He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Dangerous Ground centers on pleas to Congress by American settlers and officials in Oregon for their region to gain official territorial status, recognition that would bring greater security, federal infrastructure, and, most crucially, U.S. patents for their land claims. The action takes place during the anxious period between the Oregon Compromise of 1846 and the Oregon territorial act of 1848, a time marked by bloodshed between whites and Native Americans and concerns over the abiding influence of Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company. To their frustration, Oregonians faced stiff resistance to integration into the American fold from southern lawmakers because they had barred slavery several years earlier.Learn more about Dangerous Ground at the Oxford University Press website.
The Page 99 Test works surprisingly well for Dangerous Ground, with important dimensions of the book’s arguments and methodologies appearing in full view. The study reveals how Jacksonian Democrats rose to dominance in the 1830s and 40s by taking a novel stance towards squatters in the West, promoting an ethos of aggressive land-taking that contributed to an era of unprecedented territorial conquests. Unlike their Federalist and Jeffersonian forebears who denounced and sought to hinder illegal settlers, Democrats hailed squatters as patriotic pioneers and aided their land grabs with preemption laws, Indian removal, and saber-rattling toward rival empires. Squatters, in turn, helped secure U.S. claims to large swaths of the continent, while forming a strong, expanding base for Democrats. Such was the quid pro quo of Squatter Democracy, a marriage of interests that transformed the partisan landscape and map of North America. The U.S.-Mexico War proved a turning point, particularly after David Wilmot, in August 1846, attached a proviso to an appropriations measure barring slavery from any land conquered from Mexico. For southerners, the Wilmot Proviso posed an existential threat. Where Democrats from the North and South had previously unified behind a squatter-driven expansionist platform that paired the acquisition of Oregon with the annexation of Texas, slavery proponents now fiercely resisted organizing a territory for Oregon. Years later Stephen A. Douglas would recall the contentious debates over Oregon as the moment when “squatter sovereignty” began to bedevil the country.
Methodologically, the page captures the give-and-take between squatters in the West and politicians in Washington, an uneasy alliance that brought the U.S. to the shores of the Pacific and Democrats to power, but created fissures that would grow even more acute in the lead-up to the Civil War as squatters waged war over the place of slavery in America’s future.
--Marshal Zeringue
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