In Maine, land was constantly disputed on account of conflicting patents. The three major patents were drawn up by British lawyers who had never even seen the territory, so they were often imprecise and overlapping. These three major patents were claimed by the Great Proprietors, but they were further in conflict with ten other, smaller land patents. To make things more confusing, tracts of land were frequently sold and resold by local Indians to white settlers who didn’t understand that several other people were also under the impression of ownership. Consequently, property titles were unclear in most of the region—though the Great Proprietors could more easily back their unfounded claims with wealth and sued settlers who purchased land from the competition.[30]
Despite being the original developers of schools, meetinghouses, gristmills, sawmills, and roads in their towns, the settlers were compelled to pay the Great Proprietors for their use of the land. “Because wilderness land was virtually worthless without men to improve it, the settlers created the value that the proprietors demanded from them.” This should not suggest that settlers were opposed to private property; instead, the “cultural expectations of rural equality taught that a man should hold only what his family could improve,” which was usually about 50–150 acres per working male.[31]
The Great Proprietors, on the other hand, maintained the illusion that they were intellectually superior and that it was their moral obligation to guide the backcountry pioneers into a mode of civilization and sophistication. With disdain, they viewed the frontier as “an escape hatch that allowed men and women to evade discipline, morality, and law. So long as that outlet existed, the poor would remain saucy and uncooperative, and the frontier would sustain a squatter anarchy where quasi-Indian whites squandered nature’s bounty to live in idle dissipation.” The proprietors’ measure against this threat of sustained backcountry ignorance and degeneracy was to impose an “entry fee” to the frontier, limiting settlers to only those upright citizens who could afford pioneering, and molding the enlightened Maine that they envisioned. After all, if they failed, squatters might “preempt the vast American frontier for an asylum of the turbulent poor lost forever to commercial civilization, a threat rather than an asset to the older centers of trade, culture, and governance.”[32]
Henry Knox was one of the most notorious and reviled proprietors, known for taking out advertisements such as this one (with its original capitalization and application of italics, in the style of the day):
The Subscriber has agreed, with all the settlers, seated on his back lands, and sold lands the fame quarter to numerous and respectable Emigrants from the States Westward, on principles promising them great prosperity and the establishment of harmony and good order throughout that fertile region. He conceives therefore, that this is the proper moment to announce in the most public and solemn manner that in future, No usurpation of his lands will be tolerated. As the land is, and will be surveyed into lots, no hope of impunity will arise from any [ILLEGIBLE] in the offense. Every regular settler has bound himself to discountenance and discover lawless persons—It would be deemed madness among Farmers to suffer a wolf to enter at among their sheep, much more so would it be for regular settlers after having legally engaged valuable consideration for their Lands to suffer an audacious usurper to enter and remain there, scattering the seeds of discord, misery, and insurrection with both hands. Any person therefore, who shall in defiance of this notice, and in defiance of the law, usurp the lands of the Subscriber will be prosecuted for the damages that many ensue; suffer the utter loss of his labor and fixtures, and be refused Land at any price whatever.[33]
Knox, as many of the Great Proprietors, was under the impression that his relationship to settlers was a protective and paternalistic one. He described himself as a “father and guardian” to them, as well as a “close friend.” These notions are contrary to his many land monopoly plots and credit schemes at the expense of settlers. In 1792, for example, he teamed up with William Duer of New York, and the two purchased almost three and a half million acres at twenty cents per acre by paying the General Court a relatively small down payment and persuading the court to grant them the full acreage on credit. They planned to sell the parcels at inflated rates to settlers, and in this way, “the settlers would finance the land monopoly held over them by Duer and Knox.” Knox consistently used settlers as a revenue source, profiting from them twice over: first by their improvements on the land and second by their purchase of it. In fact, part of the grander conspiracy of the Great Proprietors was to transform these ignorant yeomen into economically savvy commercial farmers, developing the wilderness and maximizing the financial exploitation of the frontier—perpetuating the free market ideas of Adam Smith.[34]
In response to the reckless authoritarianism of the Great Proprietors, squatters and other settlers launched a series of assaults on the proprietors and their property. This frequently involved sabotage or destruction of their boats, garrison houses, or sawmills. Between 1790 and 1799 there were thirty-three such instances recorded, and another hundred between 1800 and 1809. Resisters regularly used the popular Indian-disguise tactic, and—incognito—they would harass the proprietors outside their homes (sometimes by firing shots), steal logging tools and horses, break windows, destroy survey plans and compasses, surround the jail and liberate the prisoners, throw down fences and gates, publicly humiliate proprietor supporters, ambush law enforcement, strip naked the constable and beat him with sticks, and light just about anything on fire.[35]
Knox and the like-minded speculators simply could not understand why this was happening. They blamed the rebels’ actions on the “darkness of ignorance,” and sought to break down the isolation that supported the resistance, while integrating the remote settlers into mainstream American civilization. These squatters became so problematic, however, that the Great Proprietors strategically recruited new settlers, in the hopes of replacing the older, more troublesome ones. “Not used to trust in one another to act against gentlemen of wealth and standing, the recruits dared not directly occupy the homesteads they needed. They had never known the cultural distance from authority that allowed the backcountry’s settlers to develop their own notions about property and power.”[36]
According to the agrarians, not all land was property; unimproved wilderness could only be transformed into property through labor, since labor created all value—and where there is no value, property cannot exist. That said, the Great Proprietors were theoretically unable to sell the title to wilderness lands. Yet, some settlers—especially the new ones—had already been duped into believing the doctrine of private property. Agrarian William Scales asked of the proprietors in 1789, “O why do you not sell the rain, dew, frost and Sunbeams also[?]”[37]
Efforts such as those in Maine, as well as those of other resisters throughout the country, culminated in the federal act of September 4, 1841 (the Preemption Statute), which loosened laws intended to punish squatters. Finally, in 1862, the federal Homestead Act provided an avenue for settlers to acquire federal land after living on it for five years and meeting its improvement requirements.[38]
Americans had become accustomed to free land grants, and they did not adjust well to government’s intention of using public land for revenue. Thus, the Homestead Act quelled many concerned voices in regard to the privatization of federal land. It allowed for heads of family or citizens (or soon-to-be citizens) twenty-one years or older to file a claim on no more than 160 acres of surveyed land, which was not already claimed or under Indian title. Despite the rule against settling on unsurveyed land, many found a loophole in settling the plot first and then filing a homestead application after the land was surveyed later. Surprisingly, it was because of the surveying stipulation that