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Show CASH SALES, 1820-1840 be limited to small unalienable properties. Such a policy would help to rid the cities of their unemployed and thus better the lot of those who remained.67 The National Land Reformers were a small group to which little attention was paid outside the ranks of urban labor. However, other events contributed to the movement for land reform. Simmering social unrest on the estates of the landlords of the Hudson-Mohawk region of New York developed into serious clashes between the tenants and the landlords over the collection of rents, the nature of the leases, and tenants' rights. Efforts to compel tenants to pay their rents, to eject those who did not, and to arrest those resisting the sheriff led to a series of violent outbursts by the Anti-Renters. The members kept the region in a state of turmoil for years, entered into politics and made landlordism unprofitable. Some of the leaders of the Anti-Renters were doctrinaire reformers whose slogans caught on but whose views on private property made little headway. The American Land Company Another factor contributing to the demand for land reform was the extent to which western lands were being acquired by capitalists and land companies. A number of these companies have been mentioned before but the one that attracted the most attention was the American Land Company, organized with capital of a millon dollars to invest in western real estate, including both wild lands and city lots. Not since the British colonial period when highly placed political and economic figures invested in a series of land companies had there been brought together such a group of distinguished and well-known men as those in the American Land Company. Charles Butler and Arthur and Frederick Bronson were the principal organizers. Among the large investors were Charles Butler's 171 brother, Benjamin F. Butler, Attorney General in Jackson's Cabinet, Erastus Corning, John Van Buren, John A. Dix, and Edwin Croswell, members of the Albany Regency and leading Democrats of New York. Lot Clark, a former New York member of Congress and himself a prominent speculator in public lands, and a group of the most prominent New York and Boston bankers and brokers were also in the company. The first annual report of the company in 1836 reported that $400,000 had been set aside for the purchase of Chickasaw allotments (potential cotton land in Mississippi), $250,000 for land in Arkansas, and smaller sums for investment in land in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, and in Chicago, Toledo, and a number of other towns and cities.68 Through arrangements with influential leaders in the West, such as William B. Ogden in Chicago, David Hubbard of Mississippi, and Lucius Lyon, Michigan's delegate to Congress in 1833-35 and later Senator from that state, the company acquired 322,280 acres and many town lots in cities and towns of eight states.69 In the process of acquiring the 84,000 acres of Mississippi land, David Hubbard, who had been one of the ringleaders in the movement to control sales and prevent competition at Pontotoc and other offices, defended himself from the charge of bidding against a settler, saying: "If it is wrong to over-bid a settler for a piece of public land, the fault is with those who, by legislation, have ordered" lands sold to the highest bidder. "The strong will prevail over 67 Helene S. Zahler, Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy, 1829-1862 (New York, 1941), pp. 29 ff. 68 First Annual Report of the Trustees of the American Land Company (New York, 1836), passim. 69 The American Land Company stands among the very largest of the companies investing in public lands of the United States before the era of railroad land grants. It was exceeded in amount of land owned by the New York & Boston Illinois Land Company which claimed to own 900,000 of military bounty lands in the Military Tract of Illinois in 1837, but much of this land was probably held only by tax title. The fullest account of the American Land Company is in Irene D. Neu, Erastus Corning: Merchant and Financier, 1794-1872(Ithaca, N. Y., I960), pp. 129-36. |