SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY, a term designating the right of occupation acquired through undisturbed possession of public lands for a certain number of years by settlers originally unauthorized. Public lands or public domain belonging either to the nation or inch vidual States, from the necessities of govern ment and the usual operations of capitalists, became an object of speculation, and were ac cordingly sold from time to time in large tracts to capitalists and speculators, who generally resided at a great distance from the lands thus purchased by them. Their lands being thus entirely out of their view and control were of course continually intruded upon and possession taken here and there by emigrants from the more populous towns, who put them under cultivation and erected houses and buildings upon them for the common purposes of agricul ture. These settlers came to be familiarly known as squatters, a name naturally derived from the act of settling upon lands in the man ner practised. By the lapse of time the mere possession of these settlers, without any formal title to the land, ripened into what they consid ered to be a right, although the titled proprietors of the soil were frequently wholly ignorant of such occupation of their property. Often, after a long series of years, it became impossible to dispossess them, whatever their possession, in its origin, may have been.It is true that the i proprietors might, and did institute legal proc esses and recovered judgment against the occupants, but the officers of justice frequently could not execute the sentence of the law and dislodge them from their possessions. Instances not unfrequently occurred where the officers of justice and the proprietors themselves, or their agents, were shot at or suffered other acts of violence from the occupants. In this critical exigency, which threatened the public welfare, and which was perhaps exaggerated by those men who wished to avail themselves of the occasion to obtain popularity for political pur poses, it was thought necessary to pass laws which were to a great extent similar to the Roman agrarian laws and which deprived the technical proprietor of a portion of his rights and transferred them to the possessor who had occupied and improved the land.
Under colonial laws and usages a title to land by mere occupancy could not be acquired by a possession short of 60 years. By one of the first laws promulgated by a State of the re public on the question, the legislature of Mass achusetts in 1808 shortened this term to 40 years.
This essential change in the legal rights of the titled proprietors, in violation of what they deemed to be the fair intent and meaning of their contracts, caused much excitement and dissatisfaction among them. Generally, it may
be said that there evidently was hardship on both sides; it was not equitable, on the one hand, that the proprietor should be deprived of his land, nor on the other that an innocent occupant who had been suffered to remain in possession for. 30 or 40 years, undisturbed by the proprietor, should be suddenly expelled and stripped of the fruits of the labor of a whole life. By way of alleviating the difficulties of the case, it was provided in this law of 1808, agreeable to a well-known principle of the Roman code, that when the proprietor should institute a process to recover his land the oc cupant should have a right to claim an allow ance for the value of the improvements which he had made upon the lands thus occupied by and which were called in the Roman law melsorantes or melioramenta, and by analogy in the popular language of New England, bet terments, improvements, which might have been taken to convey the idea of mehoramenta being already used in New England in the sense of occupation..
In practice, the law was more unequal in its operation as regarding the proprietor of the land, from another circumstance; for he being usually a non-resident or stranger, and the occu pant being an inhabitant of the same territory from which the jury was taken who were to try the question of right between the parties, the proprietor was in the more danger of suffering from the prejudice or hostility of the jury.
The law remained in operation, and the lapse of time rendered it less and less unequal and injurious in its effects; finally it became the model of similar laws for all other States of the Union which respectively claimed the right to legislate upon the matter according to local needs.
And from this claim for legislation accord ing to local needs arose the cry of °popular sov ereignty° which became identified with °squat ter sovereignty)) in that its adherents, especially from 1847 to 1861, advanced and strenuously advocated the theory that the question of slav ery in a State or Territory should be decided by the electorate of the State or Territory and not by Congress. See also PUBLIC LANDS, BOUNTIES.
or KLEBERRY, the deerberry, genus Vaccinium stamineum, a bush native to the eastern part of the United States. The bush rarely grows to any height and the berry is very unsavory. The bush, however, has pretty racemed flowers with white recurved corolla and yellow stamens.