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Show CASH SALES, 1820-1840 147 ture dated December 16, 1847, January 13, and February 15, 1848, wherein postponement of the sales for 5 years was urged on the ground that settlers had thought the lands would not be offered until a much later period and that they had not the ability to pay for them. The $2.00 price was declared to be unwarranted and unjust and Congress was urged to reduce it to the regular minimum. Many of the settlers were said to have "bravely" volunteered in the Mexican War and it was suggested that they be permitted to use their military land warrants, then selling for less than a dollar an acre, to enter their lands.4 In her study of land speculation and Indian allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, Mary Young has shown that Jackson, who professed concern for the settler as against the speculator, nevertheless "put pressure on the General Land Office to accelerate the offering of land," that he refused to comply with an Illinois petition of 1835 urging the postponement of announced sales in Illinois, and that during his administration public land offerings in the two cotton states amounted to 19 million acres. In addition, during Jackson's administration several million acres of Creek and Chickasaw lands in Alabama and Mississippi were divided into individual allotments to members of these tribes. These allotments also passed quickly into the hands of influential white people, who thus acquired much of the best land in these two states. Professor Young raises the question of how one can reconcile Jackson's action with his anti-speculator professions in the Specie Circular! On the other hand it is only fair to point out that during Jackson's second term, when sales were being made at an unprecedented rate, the acreage of new land proclaimed for 4 Act of Aug. 3, 1846, 9 Stat. 51; Laws of Indiana, 1847-1848, pp. 101, 104, 108. For the pressure to open the lands and something of their value see my Introduction to The John Tipton Papers, Nellie Armstrong Robertson and Dorothy Riker (eds.), (Indianapolis, 1942), passim. sale was less than the quantity of land being sold. Furthermore, in 1836 when sales of public lands reached a figure never to be exceeded Jackson virtually ceased proclaiming additional land for sale, a mere 509,034 acres being offered that year as compared with 13,767,268 acres the previous year. Some additional Chickasaw trust lands were, however, offered at public sale in 1836 and 1837.5 After the Panic of 1837 it was extremely difficult for settlers to raise the necessary funds to purchase their claims because of bank suspensions, currency problems, and most of all, lack of demand for produce. From the point of view of the pioneers it was a most inappropriate time to hold public sales. When lands in the northern Illinois district were ordered into market in 1838 it was politically smart for the Whigs to charge the Van Buren administration with complete disregard and contempt for the welfare of the settlers. "The government wants the money, and no matter how it is wrung from the honest settler," said the Quincy Whig, in November 1838. Money it would have even though the settlers' improvements "may be jeopardized or seized by the rich speculator . . . ." (The same criticism was to be offered by the Republicans in 1858-61 when the Democrats were in power and were pushing large quantities of public lands into market in equally trying times.)6 Those settlers in northeastern Illinois who were neither able to secure a postponement of the sale in 1839, nor to raise the necessary funds except at the "extortionary [sic] ruinous rates exacted by 6 Mary Elizabeth Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts and Rednecks, Indian Allotments in Mississippi and Alabama, 1830-1860, pp. 164-67, 182 ff. The statistics of proclamations and sales are from the GLO Annual Reports. 6 Theodore L. Carlson, The Illinois Military Tract (Urbana, 111., 1951), p. 53n; Paul W. Gates, Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts Over Kansas Land Policy, 1854-1890 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1954), pp. 81 ff. In addition to public sales ordered held in Nebraska Territory, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, Buchanan ordered 7,966,000 acres in Kansas Territory to be offered at auction, making a total of 46,422,000 acres ordered to sale. |
