Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

8-9-2008

SSRN Discipline

Legal Scholarship Network; LSN Subject Matter eJournals

Abstract

Landscape art in the antebellum era the period before the American Civil War 18611865 often depicts the role of humans on the landscape Humans appear as hunters settlers and travelers and human structures appear as well from rude paths cabins mills bridges and canals to railroads and telegraph wires Those images parallel cases treatises orations essays and fictional literature that discuss propertys role in fostering economic and moral development The images also parallel developments in property doctrine particularly related to adverse possession mistaken improvers nuisance and eminent domain Some of the conflicts in property rights that gripped antebellum thought also appear in paintings including ambivalence about progress concern over development of land and fear of the excesses of commerce The concerns about wealth as well as the concerns about the lack of control through law appear at various points Other paintings celebrate intellectual moral technological and economic progress The paintings thus remind us of how antebellum Americans understood property as they struggled with the changes in the role of property from protection of individual autonomy of the eighteenth century to the promotion of economic growth in the nineteenth century

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