial liberty to acquire land became part of the way patriots justified the choice for independence.

For the new nation born in 1776, then, settler expansion and Native dispossession were founding mandates. Land would not simply be doled out for free, though. Rather, in a crucial break with the main thrust of British policy and the patterns of other European empires, it would be sold for public revenue or exchanged for outstanding public debts. The patriots fought their war for independence on fiat currency and borrowed money. Amid a tax-averse political culture, they looked to land as a resource for putting new governments on solid fiscal foundations. A national view of these efforts uncovers a crucial pattern: in the heady decade after 1776, the national government and almost all of the eight states that claimed large swaths of Native territory attempted to pay down their war debt by experimenting with settler-friendly laws for converting land—much of it not yet ceded by its Indigenous owners—into public revenue. Many states made populist plans for selling the confiscated property of loyalists, too, in ways that intersected with and informed frontier policy. In both cases, parceling out claimed or expropriated public lands in small tracts and directly to actual settlers promised to achieve a double goal. Broad land sales would not only pay the arrears of the Revolution. They would also, symbiotically, expand the landowning citizenry and bolster the rough equality of wealth that patriot revolutionaries considered essential to the survival of a republic. I call this dual vision settler republicanism, for it married the fiscal imperatives and social aspirations of the struggle to create an independent republic. The lawmakers who twinned these objectives assumed that there was immense demand for land among ordinary white citizens who would be willing and able to pay. And although these initial plans lasted longer in some places than others, in all cases they were designed to exclude speculators; settler republicanism militated against speculation, privileging public goods over private gain.¹³

But settler-republican policies did not pan out as planned. During the 1780s and early 1790s, they were thwarted by a convergence of circumstances. Nascent state and national governments were ill-equipped for the onerous work of apportioning land, and they struggled to pinpoint policies that could promote settlement while discouraging speculation. Even more problematically, settler demand fell short of expectations. To be sure, thousands of squatters and legal settlers moved into contested regions such as the Ohio Valley during these years. But the lands on offer attracted far fewer purchasers than what lawmakers had predicted, or what scholarly assumptions about settler land hunger might lead us to expect. The experience of eight years of war had been no less financially disastrous for individuals than it was for governments; citizens could not afford to buy land at the speed and scale policymakers had envisioned. And in many places, despite patriot presumptions that Indians had lost the Revolutionary War, Native nations were able to repel or delay the republican invasion. Their persistence made settlement a dangerous personal and economic proposition, stalling sales and depressing settler demand. Meanwhile, a much hungrier set of well-connected investors continued to press. Although political leaders across the republic still saw land sales as a pillar of public finance, the dual vision of settler republicanism was proving impossible to achieve.

Beginning in the 1780s and extending into the 1790s, therefore, the states and the national government changed tacks. One by one they began selling vast tracts to speculators with alacrity. Part II, the heart of this book, follows land speculators in action to explore why they chose to invest so deeply in the imagined future of an American empire and how they managed to do so. It chronicles the political creation of a market for the claimed or expropriated land that governments desperately wished to sell—one so rife with speculative opportunity that land became a mania. The sense of haste was palpable across the republic, as the balance tilted in policy and politics from settler republicanism to speculation. In Augusta, Georgia, a throng of would-be speculators rioted outside an understaffed land office. In New York, a speculator transfixed by the many possibilities for investment admitted to having gone Land mad.¹⁴ In Philadelphia, one speculative syndicate claimed six million acres scattered across six states, and William Bingham, an officious merchant-financier, floated plans to buy all the land available from Pennsylvania to Maine.

To be clear, this was not what economists would call a perfect or pure market. Riddled with misfires, failures, and conflicting claims, it is better described as an emerging market. But its consequences were significant. As U.S. governments sold huge land claims, financial manipulations became more central than ever before to the relationships between territory, governance, and expansion. The result was a political system and a property system yoked together, which made land—much of it yet uncolonized—into a ligament that connected public and private finance through massive sales to speculators. In the process, U.S. politicians, merchants, lawyers, and financiers leaned away from early modern understandings of land as a material resource and a basis for social status and toward a vision of land as capital: a financial commodity, an abstract source and measure of wealth. While they continued to speak of this pasture and your northeast field, more and more they also thought in terms of my western purchase and his half-million acres. As one bewildered Irishman observed during his travels through the new republic, immense tracts numbering in the millions of acres were being traded by people who never perhaps were within five hundred miles of them, like so many articles of merchandize. Land itself, one immigrant wrote in 1794, was the staple of America.¹⁵

