“Stories of origin are always instrumental in creating and reinventing the narrative of national identity. Frontier stories occupy a significant place in American imagination.”
Johannes Ledolter and Lea Vandervelde
Introduction:
In the chaotic times of post-Revolutionary War America, squatters such as “Prisoner Ross” were eager to stake a claim and begin their lives in early America (John Armstrong to Josiah Harmar April 12th, 1785). One of the problems with squatters like Ross was that they were illegally attempting to establish settlements on inhabited Indigenous lands. This created inter-ethnic friction which often led to violence and disrupted the Native lifeways on their ancestral homelands. During this period, America was working to form its identity while actively attempting to maintain a cohesive union. It was clear to the early government that these squatters could be the catalyst to a Native American war; managing this explosive conflict on the frontier would require a militia. Fearing a war with Native American communities in the Ohio and Wabash River Valleys, the United States government began to systematically force squatters to vacate their dubiously acquired land, then burned their settlements. The volatility of land acquisition practices on the ground in the western territories compelled Congress to immediately 1) formulate procedures for settlers to establish legal homesteads on undisputed U.S. soil, as well as 2) establish a strong militia to secure the safety of settlers and Indians alike. From these pressing concerns blossomed the strategy of continuing to issue Military Bounty Land Grants as a way of enticing colonists to settle and protect American territories. Various problems arose as the newly formed government set out to acquire satisfactory land to be given as emoluments for Revolutionary War veterans and newly committed soldiers. Lack of experience managing the intricacies of both acquiring tribal land and fulfilling military bounty grants proved to be stumbling blocks impeding progress. Pressure existed from multiple sources because
“The United States was pledged to grant land as a bounty to its army (and could not afford to pay much for such lands), because the increase in population had made it necessary to make speedy provision for the extension of the territories of the United States, and because ‘the public creditors’ had been led to believe (and had a right to expect) that these territories would be used to create a fund to extinguish the national debt.”
(Horsman 11)
This early legislative period of working through such challenges slowed the process of settlement on multiple fronts.
Using topic modeling and computational text analysis of the American State Papers – Public Lands records, we argue that the early United States government developed ad hoc policies and procedures out of necessity in response to contingent circumstances that settlers and Native American communities shaped in the lands northwest of the Ohio River.
The United States acquired western lands by first persuading Virginia, and then six additional states to cede their crown grants to the United States. This ceded land nearly doubled the size of the United States at that time. Next, they needed to populate that land. They did so, with George Washington’s leadership, as he recommended to Congress the idea of recruiting a long term army. Congress moved quickly on this and by September 16th, 1776, had established a permanent army with enticements of $20 and a certain amount of land granted based on military rank. Now with a plan and the promise of land west of the original thirteen colonies, Congress had a solution to populate the land, defend the early nation, and address the government’s debts from the American Revolution. Congress believed that by populating and building up the lands they granted, it would boost the economy by strengthening the nation internally through trade, agriculture, and defense. O’Callagan shows how the American government needed to establish settlements in the western territories to stabilize and legitimize the young United States as an independent nation. The land cessions and buy in for a permanent military catalyzed nationhood and were critical factors in the success of the newly formed confederation of American states. Settlers were able to get paid and receive acres of land in return for protecting America via military service with other fellow settlers.
Historical Background
To study divergent views of landed property, Ian Saxine’s Properties of Empire (2019) takes us back to a period before the colonies won their independence from Britain. By providing a descriptive history of what is now the state of Maine, we come to understand that establishing the legitimacy of land sales and cessions was fraught with confusion and conflict. The presence of Indigenous people in this region was not only acknowledged, their rights to the land they inhabited reigned supreme despite differing views of ownership. In addition to the friction on the ground between frontier squatters and the Wabanakis in the area, battles became especially contentious between various land speculators whose deeds rested on verification of authenticity by Indigenous tribes (Saxine 5). Absentee land speculators loomed large in this region. Using their Imperial appointed roles as interface with tribal leaders, they negotiated to further their own personal gain. Saxine acknowledges that “The English policy on Indian land purchases during the turbulent seventeenth century was a bundle of contradictions” (29). For quite some time, the balance of power benefited the Indigenous inhabitants because Indian “deeds were more precise than vague royal patents and proved useful in warding off metropolitan attempts to interfere in colonial affairs” (Saxine 27). To further muddy the waters, “During the eighteenth century some Maine colonists continued to display indifference to recording deeds from sources they mistrusted—in that case, absentee land speculators … Provided a competent interpreter could be secured, Indians gave more accurate grants than Englishmen who had never seen the land in question” (Saxine 33). If absentee land speculators attempted to delegitimize the claims of rival speculators, they might themselves jeopardize the grounds of their own claims. Bringing disputes regarding competing deeds to the Crown risked shattering the foundation of all claims; this in turn, would cause claims to revert to the Crown. Upon gaining independence and having insight regarding this tumultuous set of circumstances, the Founding Fathers determined that all land transactions would go through the U.S. government. This represented the need to establish policies and procedures for land transactions as well as ensured that revenues from land sales benefited the national economy.
