Historians often use a set of natural metaphors when describing how the United States displaced Indigenous peoples. There's the hydraulic vocabulary with which we discuss settlers, who flowed, streamed, rushed, and flooded Native lands. Pulling them there was a primal and insatiable hunger for land. To capture the behavior of land speculators—settlers’ evil twins—we use emotive language, ascribing to them frenzy, mania, or, when things go wrong, panic. In his vividly written and persuasive account of land speculation in the early republic, Michael Blaakman cracks beneath the surface of all this imagery. Colonization was not an organic process, driven by the laws of nature or animal spirits, but a historical one. Focusing on one such metaphor—the unprecedented “mania” in land speculation that succeeded the American Revolution—Blaakman shows how large-scale, profit-motivated investors in land acted in perfectly rational ways given the United States’ nascent economic state and its unrealized claims to neighboring Native territories.
Speculation Nation makes clear that the early United States’ desperate efforts to make land a fiscal asset—a commodity that could be surveyed and sold by states for public revenue—created the conditions for a mania to occur. Blaakman's story begins before the nation's founding, with the sudden centralization of land policy by the Board of Trade during Britain's post-Seven Years’ War era of belt-tightening and colonial reform. By stripping colonists of the right to purchase Native lands on their own and hemming in settlement east of a line stipulated in the Proclamation of 1763, the British managed to aggravate would-be settlers enough to prompt a revolt against empire. After the revolution, new state and national governments sought to sell Native lands in an effort to alleviate crushing war debts. Apart from drawing in revenue, American policymakers of this period hoped that the appropriated Native lands would provide the grounds for a republican citizenry of virtuous smallholders. This yeomen fetish, coupled with an ecstatic conviction that the United States’ virtue and demographic increase would assure its economic prosperity, formed the cultural components of land mania's “logic.” How this logic would operate in practice had everything to do with the United States’ early state formation. Property history nerds will find much to love here, but it is Blaakman's interventions into the perennial debates over the nature and extent of state power that make this book so valuable to a wider readership.
Rather than pronounce the early American state as strong or weak, Blaakman shows how its various strengths and weaknesses interacted to place public lands into private hands. Overextended states had, during the Revolution, issued a motley array of paper promises to pay debts with land in the future. They did so despite the fact that much of the land in question remained in the firm possession of Native polities uninterested in ceding them to the United States. Warrants, bounties, bonds, and debt certificates circulated as quasi-currency, albeit a depreciated sort, since many bearers preferred to pass them off for value in the present rather than wait for struggling states to make good on their promises of real estate later. Investors bought up these IOUs in bulk, then redeemed them from grateful states, thereby reducing their debt burdens. The federal government even accepted these major debt-for-land swaps when advanced by dubious land companies, conveniently headed by men with close ties to George Washington. Not only did these companies wipe out portions of war debts by purchasing land, they also (theoretically) acted as proxies for a government utterly unable to materialize its fictive claims to Native lands in the Ohio River Valley and elsewhere. Owing to fiscal desperation and a military unable to trounce Indigenous armies, the “paper technologies” states had issued with the vaunted yeoman in mind instead devolved into the raw material for a frenetic speculation.
One especially interesting artifact of states’ struggle to form property from Native lands were preemptive titles, which granted the owner exclusive right to purchase land from Indigenous possessors. Preemption, as Blaakman shows, can be traced to British policies of the 1760s, but played out most prominently in treaties signed by the United States in the 1790s, which rammed through restrictions on the freedom of Native nations to cede lands to competing empires, notably that of Spain and Britain. Preemptive title then took on a life of its own within the land market, as state governments jockeyed to sell these exclusive rights to speculators. As Blaakman lays out the story, this competition for land investors was enabled by federalism. Speculators could shop around from state to state in a search for the most favorable regulatory environment for their investments. In addition, speculators could play the national government against states in order to secure their investments. Two appeals to federal jurisdiction yielded the landmark Supreme Court decisions Fletcher v. Peck (1810) and Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823), still foundational to property law today.
There were gaps in government power to craft and execute land policies, but where states succeeded, their actions fueled speculation. Not a single transaction in land could have occurred, Blaakman points out, had states not surveyed newly acquired territories and primed them for commodification. So too did treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton's fiscal reforms restore the nation's credit, improve economic outlook, stabilize financial markets, and inject capital—all factors that frothed up more mania. Finally, the United States’ eventual triumph over a confederacy of Indigenous peoples in the Ohio Country—a victory achieved by genocidal campaigns—rewarded speculators who had invested in the region and encouraged new ventures. Only a transatlantic financial crisis in 1797 quieted the boom.
Speculation Nation is rife with unexpected, even counterintuitive insights. Land dispossession was guided not only—or even primarily—by the doctrine of discovery, but by concepts like preemption birthed from criticisms of conquest. Speculators were regularly ardent if opportunistic promoters of Indigenous sovereignty, since it legitimated their unmediated purchases of Native land. Supposedly land-hungry settlers in the early republic were actually reticent to immigrate to frontiers, given the depressed state of the economy and the lack of defense against Native power. Foreign investors in American land, so prominent in the literature, were few in number and held minor influence, although stateside speculators wished otherwise. Running over 400 pages, the book's length might deter some from assigning it in their classes, but this would be a disservice. Authoritative and remarkably readable, the book deserves a wide audience among students and scholars alike.