This traffic in commodified land was fueled by a specific image of the American future. Throughout the early modern era, the potential profits to be gleaned from staple-crop plantations, fed by a rapacious Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans, had been a primary impetus for dispossession. During the 1780s and 1790s, many speculators continued to understand that slave labor could make land valuable. Many also financed their land ventures through capital or credit drawn from slave trading, plantation agriculture, or property in enslaved people. But early national speculators were more likely to obscure these connections than they were to announce them. Creeping anxieties about slavery’s immorality and halfhearted predictions that the institution would gradually disappear meant that most speculating boosters instead couched the promise of land in the idyll of white yeoman households replicating across space. The political significance of that ideal, combined with a buoyant faith in the new nation’s revolutionary promise and bullish predictions of white population growth, suggested that demand for land would soon spike off the charts, despite the failures of settler-republican policies. Assumptions about settler land hunger, in other words, were central to the wild prognostications of speculative boosters themselves. These ideas formed the logic of land mania. They implied that land was an unimpeachable bet—that its value could only rise—justifying speculation at an extravagant scale.

Driven by this potent ideological mix, speculators deployed a range of strategies to acquire land claims from the revolutionary governments that had previously sought to exclude them. Many worked their way into the political economy of land by amassing paper representations of the public debt, as well as an assortment of other certificates that governments had issued under settler-republican policies, all entitling the bearer to yet-unspecified tracts. Through their broad circulation and by symbolizing the connection between land and public finance, these IOUs introduced many Americans to newly monetized ways of thinking about land, often in advance of its appropriation from Native nations. They turned the abstract right to future landownership into an impersonal medium of exchange—a system that created myriad opportunities for financial legerdemain. Exploiting the anemic confidence that revolutionary governments would ever be able to meet their promises, speculators engrossed public securities far below face value and hounded revolutionary veterans to sell their land bounties for a pittance. They redeemed this panoply of certificates for expansive land claims, often by taking advantage of loopholes in laws initially designed to discourage them. In some states, evolving land policies gradually caught up with the reality of wide-scale speculation, and the patriots’ original plan for a broad distribution of expropriated land fell by the wayside.

Elsewhere, speculators applied directly to governments, lobbying and bribing their way into massive purchases. Between 1787 and 1795, a bumper crop of partnerships and companies obtained claims to more than eighty million acres of public land—from organized groups with grandiose names, such as the Ohio Company and the New England Mississippi Land Company, to less formal ventures, like the shady partnership between political insiders Henry Knox and William Duer. Their strategies involved a mix of allying with, co-opting, or supplanting the still-plastic institutions of fledgling governments. Speculators across the political spectrum—Federalists as well as Democratic-Republicans—appealed to the fact that the Revolution’s political strains and fiscal fallout limited governments’ abilities to administer settlement and ensure frontier security. Pooling resources like capital, credit, access, information, and expertise, these companies and partnerships pledged to profitably absolve the state of the burdensome work of settlement, from surveying land and selling it to financing those sales and cultivating social and economic institutions. If land schemes such as these had been an annoying object of governance for the British empire of the 1760s and 1770s, they became, in many ways, a mode of governance in the new republic. Meanwhile, the new nation’s federal structure only played into speculators’ hands. With state and national governments alike seeking to offload claimed or expropriated land, speculators pitted governments against each other to drive prices down, and they incorporated the federal union’s legal patchwork into their strategies for marketing land while waiting for its value to rise.

Beyond regions of dense white settlement, Native people continued to forcefully oppose settler incursions and to deny state and national claims to their territories. In the Ohio country, for instance, Shawnees, Delawares, Miamis, and other groups built a multinational confederacy to defend their lands. In the early 1790s, they dealt the new republic several decisive military defeats. Creek leaders cultivated a Spanish alliance against the United States, and many Cherokees sought to stand up to the Americans by promoting centralized governing institutions and embracing a new political identity in national terms.