At the outset of the American Revolution, Euro-Americans viewed the land west of the Appalachian Mountains as temporarily in the possession of Native Americans. A number of prominent statesmen, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, believed that Indigenous peoples would be acculturated and the land they inhabited would eventually be incorporated into the United States, even though the outcome of the Revolutionary War remained uncertain at the time. The Americans’ objective to acquire land from its Indigenous inhabitants signaled to Native leaders that the United States had embarked on a path toward becoming a settler empire, even as the confederated states fought to free themselves from their own colonial status within the British Empire. Paying for the soldiers’ service remained a vexing problem for the American Continental Congress. Lack of adequate financial resources motivated political leaders to promise land as payment for services rendered in securing American liberty from British rule, circumventing the need to pay them in specie. This decision had the added advantage of supplying more settlers as bastions of American sovereignty and defenses against Indigenous land claims and armed reprisals.
Although the Revolutionary War resulted in freedom from British rule, the British presence in surrounding outposts throughout the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions remained a continuing concern. Historian Reginald Horsman states
“Though it might well be expected that the new United States would follow British and colonial precedents in acknowledging an Indian right of soil, the country for a time ignored this concept in seeking land in the Old Northwest. This stemmed both from a desire for revenge because of Indian hostility in the Revolution and from an over-optimistic belief in the degree to which the Indians would be overawed by the defeat of their British allies.”
Horsman, 5
After years of warfare and unauthorized raids and counter-raids, Native leaders assembled at Sandusky in September 1783 agreed that they were grateful for the peace Americans offered, but not for their terms. A Congressional investigatory committee from the same year relayed this message to American statesmen – that although the recently hostile tribes were ready for peace, they were not yet inclined to turn over the lands the Americans so desperately coveted (Prucha, 7-8). While the committee observed that “motives of policy as well as clemency ought to incline Congress to listen to the prayers of hostile Indians for peace,” they suggested instead that “lines of property should be ascertained and established between the United States and them” (JCC 25: 681) .
The commissioners offered several justifications for appropriating Native lands. They reminded Congress that they had promised portions of the uncultivated lands “as a bounty to their army and in reward of their courage and fidelity” (JCC 25: 681). In addition, the rising domestic population and increasing emigration necessitated the “speedy provision for extending the settlement of the territories of the United States.” What was more, the United States government was broke, or in the words of the committee, “the public finances do not admit of any considerable expenditure to extinguish the Indian claims upon such lands” (JCC 25: 681). This statement also reveals that at least some American statesmen recognized Native property rights and the need to “extinguish” them before the United States could truly claim ownership. Nevertheless, the deplorable state of American finances required that a way be found to generate revenue as quickly as possible. The public creditors, the committee recalled for Congress, “have been led to believe and have a right to expect that those territories will be speedily improved into a fund towards the security and payment of the national debt” (JCC 25: 682-3).
“By the end of January 1786 the American government had dictated to the Indians of the Old Northwest three treaties, all of which were based on the philosophy that the land to the Mississippi was American by right of conquest and that the United States could automatically draw boundary lines which would allow for American expansion. Signatory tribes had by then yielded what is now eastern and southern Ohio. The Indians resented the negotiations and the movement of settlers across the Ohio. Their determination to overthrow the dictated treaties was strengthened by British reluctance to consummate the Northwest cession made at Paris in 1783.”
(Horsman 23)
In addition to the British, Spanish and French influences remained in this region, so ensuring new settlers maintained their allegiance to the young United States remained a concern among American political leaders. Onuf states “if settlers refused to pay Congress for their lands and looked beyond the United States for markets for their produce, disunion would inevitably follow” (4). George Washington expressed concern that these would not be good neighbors if they sought protection from others such as Spain or Britain.
