Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton Studies in American Politics)

This book is a vital contribution to the study of American political development. It is a bold and innovative reinterpretation of the process by which the American state acquired and settled territory and in the process reconstructed the composition and character of the American people. One of the fascinating dynamics Frymer details is how the conflicting goals of state-builders and relative limits of the American state created an ongoing dilemma: each round of expansion was premised upon the hope that the country would be made an empire for whites, and yet each expansion produced a more diverse population. Ultimately, the threat of even more diversity and the limits to America's form of settler expansion constrained the scope of its territorial conquests. There will be mistakes of historical interpretation, and historians and political scientists should critically engage with the book; but as a vital rethinking of American statebuilding it is a monumental achievement.

The history of how the US government managed the public lands and turned them into private property is badly in need of an update. While many book have been written on the subject, they’re almost all from the 1940s to 1970s and ignore questions of race and the displacement of Native Americans that resulted from federal land policy.Frymer’s book is an attempt to reinterpret land policy. Instead of the progressive historians’ focus on conflicts between land investors (“speculators”) and frontier farmers, Frymer suggests that federal land policy was developed strategically in order to restrain and incentivize the movements of white citizens with the goal of displacing Native Americans and expanding a white settler republic across the continent.Frymer’s fundamental idea is interesting and should be investigated by historians. However, the book has severe problems and is not a reliable guide to the development of federal land policy. Frymer has obviously only made a superficial review of the existing literature on land policy and he therefore misunderstands basic features of the public land system. While he claims to use (among other things) “territorial records and federal archives, as well as personal papers, periodicals, and newspapers“ (p. 27), I have not been able to find any reference to unpublished archival material in his footnotes. What is worse, however, is that Frymer has often not read the legislation that his book supposedly explains. Three examples:The Florida Armed Occupation Act of 1842 supposedly “required settlers to reside on land that was in the middle of the war zone for seven years.“ (p. 136) Actually, the law required five years residency and it was passed after the war had ended.The Oregon Donation Act of 1850 was according to Frymer open to “anyone white regardless of citizenship was free to benefit from the land donations as long as they intended on staying in the United States and maintaining their possession of the land.“ (p. 140) The actual law required foreigners to become naturalized US citizens before a final land title was issued (see section four of the act).Frymer believes that the Homestead Act of 1862 “allowed settlers to purchase land for $1.25 per acre (in addition to a $10 entry fee), after residing continuously on the property for five years.“ (p. 152) As every high school text book will however tell you, land was free under the Homestead Act (apart from the entry fee). While it is puzzling by itself to find this sort of misunderstanding in an academic book claiming to reinterpret public land history, the mistake also reveals a lack of insight into the land system’s functioning. Settlers were already able to buy land for $1.25 per acre since 1820 and since 1841 they were free to locate claims on any of the government’s lands. Frymer’s version of the Homestead Act is therefore not just a misunderstanding, but completely out of sync with the way in which land was distributed in the decades before the law’s passage.The most troubling aspect of the book is however its use of source material as evident in a graph that supposedly shows a strong correlation between finished homestead patents and percentage population increase in western states between 1860 and 1904 (p. 153). The bars showing the number of homestead patents issued in each state are not representing the numbers in the source that Frymer references. The correlation between the number of homestead patents and population increase was not as strong as the graph suggests. According to Frymer’s alleged source (SDoc 189, Cong. 58-3, p. 175-179) there were many more homesteads in states like Alabama, Arkansas, California, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin than his graph suggests. However, as these states had larger populations in 1860, an accurate graph would not have produced the impressive correlation between percentage population growth and homesteads that Frymer presents in his book.In general, the argument would have been more convincing had Frymer made a fuller review of the existing historical literature. His descriptions of the Florida Armed Occupation Act as a great success (p. 137) and the Homestead Act as an extension of the principle of armed occupation (p. 149) will surprise land historians who have studied the laws more in depth. Unfortunately, Frymer does not engage with their arguments.