Such unequivocal demonstrations of sovereignty reshaped a long-running debate, which stretched back well before the Revolution, over the nature of Native land rights. During the mid-eighteenth century, British officials had tried to exert authority over the colonial frontiers by defining Native title in particular ways and asserting the imperial state’s exclusive right to acquire it—definitions and regulations that had irked many a colonial speculator. After 1776, white Americans disagreed over who had the right to accept Native land cessions, whether Native lands were already conquered or needed to be purchased, and indeed whether Native people had any property rights at all. U.S. speculators, statesmen, and settlers took divergent positions on these questions, for their answers would determine who enjoyed the first fruits of dispossession. Ironically, for instance, patriot leaders in Congress quickly repurposed British strictures against the private acquisition of Native title. By insisting that government alone had the authority to obtain land from Native people, they sought to underwrite the public land sales they would rely upon in ways the British empire never had. Many Native polities in eastern North America, meanwhile, drew on the cross-cultural fluency gained through generations of interaction with Europeans to increasingly articulate their territorial rights in an idiom of private property. This legal language had been engineered by colonizers, and therefore, it seemed, they might be persuaded to respect it.

During the late 1780s and the 1790s, Native persistence against U.S. expansionism brought this debate to a head. In the face of Native intransigence, American officials were forced to return to the prerevolutionary consensus that Native territories needed to be purchased. They conceded that Native nations indeed owned their land—but differently. As white Americans pursued state formation through ideologies of propertied citizenship and the development of a speculative land market, they simultaneously cohered around the perception that Indians had no individual property or wealth, only common territory that became valuable real estate once it was owned by others. These ideas in turn helped to define white subjectivity; white citizens were supposedly set apart by their affinity for private property and their ability to financialize it. By contrast, as white Americans understood it, Indians did not buy, monetize, or profit from land. They only—and inevitably—sold it.

The expectation that they would do so became so central to racial definitions of Indianness that revenue-starved U.S. governments began selling preemptive claims to expansive tracts of unceded Native territory. Made with the understanding that Native title still needed to be acquired, these sales were what had inspired Robert Randall and Charles Whitney’s ill-fated scheme. And although those two failed to land the deal, plenty of others did not. During the late 1780s and the 1790s, speculators purchased vendible rights to millions of acres that were still occupied and governed by Native people on the assumption that future cessions were certain. This new financial instrument, which I call preemptive property, made Indigenous removal part of the speculator’s bet. On one level, it demonstrates that land speculation both depended upon and fortified racial distinctions; the abstract commodification of land rested on categories not only of property but also of race, advancing both in tandem. White Americans had come to conceptualize Native title in ways that made lands they had not yet acquired into a public fiscal asset and a form of private capital. On another level, preemptive property reveals one way that Native people shaped the historical trajectory of settler colonialism. White Americans sought to circumvent Native territorial control in the present through the invention of a future land right, one that unleashed speculation far beyond the actual limits of U.S. sovereignty. Devised in response to Native strength, preemptive property was the epitome of the financialized frontier. U.S. governments, addicted to the fiscal promise of massive land sales, flooded the market with millions of acres of cheap tracts and fabricated titles.¹⁶

Yet this bonanza did not spell success for all speculators. Far from it. As Part III discusses, the land mania of the 1780s and 1790s impelled speculators to muster all the credit they could unlock, assembling highly leveraged networks of debt to purchase enormous amounts of land. Many expected that an influx of European investment would allow them to convert their land claims into profits. But the chaotic tumble of speculation had left many clutching conflicting titles to commodified tracts with imprecise boundaries. And like governments before them, speculators overestimated the demand for the lands they claimed. In 1796 and 1797, land mania went bust. When a transatlantic credit crunch shattered the intricate structures of contracts and debts they had erected, scores of land rich, cash poor speculators found themselves evading their creditors, imprisoned for debt, or declaring bankruptcy. These failures, and the speculative furor more generally, left a mess of troubled titles in their wake, sullying settler landownership and economic security in some regions for decades to come.

By the turn of the century, as U.S. governments gained firmer footing, the era of million-acre sales and frenzied investment on a revolutionary scale had passed. The original states had sold most of the Native lands they claimed, bringing an end to a period when they and the national government competed to sell their discrete public domains. Land speculation became institutionalized: an unexceptional din rather than an unprecedented mania, increasingly channeled through the federal government’s emerging land-office system. Speculation became democratized, too, to an extent, with greater numbers of people trucking in smaller tracts. But as the Epilogue describes, the land rush of the 1780s and 1790s left an enduring imprint in Jeffersonian land policy, pointed the way toward future rounds of dispossession, and informed the purchase of Louisiana—a speculative scheme if ever there was one.

