[f. SQUAT v.]
1. U.S. A settler having no formal or legal title to the land occupied by him, esp. one thus occupying land in a district not yet surveyed or apportioned by the government.
1788. J. Madison, in Sparks, Corr. Amer. Rev. (1853), IV. 207. Many of them and their constituents are only squatters upon other people’s land, and they are afraid of being brought to account.
1809. Kendall, Trav., III. lxxiv. 160. Upon visiting his lands, he finds … possession taken by a race of men, (the settlers and lumberers,) who in this view are called squatters.
1834. Pringle, Afr. Sk., iii. 162. Engelbrecht is what in America would be called a Squatter. He has no land of his own.
1856. Whittier, Panorama, 478. The hunted bison tires, And dies o’ertaken by the squatter’s fires.
b. An unauthorized occupant of land.
1849. Macaulay, Hist. Eng., iii. I. 359. At another time an impudent squatter settled himself there, and built a shed for rubbish.
1860. G. H. K., Vac. Tour, 156. Hundreds of squatters from the neighbouring parts of Sutherland and Ross.
1874. Jefferies, Toilers of Field (1892), 68. Commonly the squatters pitched on a piece of land … running parallel to the highway or lane.
c. In fig. uses.
1821. Coleridge, in Blackw. Mag., X. 250. An intrusive supernumerary or squatter in the same tenement and workshop.
1897. Bailey, Princ. Fruit-growing, 342. It will … be necessary to begin hunting for borers, and other squatters and campers.
2. Austr. One occupying a tract of pastoral land as a tenant of the crown; a grazier or sheep-farmer, esp. on a large scale.
In early Australian use (c. 1835–) the term was employed as in sense 1.
1840. G. Arden, Austr. Felix, 109. Under this license the squatter is protected.
1847. Leichhardt, Jrnl., Introd. p. xiv. We were received with the greatest kindness by my friends the ‘Squatters,’ a class principally composed of young men of good education, gentlemanly habits, and high principles.
1889. Mrs. C. Praed, Rom. Station, 12. I am glad to have married a squatter instead of a townsman.
3. A squatting person or animal.
1824. Chalmers, in Mem. (1851), III. ii. 17. Dr. Haldane was not one of the squatters, but somehow his dusty back got into the view of the audience.
1872. Spurgeon, Treas. Dav., Ps. lxviii. 13. Their enemies may have called them squatters among the pots.
1894. Athenæum, 3 Feb., 144/1. The portrait of a toad ‘from life’ is creditable alike to the artist and the sitter—or rather squatter.
b. Austr. A variety of pigeon.
1872. C. H. Eden, My Wife & I in Queensland, 122. On the plains you find different kinds of pigeons, the squatters being most common,… crouching down to the ground quite motionless as you pass.
4. attrib., as squatter magistrate; squatter pigeon Austr., = sense 3 b; squatter sovereignty U.S., the right claimed by the inhabitants of newly formed territories to settle for themselves the question of slavery or other institutions; squatter state (see quot.).
1894. H. Nisbet, Bush Girl’s Rom., 214. To congratulate the *squatter magistrate on his good fortune.
1881. Gentl. Mag., Jan., 69. For the first time I saw the *squatter pigeon, a pretty little brown dove, that derives its name from its habit of squatting on the ground.
1850. Georgia Telegr., 14 May, 2/3. This act in the language of a contemporary, at once gives a full and solemn recognition by the Congress of the United States, to the doctrine of *Squatter Sovereignty, and legalizes the California proviso.
1854. in Rep. 200, Ho. Representatives 34th Congr., 1st Sess. 954. We are in favor of bona fide squatter sovereignty.
1860. Lowell, Election in Nov., Prose Wks. 1890, V. 25. The Pro-Slavery party … here … represents Squatter-Sovereignty, and there the power of Congress over the Territories.
1894. J. Fiske, Hist. Amer., 342. The doctrine of ‘squatter sovereignty’; not Congress, but the ‘squatters’ were to be the supreme authority on the great question. It was the principle of ‘local option’ applied to slavery.
1872. De Vere, Americanisms, 659. It [Kansas] appears occasionally as *Squatter State, from the pertinacity with which the squatter-sovereignty was discussed there.
