| This dissertation is an intellectual and cultural history of what nineteenth-century Americans called "the land question" as it developed in California and shaped the American political economy from 1850 to 1920. The land question was really two questions: who should have the right to own land and how much of it? Over the course of the nineteenth century, as the borders of the United States stretched west, the land question became part of a dialogue about wealth and opportunity in the expanding Republic, about interracial relations and equality among new migrants and old inhabitants, and about the fortitude and weaknesses of patriarchy and families in western communities. As sectional strife gripped the country and civil war loomed, the land question entered debates over the expansion of slavery and became shorthand for expressing the politics of free soil and free labor. And as the American economy corporatized, consolidated, and grew, the land question surfaced again, this time as a way of thinking through the rights of wage-workers to rise up, to organize, to receive reward for their labor. It became part of debates over industrialization and new immigration from Asia and Europe.The competition for land was particularly frenzied in mid-nineteenth-century California where a land rush followed closely on the heels of the Gold Rush. To understand the changing meanings of the land question, this dissertation focuses on anti-monopolist land reform movements that began in California and spread eastward. To oppose land monopoly was to support landownership among small producers---farmers, craftsmen, and small businessmen---and restrict the land rights of non-producers---landlords, speculators, and great estate-holders. While anti-monopolist goals and leadership were distinctly middle class, reformers found a receptive audience among industrial wage-workers, who were attracted by the promise of restored opportunity for their independence and reward for their labor. Understanding how anti-monopolist land reformers answered the land question is essential to understanding how nineteenth-century Americans envisioned sustaining the ideals of their democratic republic in an era characterized by territorial expansion, new immigration and diversity, and large-scale industrialization. |