As American revolutionaries understood it, landed property was key to shaping the character of a republican people capable of kingless self-government. Republics, they knew, were fragile. To protect them from slipping into corruption and tyranny, the thinking went, required a particular type of citizenry: a broadly equal society of white men. Most of these men would be landowning farmers, undegraded by wage labor or the unproductive alchemy of finance. Property ownership would make them independent and virtuous, empowering them to protect their government and check its power with equal vigilance. At first, patriot leaders believed that the broad public sale of expropriated land could achieve this vision while also funding the Revolution. But during the 1780s—a decade of financial hardship, political tumult, and mounting Native power—they learned that accomplishing these goals together, simultaneously, required a more vigorous state than they wanted and a stronger economy than they had.

Something had to give, and speculation became the solution. Perhaps no one captured this better than Robert Morris, a senator from Pennsylvania who had once served as Congress’s superintendent of finance and was one of the nation’s leading land tycoons. "Uncultivated lands, Morris wrote in 1796, have been an object of attention from the first settlement of the country to the present day. But since the [Revolutionary] war, he continued, the several States have, perhaps prematurely and with a blamable haste, drawn their revenues from, or liquidated their debts by, the re-sale of them on very low terms to [people who] could advance money to pay for them. Across the nation, many seized the opportunity, entered very largely into the speculation, and purchased of the States to an amount that would appear astonishing to Europeans. Nothing remained in the public’s hands but the summits of mountains, abrupt precipices, or plains covered with stones. As a result, Morris concluded, the lands must now increase in value with the population; for, the States having generally disposed of their vacant lands, the settlers will have no other resort but to private proprietors or companies."¹⁷ This talk about governments’ blamable haste was a slick, even cynical, bit of rhetoric. For Robert Morris had bought up more of that land than just about anybody.

But if he misconstrued the moral of the story, Morris was right about its basic plot. Investigating the origins of land mania illuminates how the American Revolution produced a republican empire with financial speculation at its core. This story challenges conventional scholarly wisdom and recasts ongoing debates in several respects. For one, it upends a view of republicanism and political economy that has long defined the study of the early republic, as a Manichaean struggle between financial capitalism and economic development, on the one hand, and rustic agrarianism on the other. On a rhetorical level, what Thomas Jefferson called the empire of liberty—a society of virtuous yeoman citizens, extending across formerly Native space—was indeed defined in opposition to the world of speculative finance. But as Morris obliquely hinted, the fiscal and political challenges of revolutionary state formation in fact opened the way for speculators to shape the imperial architecture of an agrarian republic. Their goal was to secure a lucrative place in its design, to privatize the administration of settler-colonial expansion as a way to invest in futures of the United States. In doing so, they rooted the empire of liberty in speculative capitalism, creating a market—and a nation—where in many ways the ideal of yeoman republicanism was itself the very thing to be bought and sold.

In all of this, it can be difficult to discern where the state ended and the speculative interest began. Although scholarly consensus long held that the early U.S. state was weak at best, historians and political scientists are currently reevaluating this conclusion. Many have described the early national state as strong but invisible: light and inconspicuous, a government out of sight. Others have argued that the key to state power in the early republic lay precisely in its elision with the private interests of political entrepreneurs, to the point that there was no meaningful line between the two.¹⁸ To be sure, many if not most government officials in this era either counted land speculators among their friends and relatives or were speculators themselves. But the lines separating public obligations from private opportunities were neither imperceptible nor meaningless. During the first few years of U.S. independence, public officials aimed to marginalize speculation from the political economy of land. Later, as settler-republican policies gave way to land mania, speculators took advantage of both the weaknesses and the strengths of budding U.S. governments, state and national alike. A key source of their power was the ability to draw and redraw the state’s ambit in ways best calibrated to bolster their interests.