Given the protective and stabilizing factor that soldiers and their families were anticipated to bring to the untamed backcountry, making every reasonable effort to facilitate their settlement there as soon as possible served to establish a valuable sense of community where none had existed before. American statesmen fear that the tenuous period before settlements were well established would leave people vulnerable. Extensive delays in actually acquiring arable land might leave soldiers without means for sustenance resulting in the need to assign their claim to others for immediate funds. An example of the hardships experienced are noted in the official public records “Land Claimants of the Northwest Territory” in that “N.B. It is observed of these people that the scarcity of provisions and their poverty forced them away” (ASP-PL-v1 doc 4). The Ohio Company’s “Land Company promoter Manasseh Cutler” extolled the virtues of cultivating land. Onuf tells us that “The promise of development was thus counterpoised with the dangers of underdevelopment, the reassertion of the wilderness’s natural sway over savage man. Even while celebrating nature’s bounty and asserting their natural rights to exploit it, Americans defined the ‘state of nature’ as the lawless reign of anarchy and vice” (8).
Contrary to prevalent depictions in published promotional tracts, the western territories were not peaceful, empty lands awaiting Euro-American settlers. Powerful Native communities still dominated the landscape – a reality that was evident to anyone who actually visited the region and passed through thousands of acres of cultivated fields and managed forests. While some Euro-American settlers were reluctant to move into areas without government oversight and structure in place, others grew impatient with legislative delays and were determined to proceed on their own concluding that the indecisive government was squandering their valuable opportunities. Lacking a confirmed acquisition plan for Indian land resulted in extreme conflict as so called “squatters” encroached on Indian territory. The magnitude and repercussions of this conflict cannot be understated. The U.S. government and its representatives, as well as the Indian Nation’s leaders and elders, each found themselves in a horrible situation of trying to stamp out a sense of lawlessness in the Northwest Territory.
Upon gaining independence and experiencing the tumultuous circumstances while under the Crown, the Founding Fathers determined that all land transactions would go through the U.S. Government. This represented the need to establish policies and procedures for land transactions as well as ensuring that revenues from land sales benefited the national economy. Onuf states “There was no room for squatters in this picture … Success of the new land policy hinged on the government being able to offer unencumbered titles. This meant clearing squatters off the land, by force if necessary” (31).
Sources
Our team worked with six volumes of the American State Papers – Public Lands records as our primary source documents. Access through HathiTrust allowed us to utilize plain text files of the many historical documents representing late eighteenth and early nineteenth century policies and legislative filings. Our secondary source material ranges in date from 1946 to the present and offers scholarly historic perspectives that informed our contextual framework. All sources contributed to our understanding of the difficult balance the country was trying to achieve in its early days of independence.
It would not have been realistic to individually review every document in the six volumes of the American State Papers – Public Lands records. Yet, we needed to determine how they each might inform our research. Having access to plain text files through HathiTrust, was certainly a time-saver when compared to manually transcribing other historical sources that had not yet become digitized utilizing technological applications. Although very useful, unfortunately, these digitized historical records did not necessary represent what one would find by simply viewing scans of the actual bound volumes. Being able to view scanned pages containing specific documents published in these public records, offered a reference point so we could “cleanup” individual document’s text files so they were more accurately representative of what was actually published. Given these limitations, nevertheless, legislative documents proved a valid source to glean overall patterns and transitions including change over time in policy and attitude. To begin with, we selected terms such as “squatter”, “pioneer”, frontier” and “settlement” to examine potential patterns using Voyant tools to set the stage for further exploration.
Methods
For aid with text analysis of our corpus, we used Voyant Tools and Mallet topic modeling. With our corpus consisting of six volumes of 800+ pages each for the American State Papers, Voyant has been paramount to our success in understanding and deciphering what is useful and important for our argument. Voyant expanded our research by helping us understand how words like soldier, widow, pioneer, squatter, etc. were used in each volume. With Voyant, we used tools like Trends, Context, and Bubblelines. Trends helped us visualize word frequency in each document which was important when looking at how term usage changed over time. The context tool showed how a word was used throughout the volumes. Context made it possible to decipher and pull the most important information from these volumes. Bubblelines helped us visualize where various words were paired in each document. This was important as if soldier and widow were near each other, we could pair that information with the context tool to locate and extract information from the American State Papers. Utilizing these techniques in Voyant ,we were able to draw conclusions and gain new understandings of the landscape of the Early American lands and the legislative process and conclusions on certain topics.
The second tool we used was Mallet topic modeling. Mallet is a software that enabled us to examine our volumes separated by document to find common themes throughout the first two volumes of our corpus. Once we got the list of correlated terms, we labeled the terms based on the general theme of the words given and then paired the findings to the specific documents from the American State Papers. This allowed us to search specific documents to deepen our understanding as well as provide clarity regarding topics we deemed important. Once this clarity was achieved, we paired our findings with the Voyant techniques and obtained a clearer picture of the policies, procedures, and community that directly affected Government, early settlers, and the overall landscape of early America.
