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Show PRIVATE LAND CLAIMS 103 declared invalid.45 These and perhaps other actions led to a newspaper attack upon Peck, the arrest and sentence for contempt of court of the leader of the attack, and the impeachment of Peck. The Senate was not convinced that the charges justified Peck's removal, 21 voting guilty and 22, not guilty.46 Congress was later to abandon the procedure it had set up in the Act of 1824 as a result of pressure from the claimants who felt that they were getting nowhere in gaining confirmation of their titles. However, the Act of 1824 was to be the model on which later adjudication processes were erected, notably in California. It is worth noting that Senator Benton, who has been called the political broker of the fur traders and land claimants of Missouri, was responsible for the move away from judicial trial in his own state, and later he tried to keep it out of the Land Act of 1851 in California where his two sons-in-law had acquired large claims. Meantime the claimants continued to ask for more indulgence in submitting their titles for adjudication. Congress responded in 1826 by allowing 2 additional years for filing petitions for adjudication. But it soon appeared that extension was not what the claimants wanted. In two petitions of 1828 and one of 1831, they declared that Judge Peck had totally lost sight of the remedial character of the Act of 1824, taking such a hard line as to discourage owners, who were withdrawing their petitions. They wanted the Act of 1824 amended to secure the petitioners "a final confirmation of their titles." Failing that, they wanted a further extension of the time in which they could file their petitions in the hope that the Supreme Court would soon decide the Soulard case and repudiate the line of decisions Peck was making. A petition submitted to the Senate on December 23, 45 S. Doc, 21st Cong., 2d sess., 1830-31, Vol. I (Serial No. 203), Nos. 11, 12, and 27. The Journals of the House and Senate and the Annals of Congress contain the actions. 46 Annals of Congress, 21st Cong., 2d sess., p. 45. Benton did not vote. 1831, and signed by six members of the Chouteau family, John Mullanphy, and William Russell, all with numerous confirmed claims and much larger ones still to be tried, declared that the failure to confirm titles had reduced numerous individuals from a "situation of comfort and independence ... to indigence and distress," that further delay would be ruinous to private citizens and "injurious to the public weal." The burden of their argument was that the Act of 1824 which was intended to be remedial had been much more injurious to the claimants because of the heavy burden in legal costs and the taxes they had to pay while their titles were unsalable. Extensions in 1826 and 1828 and the removal of costs where the claimant was victorious went part way in meeting their complaints. On the other hand a petition of Stephen Glascock and others protested to Congress against the proposed confirmation by Congress or the reopening of the land claims except by judicial action. The petitioners expressed their belief that all claims deserving of confirmation had already been approved for title.47 John Marshall's delay in deciding the Soulard and other cases led Congress on July 9, 1832, to adopt still another act "for the final adjustment of private land claims in Missouri." Instead of relying on the courts, Congress returned to the earlier Board of Land Commissioners, composed of a recorder and two commissioners, to which was given power to try any incomplete grants, concessions or orders of survey made prior to March 10, 1804, and to confirm or reject as the evidence seemed to justify. In the following year the land commissioners were given authority to consider claims based on settlement and cultivation with verbal or implied permission of Spanish or French authorities which had been previously rejected.48 The 47 American State Papers, Public Lands, V, 343, 460, 509, 612; VI, 326. 48 4 Stat. 565, 661. |