Journal of Southern History

In this impressively researched study, historian Julius Wilm traces the development of free land policy in the United States from the late eighteenth century through the 1862 Homestead Act. As Wilm notes, while land has become a trendy topic among U.S. historians, his is the first book to delve comprehensively into free land legislation since the works of Paul W. Gates and Roy M. Robbins a half century ago. Wilm provides a much-needed update to these studies by investigating free land policy through a settler colonial framework, and in doing so he integrates Native peoples and settler-Native conflicts into the story. Indians sit at the core of Wilm’s main argument: Congress was willing to provide free land to white settlers only “when proposals were geared to create, enforce, and expand a racist order across the North American continent” (p. 19). However, this legislation rarely acted as congressmen and settlers hoped, demonstrating what Wilm terms the “contradictions of settler imperialism” (p. 251).

The book is divided into three chapters, all of which are subdivided into helpfully organized short sections and written in clear, workmanlike prose. The first chapter examines six failed attempts to pass free land legislation between 1798 and 1829. This chapter is particularly useful, for none of these policies have been comprehensively studied before—though perhaps with good reason, as they all were voted down by overwhelming congressional opposition. The bulk of the book then examines three policies in detail: the failed 1838 Arkansas “Belt Bill,” the 1842 Armed Occupation Act in Florida, and the 1850 Donation [End Page 149] Land Claim Act in Oregon. In the cases of Florida and Oregon, policy makers believed that free land would facilitate white settlement and, in turn, that settlement would cheaply and effectively secure these regions from Indians and (in Oregon) Great Britain. In Arkansas, settlers tried to make a similar case, but few in Congress believed the recently removed Natives in U.S. Indian Territory were a threat, and it was left to the Arkansas state legislature to grant free land—none of which, it turned out, was near Indian Territory. Yet neither the Florida nor the Oregon bill worked as intended. In Florida, due to malaria and difficult legal hurdles, only a third of claimants remained on their land by 1848, too few to make much headway against the few remaining Seminoles. Oregon witnessed the opposite problem: the thousands of successful claimants quickly initiated a series of brutal conflicts with Indians, forcing the United States to spend money to defend its citizens. Cheap settlement turned out to be quite expensive. The final chapter of the book details how the Republican Party transformed free land policy in the 1850s by downplaying the conquest of Indians and instead emphasizing improvement of the land itself, which culminated in the 1862 Homestead Act.

The essential strength of the book lies in the author’s impressive research and data-driven evidence. Not only has Wilm mined federal and state archives, local historical societies, and countless newspapers, but he has also included twenty-three tables and two appendixes. Indeed, if this book has a flaw, it is that the wealth of data makes it a victim of its own success, just like the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act that it describes so well. The book is intended to demonstrate the contradictions in settler colonialism, but it does much more than that, and it is not served by being bounded by a theory-driven framework. Wilm’s evidence points to new revelations about gender, geopolitics, and especially class during the early republic, yet the author leaves most of these findings unaddressed or underanalyzed. It will be left to other historians to pick up where Wilm has left off. When they do so, they must acknowledge him for this fine piece of scholarship.