Controlling Bodies
Initially, there was no single, unifying concept that garnered consensus about how to settle the new western territory. States had varying views which were influenced by whether they themselves had land to offer soldiers as compensation for fulfilling a commitment in the national military. Among the concerns was losing citizens in their original state but also not having a representative population in the new territory; trying to establish a way to move forward while worrying about the balance of power between states complicated matters even further. Adoption of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 did not erase the troubles plaguing the smooth settlement of the new territory. Issues prevailed with inconsistent contextual understanding of compacts that were written into the Northwest Ordinance. Onuf’s work in Statehood and Union specifically sought to address assumptions that the authors of the Northwest Ordinance “brought to their work” (xv). Conflicts arose between Federalists and Republicans related to the authority perceived to have been built in for Governor Arthur St. Clair while territories increased population and evolved toward the complete set of rights associated with full statehood. It should be noted that possession of specified quantities of land were a requirement for men to hold representative offices and thereby have voices in how the Northwest Territory was governed. Some settlers complained that they felt less like citizens and more like subjects under Governor St. Clair. There was a fine line between the freedom that so many had fought for and what seemed to represent almost the return to feudalism during this interim period. Settlers hoped that statehood would be achieved quickly, but a rapidly rising population was definitely not guaranteed at the outset; the evolution was riddled with obstacles given the political infighting as well as on-going conflicts occurring with Indian tribes.
The government’s plan to compensate soldiers with military bounty land in the new frontier was no panacea either. It took a number of years before any government land passed into veteran’s hands. Due to the long delays, some soldiers bordering on being destitute and ill equipped to work in the agricultural fields as they had done before serving in the military, found it necessary to sign away their rights to any military bounty land for a mere pittance. The presence of land speculators was not hidden; they sometimes made their way into community representative positions which further supported the gain they hoped to achieve. These soldier’s disappointment does not compare with what the Indians were experiencing as the government’s overriding motive became to contain or extinguish them. In the government’s zealous hunger to displace Indians and acquire their land, the heads of state recognized that their actions were a complete contradiction to the American values that the country was supposed to be established on. In dishonoring their agreements with the Indians to keep settlers away from Indian Tribal Lands, the conflict was described as having to decide who to kill, a settler or an Indian.
Despite the rosy picture of American westward movement still prominent in American K-12 education, acquiring lands in the western territories was a violent endeavor. Judging squatters and referring to them as “white savages” gives you an idea of how early colonists viewed these defiant individuals and families. Some saw squatters as lazy, only wanting to live off of local game for sustenance and being unwilling to toil by working the land. As the Indians became more unwillingly subdued, the government used whatever means necessary to acquire their land for U.S. expansion. In the process of American myth-making, illegal settlers evolved into determined pioneers and frontiersmen. While population shifted west, views of those demonstrating resourcefulness and diplomacy came to be seen in a different light. No longer illegal unruly squatters, those that formed community settlements went on to become members of respectable regions.
Land held unique meanings for different groups of people. For Indians, their sense of self and community was tied to tribal lands. For groups such as immigrants and entrepreneurs among others, land out west meant opportunity. For the newly established United States, land represented stability. Rising from the ruins of war, America was beginning to find its identity and nationalize along Eastern North America. With the Revolutionary War behind the early colonists, it was time to establish the United States of America as a legitimate nation with tremendous growth potential. Vital to this identity, were the principles that the nation was founded on. Interactions with native Indians (and squatters) challenged these ideals when conflicts arose, which occurred frequently. The result—movement west was anything but blue skies and smooth sailing.
Focusing on the numerous benefits available through expanding west, not the least of which was economic, land development and settlement represented a source of cohesion to bind the new nation together. The country was seeking stability through westward expansion. “Only through the creation of a market in western lands could the United States guarantee economic development and preserve their union” (Onuf 42).
One of the most important methods for maintaining and growing early America was settling land and populating that land with “high quality” families. This would serve two valuable goals: to generate revenue for a depleted treasury as well as offer protection from outside threats through the formation of high-density communities locally driven by mutual belief systems. Due to a shortage of both committed militia and funds to compensate them, Congress attempted to entice men from the colonies to join the military in exchange for the promise of land grants in the Northwest Territory. A deep and complicated issue arose because these lands were inhabited by Indians; achieving the right to pass them on to soldiers and their families in an orderly fashion was a problem steeped in conflict and deception.