Squatters and Cotters

American exceptionalism leads us down some weird rabbit holes.

Consider this: There is a considerable body of American historical research that argues against widespread urban squatting because, America!

Some approach this conclusion through a theoretic position. Charles Abrams being the best known. His training in the old Chicago School perspective both encouraged his belief in exceptionalism and led him to expect that the reason for that exceptionalism would be found in the unique American frontier experience. So, as was noted in the last post, Abrams put forward a theory that the frontier siphoned off the land-hungry poor that would otherwise be seeking land in the wastes of the developing cities. After all, why would anyone settle for a pittance of crowded and infertile city property when the promise of tens or hundreds of acres of tillable farmland could be had for the asking?
Abrams leans rather heavily on the other leg of the old Chicago School here, where the American Population has a true aversion to cities as unnatural and undemocratic. The national temperament is fired with a Jeffersonian disdain for the clerks, the bankers, the savage capitalists that swarm the cityscape seeking to further their own gain. Instead they seek the forests and plains of the nation as naturally as a vine seeks light and water. Once planted on the frontier they develop a yeoman's pride in their own self-reliance and an unquenchable interest in the progress of the nation. That's an overstated version, but conveys the essential mood of this generation of scholars.
Like other examples of exceptionalism, Abrams' conclusion is ripe for revision. The simplest way to refute the exceptionalism premise is simply to demonstrate that there was widespread urban squatting throughout the frontier era, and this seems to be where the state of the literature is now. Since publishing my article establishing a case for widespread urban squatting four years ago I have become one of a diverse group of scholars on the same mission. What hasn't happened yet is a theoretical challenge or any other reframing of squatting that could direct future research.
Also, interestingly, there is some defense of America's no-urban-squatters exceptionalism that also uses local archival research. That is set to become part two of yesterday's post introducing this topic.

What I want to move to instead, and what I want to begin emphasizing more strongly in future, is the absurdity of the exceptionalism argument while building a new framework to observe historical urban squatting.
The absurdity argument is fairly straightforward and rests on several points.
1. That any urban property is inherently more valuable to their owners than the undeveloped farmlands of the far west. This most true for the very poorest in terms of their opportunities to earn a living or establish a business.
2. Farming isn't for everyone. In an age where a significant percentage of the population worked in agriculture, it couldn't have been very hard to get a sense of how well suited one was to the life. Also, if my reading of Horatio Alger and other Victorian popular authors is representative, the culture as a whole was not as deeply enchanted of the rustic life as scholars of the period remain today.
3.  The immigrants fueling urban growth throughout the 19th century came from nations with a strong squatting tradition, a tradition that encompassed cities.

This last point is best illustrated in the little-noticed volume Cotters and Squatters, which documents how the nearly universal "House Built In a Single Night" tradition remained current into the modern age. Particularly telling are the stories of the masses displaced during the endless rounds of enclosure bills passed in the 17th-19th centuries often took up residence in urban wastes and parish common lands. This pattern is replicated almost precisely in the United States by the displaced persons who had the ability to travel to the New World. Fascinatingly, the usual course was not to displace the squatters, but instead to fine them. This in time was regularized into a form of rental payment.