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Show LAND ORDINANCE OF 1785 63 provide for the sale of public lands without naming the price and without restrictions on large purchases, but when President he took no steps to reduce the very high price of government land.8 Moreover, he signed an act authorizing the use of troops to expel persons who in the future should make any illegal settlement on public lands or who attempted to create any right in land by surveying it or even blazing trees upon it.9 Jefferson's proposal for a land ordinance to provide for the sale of the western lands received little support in 1784 and nothing was accomplished. In 1785, however, the as is this statement, it represented the viewpoint of many speculators, then and later. Some students prefer "investor" because it suggests no opprobrium. Washington, Franklin, and most other public men were speculators in land companies if they were not, as Washington, personally holding large acreages of undeveloped land from which they anticipated high returns. They may be regarded as "entrepreneurs," promoters, developers, even empire builders, or mere "petty capitalists" but contemporaries did not so regard them. They operated in the open, as well as manipulated in the dark; they were in Congress, on the bench, and in other public positions and frequently did not draw a fine line, as did Thomas Jefferson, between their personal and their public activities. Modern notions of conflict of interest did not disturb them. On the other hand, I suspect that their contemporaries were more aware of the private business operations in which Patrick Henry, George Morgan, Robert Morris, and George Washington were involved than modern society knows about the investments and other sources of private income of its high officials. I am not enamored with the uncritical manner in which some writers characterized Manasseh Cutler, Rufus Putnam, John Cleves Symmes, or Rufus King. Contemporaries, whether critical of their operations or not, thought of them as speculators or land jobbers. Advertisements addressed "To Speculators" which appeared in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette for Jan. 4, July 18, Nov. 8 and 16, 1836, indicate that there was no sensitivity of the use of the term. Notices "To Speculators" called attention to two stores, a small tenant farm, a double brick house, various lots and 200 acres for sale, and a mill property which was offered as a "Splendid Speculation." 8 Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison. The Great Collaboration (New York, 1950), pp. 62 ff. 9 Act of March 3, 1807, Annals of Congress, 9th Cong., 2d sess., p. 1288. country's financial condition had changed for the worse. Congress had requested an impost and the states had failed to honor fully the requisitions made upon them. Interest on government securities was mounting, foreign obligations were not being met, the credit of the Nation had fallen to a low level, and its government was forced to get along on the smallest expenditures possible. The sale of western lands now seemed to be the last resort; Congress turned to plans for their disposal. Methods of Disposal Debated Immediately a clash developed: on the one side were advocates of the Virginia method of indiscriminate location and subsequent survey, with all the heavy costs of riling caveats and the extensive litigation that followed; on the other side were proponents of the more orderly New England system with its township grants to proprietors, survey and sectioning of the townships before settlement, reserve lots for church, minister, and school. In the South, much of the better land was contained in large plantations wastefully worked by numerous slaves and servants; small farms were generally to be found on the poor land; population was thin, absentee ownership common, public schools lacking, and religious influences minimal. All this was in sharp contrast to the small farms, compact settlement, absence of large speculatively owned tracts, and the early presence of the church and school in New England. Jefferson had recognized the advantages of the New England system but other delegates from the South found it more difficult to give up their method of land management which offered protection to the squatter, tolerated the individualistic frontiersman with his inclination to go wherever the spirit moved him, and permitted him to delay for years before filing his warrants and his survey of the lands he had taken up. Furthermore, in somewhat broken territory like much of southern Ohio, |
