Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy

The squatter--defined by Noah Webster as "one that settles on new land without a title"--had long been a fixture of America's frontier past. In the antebellum period, white squatters propelled the Jacksonian Democratic Party to dominance and the United States to the shores of the Pacific. In a bold reframing of the era's political history, John Suval explores how Squatter Democracy transformed the partisan landscape and the map of North America, hastening clashes that ultimately sundered th...