Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840 by Mark C. Chambers (review)

Abstract

ground in the West, both political and violent, Suval strips away the sense of the inevitability of secession and war that often hangs over portrayals of the 1850s. Old characterizations resurfaced in new guises during debates over slavery in the western territories. Stephen Douglas echoed Jacksonians of the past when he championed the rights of squatters to shape the social institutions of their new territories. They were not escaping civilization and citizenship but instead were extending the blessings of settled society to the wilderness. Who better to determine the fate of slavery in a territory than those who pushed forward first? Southern Democrats emphasized the transitory nature of early settlers when rejecting the concept of “squatter sovereignty.” Calhoun thought popular sovereignty “was reckless and frankly ridicu lous . . . given that the ‘first halfdozen of squatters would become the sovereigns, with full dominion’ ” (102). Opposing the bill to accept Oregon as a free territory, Calhoun called the inhabitants “ ‘mere trespassers . . . without title and without the authority of law’ ” (198). Like the Whigs a decade or two earlier, southern politicians portrayed squatters as disrupters and obstacles to the kind of propertied settlers who might champion slaveholders’ rights. Unlike the Democrats and Whigs of old, politicians like Douglas and Calhoun found no common ground to reconcile the growing divide between North and South. Suval has written an impor tant and engaging book that makes a strong case for the need to follow the paths of squatters to understand the political divisions over western territory, first over control and owner ship of public land and then over the fate of slavery in the West.