Early democratic land policy

This paper examines American public land policy from the colonial period through the antebellum era, emphasizing the gap between formal policy and settlement on the ground. Early national policymakers faced competing objectives: generating revenue from western lands, promoting orderly territorial expansion and facilitating landownership among independent farmers. Federalists, and later Whigs, generally favored revenue-oriented policies and sales to large purchasers, while Jeffersonian Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats increasingly favored policies benefiting small settlers. Yet neither approach adequately accounted for the limited administrative and coercive capacity of the early American state. Settlers routinely occupied desirable land before surveys and legal sales, establishing claims through possession and improvement. Because the federal government lacked the resources to prevent or reverse this process, Congress repeatedly accommodated squatters through preemption measures that transformed unauthorized settlement into recognized property rights. These practices drew on colonial precedents and were reinforced by a republican and Jacksonian ideology associating independent landownership with citizenship, equality and opposition to monopoly. By the 1841 Preemption Act, episodic concessions to squatters had effectively become permanent policy. Early American land policy thus demonstrates how limited state capacity and settlers’ actions shaped the public domain more powerfully than formal policies enacted in Washington.