History of public land law development

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in HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT that the office of Surveyor General be abolished. It was not unnatural that a Yankee from Connecticut (a state with a mere 3 million acres) should be confused. He probably had not been through the wide sweep of territory opened to settlement extending from Ohio through Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, where some 210 million acres had been surveyed, 30 million sold, and an additional 75 million offered for sale and opened to entry. In the first place, there were five surveyors general instead of one, as he had assumed. In the second place, at the rate the lands had been entered in 1817-20, the backlog of offered land would be taken up in 21 years, and at the rate they were to be entered in 1835-36, the backlog would be taken up in only 4 years. Foote could not appreciate that there were in each public land state or territory settlers, investors, and land companies who had looked over the land well in advance of the permanent settler and, before it was surveyed, had made selections and were waiting to purchase when survey lines were run and the lands offered for sale. To have halted sales and surveys would, for the time, bring to an end the business in lands in which new communities indulged and which, in fact, was the principal occupation of the people. Congress had tried in the Act of 1807 to prevent intrusions on unsurveyed and un-offered land but the General Land Office had wholly failed to enforce the measure. For Congress in 1829 to halt the surveying and offering of new land at auction seemed to the West a policy deliberately designed to curb its growth. Thomas Hart Benton promptly jumped into the fray, angrily calling the proposal a method "of checking emigration to the West," and sure "to inflict unmixed, unmitigated evil upon the New States and Territories." He declared, "the signs are portentous; the crisis is alarming; it is time for the new States to wake up to their danger and to prepare for a struggle which carries ruin and disgrace to them, if the issue is against them."21 He spoke of "the woeful improvidence of the new States in parting with the right to tax the Federal lands when they come into the Union ..." and in obtaining no stipulation for the sale of the lands in a reasonable time, and for a fair price. Such improvidence placed them at the mercy of those who are not responsible to them for the votes they give, who are strangers, who live a thousand miles off, and may labor under the belief that they have an interest in checking their growth. . . This is the weak and dangerous part of our system. It is taxation without representation, and that in its direst form; not of a few pence on a pound of tea, or on a quire of stamped paper, but of land; power to tax it in the price, to demand double price; to do worse, to place it above all price, as this resolution proposes to do, withdraw it from market, and deliver it up to wild beasts! Benton drew attention to the experience of Massachusetts which had retained its public lands in Maine, had nurtured the province along, "ripened her into a state," and divided the public land with her. Now it was selling its share for 5 to 25 cents an acre in contrast to the $1.25 an acre exacted by the Federal government. Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina took up the challenge of Foote and others from the northeastern states, differing from them sharply, less so with Benton; his object was to cement a political alliance between his own section and the West on land and tariff questions. In the course of his peroration he observed how great the interest in public land questions had become: More than half our time has been taken up with the discussion of propositions connected with the public lands; more than half of our acts embrace provisions growing out of this fruitful source. Day after day the charges are rung on this topic, from the grave inquiry into the rights of the new States to the absolute sovereignty and property in the soil, down to the grant of a preemption of a few quarter sections to actual settlers. ... A question that is pressed upon us in so many ways; that in- 21 Register of Debates, 21st Cong., 1st sess., Dec. 30, 1829: Jan. 18, 1830; pp. 2-7, 23.