THE AMERICAN RESOLUTION: CREATING PROPERTY THROUGH WRITING, DRAWING, AND BUILDING [2026]
[PLAT 14: RESOLUTION; ARTICLE FORTHCOMING]
In law, a resolution is a proposal made in writing. In United States property law, Foot’s Resolution of 1829 was a proposal made in writing to limit the sale of public lands in the West. It was written at a time when Westerners wanted, on the one hand, to acquire homes of their own and to commence the arduous business of farm making, and, on the other hand, to sell a relinquishment of their improvements or to mortgage the land they had selected to obtain capital for additional improvements. Westerners saw Senator Samuel Augustus Foot, a member of the National Republican Party and a Yankee from one of the old states, the same way they saw many Easterners—as hostile and jealous of the “brave, hardy, and enterprising people” who gave value to land and made it sell. Conversely, Foot saw the Westerners as “greedy, lawless land grabbers” who profited from the federal government’s bounty. This essay argues that both—and yet, neither—stereotypes were true: Easterners and Westerners simply created property differently, with Easterners writing descriptions and drawing boundaries and Westerners building houses. By juxtaposing hand-drawn surveys and auto-constructed dwellings, as well as historical maps and contemporary annotations, this essay reveals the increase of architecture’s importance in the federal valuation of land from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century and from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast, thereby destabilizing the binary of the industrial East and the agrarian West and resolving the tension between the old states and the new territories.