In early America the notion that settlers ought to receive undeveloped land for free was
enormously popular among the rural poor and social reformers. Well into the Jacksonian era
however Congress considered the demand fiscally and economically irresponsible. Increasingly
this led proponents to cast the idea as a military matter: Land grantees would supplant troops
in the efforts to take the continent over from Indian nations and rival colonial powers. Julius
Wilm's book examines the free land debates of the 1790s to 1850s and reconstructs the
settlement experiences under the donation laws for Florida (1842) and the Oregon Territory
(1850). Both laws promised to bring the interests of poorer whites and their government into a
more harmonious relation - to the exclusion of African Americans and for the explicit purpose
of displacing Native peoples. Drawing on new records Wilm details the trajectory of
settlements and shows how the settler-imperialist experiments fell apart and undermined the
rationale of the donation laws. After home seekers fled Florida due to malaria and militias in
Oregon triggered uncontrollable violence settlers came to be seen as unreliable agents of
government aims. This is the single most detailed exploration of free land in antebellum
America. Wilm does a marvelous job exploring the limits of settler colonialism as a framework
for settlement in Florida where it failed. For the case of Oregon he shows that settler
occupation was appealing to federal legislators because it would 'substitute the ax the plow
and the hoe for the gun the sword and the bayonet.' That the government knowingly held out a
promise of free land in order to encourage squatter sovereignty is a most compelling argument.
Amy S. Greenberg Pennsylvania State University This is a skillful study of American proposals
for the distribution of free public lands that predated the Homestead Act of 1862. Tracing
discussions of land policy in Congress distribution schemes in Arkansas Florida and Oregon
and the actual consequences of these schemes on the ground Settlers as Conquerors offers both
political and social history showing how 'free land' shaped Indian Removal settler
colonialism and race in the antebellum American West. Christopher Clark University of
Connecticut
