Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance

2 Romancing the State of Nature Speculation, Regeneration, and the Maine Frontier in House of the Seven Gables

39 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, small-scale landholders in the southern part of the District of Maine waged a virtual war of insurgency against efforts by largely absentee owners to survey their lands and demand payment for them. Those who had moved into the area in order to start farms in the last decades of the eighteenth century largely had fled increasingly overcrowded conditions in eastern Massachusetts, in which prices were escalating quickly due to the growing paucity of available land, and they hoped to settle enough territory to provide for themselves and their families.1 Atstakeintheantagonismbetweenfarmersandproprietorswasthe proper character and basis of land tenure, the legacy of the war for independence , and the kind of political economy that would be taken as normative in the new republic.2 Writers favoring the farmers observe that instead of gaining control over the land through labor, actually improving it through cultivation and building permanent structures like houses, elites seek to extend their reach and profit through “stratagem and artifice.”3 Rather than endorsing concrete relation to the land in the form of agricultural work as the only legitimate means of defining ownership, the state has sided with predatory speculative schemes built on the circulation of paper—“deeds”—that gain authority by receiving the official imprimatur of the government. This Lockean logic privileges labor as the basis for property, a sacrosanct relation that precedes and exceeds the specific arrangements of any given political order. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to this decades-long battle in and over the Maine backcountry, a struggle of 2 QW romancing the state of nature Speculation, Regeneration, and the Maine Frontier in House of the Seven Gables 40 Romancing the State of Nature which he would have been well aware.4 He observes of the lands in Waldo County, Maine, claimed by the Pyncheon family based on a seventeenthcentury deed that “in the course of time, the territory was partly re-granted to more favored individuals, and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers ,” adding that “[t]hese last, if they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed at the idea of a man’s asserting a right—on the strength of mouldy parchments, signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators, long dead and forgotten—to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested from the wild hand of Nature, by their own sturdy toil” (15). Hawthorne’sjuxtapositionofthePyncheons’longlost“deed”—the“mouldy” state-endorsed paper claim—with the work of “actual settlers” whose “sturdy toil” carved farms out of the wilderness replicates almost term for term the arguments made by Maine settlers and their supporters a half century earlier . The search for that deed animates much of the plot, and its discovery and the proclamation of its supposed worthlessness propels the novel to its close. In its vision of farmers who “wrested [lands] from the wild,” the opening chapter suggests that the text’s account of ownership and economy will be oriented by the struggles of the Maine settlers and the Lockean principles at play in their arguments.5 The novel’s implicit invocations of this perspective help circulate a narrative of labor in the country as a counter to the hoarding of ill-gotten gain by elites (cast as themselves residually European) and as a path to individual and collective regeneration. The novel’s orientation toward a state-of-nature ethics shapes its participation in midcentury political discourses, specifically the extant critique of speculation. Between the time of the struggle in Maine and the writing of House of the Seven Gables, two financial panics had occurred, in 1819 and 1837, followed by years of crushing depression and mass unemployment and dislocation. They revealed precisely how vast chains of credit and debt were and the degree to which virtually the entire populace was enmeshed in extended volatile financial and commercial networks predicated on paper, promises, and public policy that facilitated transregional and transnational linkages.6 However, amid the ever-growing proliferation of capitalist entanglements , the Democratic Party, to which Hawthorne belonged and from which he benefited as a government employee during the late 1830s and late 1840s,7 legitimized itself by recycling the image of the agrarian laborer as a figure of republican virtue, trading on the promotion of itself as representing Romancing the State of Nature 41 the interests of working...