Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic

by Michael A. Blaakman

Overview

During the first quarter-century after its founding, the United States was swept by a wave of land speculation so unprecedented in intensity and scale that contemporaries and historians alike have dubbed it a “mania.” In Speculation Nation, Michael A. Blaakman uncovers the revolutionary origins of this real-estate bonanza—a story of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and statecraft that stretched across millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and Georgia to the Great Lakes.

Patriot leaders staked the success of their revolution on the seizure and public sale of Native American territory. Initially, they hoped that fledgling state and national governments could pay the hefty costs of the War for Independence and extend a republican society of propertied citizens by selling expropriated land directly to white farmers. But those democratic plans quickly ran aground of a series of obstacles, including an economic depression and the ability of many Native nations to repel U.S. invasion. Wily merchants, lawyers, planters, and financiers rushed into the breach. Scrambling to profit off future expansion, they lobbied governments to convey massive tracts for pennies an acre, hounded revolutionary veterans to sell their land bounties for a pittance, and marketed the rustic ideal of a yeoman’s republic—the early American dream—while waiting for land values to rise.

When the land business crashed in the late 1790s, scores of “land mad” speculators found themselves imprisoned for debt or declaring bankruptcy. But through their visionary schemes and corrupt machinations, U.S. speculators and statesmen had spawned a distinctive and enduring form of settler colonialism: a financialized frontier, which transformed vast swaths of contested land into abstract commodities. Speculation Nation reveals how the era of land mania made Native dispossession a founding premise of the American republic and ultimately rooted the United States’ “empire of liberty” in speculative capitalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781512824476
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press
Publication date:	09/19/2023
Series:	Early American Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	42 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Michael A. Blaakman is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. He is coeditor of The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.–Mexican War, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

07/10/2023

Princeton historian Blaakman debuts with an informative analysis 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.” In the Royal Proclamation of 1763, issued by George III of Great Britain at the end of the Seven Years’ War regarding newly won French territory, Americans colonists had been denied access to all land west of the Appalachian mountains; the region was declared an “Indian Reserve.” To British Americans, this “was anathema,” and it became a central cause of the American Revolution and precipitated the land speculation “mania” of the early national period, which became entwined with the revolution itself. As Blaakman puts it, “Americans staked the success of their revolution on the seizure and sale of land.” He spotlights George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, both speculators, demonstrating how they “lived, thought, sold, and bought within the ideological matrix of Enlightenment-era political arithmetic,” as well as other Founding Fathers, including Robert Morris, a “leading land tycoon” whose failed speculations put him in debtors’ prison. Detailed and persuasive, Blaakman’s account offers useful context for later 19th-century events, including Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and Andrew Jackson’s policy of “Indian Removal.” It’s an illuminating survey of an important and understudied aspect of the Revolutionary era. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Speculation Nation delivers an ambitious, astute, cumulatively damning account of how the early republic built itself on the seizure of Native land. Written with propulsive verve and exceptional clarity, this is a major new interpretation of the revolutionary era which will stimulate anyone interested in the dynamics of property, finance, and race in America."

author of Liberty’s Exiles: American Loy Maya Jasanoff

"This marvelous multi-faceted account of the speculative land frenzy following the American Revolution argues that far from being a natural result of settler ‘land hunger,’ America's original land mania was the outcome of policies created by a people who staked the success of their Revolution on the seizure and sale of Indian land. Blaakman’s fine study restores contingency to a vitally important but misunderstood narrative of U.S. history."

Amy S. Greenberg

"In this stellar book, Michael A. Blaakman rethinks the American founding along its financialized frontier. Speculation Nation goes further to explain the contested and commodified terrain of the post-revolutionary United States than any account I’ve read in recent years. Highly recommended for its deep research, clear prose, and ambitious interpretive reach."

Seth Rockman

"Michael A. Blaakman provides a magnificent treatment of the power of land speculation in the United States from the eve of the American Revolution until the era of the Louisiana Purchase. Speculation Nation is a highly important book, rich in its research, clever in its prose, and provocative in its insights."

Gregory Evans Dowd

"In his masterful Speculation Nation, Michael A. Blaakman delivers a fresh and compelling political and cultural history of the United States’ earliest decades. Centered on the young republic’s first major financial bubble of the 1780s and ’90s, Speculation Nation reveals a nascent United States with a scarcity of land-hungry frontiersmen but plenty of speculators maneuvering to reap huge profits from Native territories."

H-Early America

"Lively and persuasive, Speculation Nation deftly reveals how massive and reckless land speculation converted lands taken from Natives into the financial resources essential to American capitalist development."

Alan Taylor