To speculators, then, the state was a recognizable entity, and its boundaries mattered. Inscribed in purchase contracts, deeds, and land laws, and scrutinized when corruption controversies emerged, those boundaries were shifting yet significant precisely because land mania and state formation were interdependent—joined at the hip. National officials almost always insisted that the right to acquire Native title, deemed by then a vital fiscal resource, belonged to the state alone. Beyond that, speculators relied upon state and national governments to originate property claims and adjudicate disputes. In turn, speculators insisted, the state could rely upon them to allocate land, attract settlers, develop infrastructure, effectuate U.S. sovereignty in new regions, and—above all—provide public revenue. It is axiomatic that there is no real estate without government; in the revolutionary American republic, it seemed like there might be no governments were it not for the sale of real estate. This equation made for a peculiar relationship between sovereign territory and private property. Though historians of empire typically consider these two categories distinct, early national ideas about Native title and preemption muddied both and inverted the sequence between them as it is typically understood. The fiscal logic of U.S. state formation drove white Americans to hastily convert the regions they claimed into alienable property, such that vast tracts of land were circulating as capital well before they had been enveloped into settler jurisdiction on the ground. U.S. governments, in short, often sold land before they governed it.¹⁹

Thus, the revolutionary era, and its surge of land speculation, calcified within the U.S. state an enduring drive to dispossess. Legal historians have written a rich body of work that frames law as the essential instrument of dispossession, a perspective that tends to accentuate legal decisions from the 1820s and 1830s as crucial turning points.²⁰ New scholarship on Jacksonian Removal similarly portrays the 1830s as a stark departure from prior patterns of dispossession and plans for Native assimilation, emphasizing how Andrew Jackson and his successors created a modern bureaucracy devoted to displacing Native nations from their homelands.²¹ Seen from the context of the 1780s and 1790s, however, Jackson’s mobilization of federal power represents but one phase in a longer process of determining how private financiers and the U.S. state would divvy up the work of territorial expansion. Widening the focus beyond dispossession by law to include dispossession by finance reveals that the seeds of Jacksonian Removal were sown in the creation of the American republic. Revolutionary attempts to make land sales a foundation for state-making introduced financial commodification as a powerful impetus for future dispossession and installed speculation at the heart of U.S. expansion—a model of empire that would evolve but not essentially change through the era of Jacksonian Removal and beyond, as it incentivized and empowered white Americans to sell, invade, and settle a continent.

This model, in turn, had major implications for the making of American capitalism. Over the last two decades, an outpouring of scholarship has emphasized slavery as the engine of early American economic development, both in the creation of new wealth and in the evolution of capitalist practices.²² Most recently, an emerging cohort of historians has argued that Native dispossession, too, has been central to the history of American capitalism. What this latter train of scholarship has so far missed is the key role the American Revolution played in forging that bond.²³ The land mania it sparked led growing numbers of elite Americans to embrace distinctly capitalist outlooks, teaching them to think about land in commodified ways and value in futuristic terms. Expropriated Native land, a vital form and source of wealth, fueled the revolutionary republic’s increasing prosperity and remains foundational to the nation’s economy in the present.

These insights combined transform a long-standing debate about the meaning and outcome of the American Revolution. For roughly a century, historians of this era have fallen into one of two broad camps. Some contend that the Revolution extended political and economic opportunity—that it was, in the final calculus, a democratizing project. Others insist that the Revolution ultimately consolidated individual power and wealth—that what began as a people’s revolution ended with a revolt of the elites.²⁴ The origins of the United States’ financialized frontier demonstrate that these competing interpretations are in fact two sides of a single coin: a coin whose alloy was Indigenous dispossession, not merely a regrettable result of the republic’s birth but its very premise. Insofar as the American Revolution created a democracy, land was its mainspring. The revolutionaries sought to extend representative government and popular sovereignty to growing numbers of white men possessed of a competency, or propertied household independence. During the era of land mania, even this limited democratic vision was as much an ideal to be marketed and sold as it was a status or lived experience available to all white male citizens. Elite speculators sought to profit off revolution by making the fulfillment of a yeoman’s republic their business.

"Were I to characterise the United States, wrote a British traveler in 1796, reporting back to his friends on the new nation their empire had lost, it should be by the appellation of the land of speculation. Particularly when it came to land, speculation seemed to be everywhere, the talk of it inescapable in every tavern, coffeehouse, and drawing room he visited. For his own part, this observer—a musician and girls’ schoolmaster with a penchant for righteous skepticism—stuck to speculations of the more disinterested sort. Surely, he mused, there never was a country where that passion was so universal, or had such unbounded scope."²⁵ Twenty years after independence, this traveler considered speculative mania to be the new republic’s defining trait, a central thread in its founding. At 61 Harvest Road and countless other addresses that occupy formerly Native territory—the inheritance of early national Americans’ attempts to cement the promise of their revolution through a speculative rush in other people’s land—this story is stitched into our own.

