Politics & Power Quote by William H. Wharton

“Savages” and “wilderness” do double duty here: they’re not just insults, they’re legal tools. Wharton is building a moral alibi for land acquisition by arguing that the land was effectively ownerless because it was occupied by people the speaker refuses to recognize as legitimate political subjects. The phrasing converts a contested, inhabited territory into a bureaucratic void. Once the land becomes “wilderness,” taking it stops looking like seizure and starts looking like administration.

The sentence’s engine is its slippery logic of possession. Wharton claims the government “had never taken possession” and, more provocatively, “could not with its own citizens ever have taken possession.” That’s a self-exculpating move: it suggests the state lacked the capacity to settle or control the territory through ordinary means, so extraordinary measures are implied, even justified. If the government can’t “take possession” with its citizens, then conquest, displacement, or privatized expansion becomes the workaround - violence laundered through inevitability.

Context matters: Wharton was a Texas politician in the era when Anglo-American settlers and leaders were justifying rapid expansion across Indigenous lands, leaning on doctrines that treated Native occupancy as something less than sovereignty. His rhetoric isn’t merely descriptive; it’s performative. It attempts to retroactively cleanse the paper trail of colonization by making prior inhabitants vanish linguistically. The sentence reads like a defense brief masquerading as a statement of fact, designed to make theft sound like a logistical problem already solved by history.