the land mania--5/4/2026

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Today's selection-- from Speculation Nation by Michael A. Blaakman. A "rage,” a "Vortex,” a “deranged" "madness,” a "ravaging flame”:

“If you were to visit the Monroe County clerk's office and begin to trace the title of my parents' house from their deed up the chain of previous owners, proceeding to a few other repositories as you continued back long before the property was a suburban lot, you'd eventually find that the first two white people to claim that land as property contracted to buy it from a revolutionary government in 1788 as part of a six-million-acre purchase. One, Oliver Phelps, a bumptious former tavernkeeper, provisioned the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War; the other, a fusty merchant named Nathaniel Gorham, cashed in on wartime privateering, succeeded John Hancock as president of the Continental Congress, and signed the U.S. Constitution.

"Those two men joined thousands of others in a surge of land speculation that began to swell during the War for Independence and crested in the 1790s, a dramatic historical process that swept up millions upon millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and from the Great Lakes to Georgia. Widely known but less widely understood, this development is rarely investigated by historians as a single, national event. To be sure, land speculation has been a theme throughout American history, from Puritan proprietors and Jamestown adventurers through the railroad barons of the Reconstruction era to a real-estate mogul in the twenty-first-century Oval Office. But land speculation in the 1780s and 1790s was a chapter apart, defined by its entanglement with revolutionary ideas, politics, and state formation. Throughout these two decades, thousands of speculators and dozens of land companies bought and sold huge tracts of land–recently expropriated from or even as yet unceded by its Indigenous owners–expecting to resell it for astronomical profits. This was a period when it seemed like anybody with capital or access was getting involved in the land business and when fortunes were being won and lost apparently overnight. It was an era when ambitious investors, the already wealthy as well as those on the make, mobilized public and private initiative to dispossess Native people and to convert their territories into private property at breathtaking speed and scale. The land market's promise seemed so certain that it led people to leverage large purchases upon the profits they expected to make from other speculations, still in progress. It led some failing financiers to try to speculate their way out of insolvency from within the walls of debtors' prison.

“By 1795, the passion for land speculation had reached the floor of Congress. Late that year, Robert Randall and Charles Whitney traveled to Philadelphia in hopes of finding a fortune. They hailed from Maryland and Vermont, respectively, and though their background and the origins of their partnership are unclear, their intentions were plain. In cahoots with a group of British merchants at Detroit, they sought to purchase from the federal government a right to the entire lower peninsula of present-day Michigan–some twenty million acres, all told, of Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi homelands. After several weeks of surreptitious lobbying, offering lawmakers money and shares of the land, they claimed to have clinched the support of a third of the House and most of the Senate. Corruption so bald could not survive the sunlight. The 'wild land-jobbing scheme' was laid bare on December 28, when several congressmen interrupted the chamber's proceedings to disclose the ongoing attempt at bribery. Whitney was quickly apprehended at a nearby tavern. Randall, loitering that day in the lobby of Congress Hall, at first attempted to flee. When the doorkeeper pointed him out to the city marshal for arrest, he seemed taken aback. After all, the United States was teeming with speculators; searching for powerful partners in the nation's capital, Randall and Whitney thought they had come to the right spot. The scandal consumed Congress for more than a week. The press, for its part, chalked the affair up to the spirit of the age, the 'phrenzy of speculation' that stretched across the republic. Randall and Whitney belonged to a 'speculating tribe' that numbered in the thousands, all of them chasing 'roman tick projects' by wheeling and dealing in tracts of land so large, so distant, and so unknown to the U.S. governments and citizens who claimed them that they could only be imagined in abstract terms.

1914 billboard criticizing speculation on land, which cites Henry George

“You might even call it a mania. And in the eighteenth century and ever since, many observers have done just that. In the 1780s and 1790s, the land business was a 'rage,' some said–a 'Vortex,' a 'deranged' 'madness,' a 'ravaging flame.' George Washington, himself a substantial speculator, marveled at how the burgeoning land business seemed to numb its participants' minds to numerical scale. 'Men in these times,' he noted in 1784, 'talk with as much facility of fifty, a hundred, and even 500,000 Acres as a Gentleman formerly would do of 1000 acres.' In a Philadelphia magazine in 1798, one writer framed this historical moment quite succinctly. 'The Land Mania is a frequent disease in every part of America,' he wrote, a bit tongue-in-cheek. 'It broke out with peculiar violence in most of the states immediately after the peace [in 1783], and has continued to be more or less the epidemic of our country ever since.'

“Such talk is telling evidence. It captures the ambition and frenzy of the era's land business, the promised profits of dispossession, the metastasizing complexity of land transactions, the soaring rhetoric and spin. When people reached for the language of 'mania,' they revealed not only that they saw the enthusiasm for land speculation as a single, national trend but also that they perceived its increased pull and prevalence as something new to their place in time–something they could not quite explain. In some ways, the puzzle inherent in this language persists to our own day. For although speculators have loomed large in histories of the revolutionary era, we lack an account that explains the unprecedented intensity, structural origins, and national scale of the land business itself. Historians often reproduce the era's language of mania to describe land speculation in the early republic. Now as then, this vocabulary marks the phenomenon as irrational, inexplicable, and ultimately unknowable.”

author:	Michael A. Blaakman
title:	Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic
publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press
pages:	2-5