PART I

The Rapturous Idea of Property

CHAPTER 1

Certain Unalienable Land Rights

The rumor was tantalizing enough that he recorded it somewhere he could easily find it, somewhere that would usually be within reach: just inside the cover of his diary for the year 1773, a Virginia Almanack he purchased from the printer and had bound with blank pages interleaved. He had probably heard the rumor on February 21, a blustery day when two travelers stopped by Mount Vernon for a brief respite from plunging temperatures. One visitor was the son of a man he had known fifteen years before, a man who had supplied his regiment as commissary during the 1758 campaign against the French at Fort Duquesne, in the Ohio country. The other guest was a stranger, a Mr. Wharton, from Philadelphia. The two did not stay long. After some conversation with their host and a quick repast, they returned to the road before dinner.¹

Given the visitors’ connections to land speculators in other parts of the colonies, it seems most likely that when George Washington learned of the rumor, he learned of it from them. Cracking open his diary, he ensured he would remember the rumor’s substance, whatever its source. The following, he wrote, is the opinion of the late Lord Chanceller Cambden, and Chanceller York, on Titles derivd by the Kings Subjects from the Indians or Natives—an opinion by two of Britain’s leading jurists on a topic Washington and scores of other speculators cared deeply about.²

The opinion, as Washington recorded it, ran just one sentence, but its implications were vast. Washington underscored the crucial bits. Lands that were acquired by Treaty or Grant from any of the Indian Princes, or Governments, the alleged opinion held, did not require the sanction of the Crown. The King’s Letters Patents are not necessary, because the Property of the Soil belonged to the Indians, and it became vest[ed] in the Grantee by the Indian Grants. The opinion acknowledged that the King’s sovereignty extended over any Native territory that his subjects purchased. And it affirmed that those settlers carry with them, your Majestys Laws wherever they form Colonies, and receive your Majestys Protection, by Virtue of your Royal Chartres. But the opinion implied that the King’s prior permission was unnecessary for colonists to privately purchase lands from Native Americans. Sovereignty and ownership, it suggested, were separate streams from separate sources. Sovereignty flowed from the King. But Natives—and not the King—owned property in the soil of their homelands, and they were free to devise it to whomever they pleased.³

Anodyne though it may seem at first glance, the legal opinion Washington transcribed into his diary in 1773 would have struck him and his fellow land speculators—including his two hurried visitors in February—as a bombshell. Over the preceding decade, the British empire had imposed onerous constraints on colonists’ plans to profit off the North American interior. Chief among them was a prohibition on private purchases of Native land. In 1773, the idea that the King’s own legal advisors had actually deemed it permissible for colonists to privately purchase land from Natives contradicted the main thrust of ten years of imperial policy. It promised to unleash colonial ambitions—to open a speculative bonanza and a thousand paths to profit—to answer the wishes and petitions and to legitimize the stymied schemes of Washington and scores of others who had plotted a future for British colonization beyond the Appalachians.

It might have seemed too good to be true. It was. Charles Yorke and Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, had, in fact, issued an official opinion about British subjects and Indigenous land titles. But it had nothing at all to do with North America. Neither, by 1773, was it novel jurisprudence. Instead, Yorke and Camden had written it at the behest of the East India Company in 1757, when they served as England’s solicitor general and attorney general, respectively. Their opinion sanctioned the private purchase of land from the Mogul, or any of the Indian princes or governments—in India. Its purpose was to distinguish two paths to property claims for British colonizers in the Asian subcontinent. Lands that the empire had acquired through conquest could be granted only by the Crown, which held both property and sovereignty. Lands purchased from native Indians, meanwhile, required no royal permission but would become subject to the King’s sovereignty through British subjects’ private acquisition.⁴

By early 1773, however, land speculators in British North America were propagating a bastardized version of the opinion, which eschewed any mention of the Mogul or the East India Company. It could therefore plausibly apply to Native Americans and American colonists. The spurious opinion seemed to confirm colonists’ hopeful belief that the obstacles to their expansionist designs constituted an overreach of royal authority. They pondered the opinion while lobbying politicians in London, and they brandished it before royal officials in North America, hoping to parlay it into a license for speculation.⁵

Perhaps Washington and the others who seized on this fragment of an opinion knew it was all too convenient. Perhaps they clung to it simply as the color of legitimacy: a legal-ish authority to proceed with their speculative projects, which they hoped they could