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Show 222 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Special Preemption Privileges Partly as a result of numerous appeals of this kind, and partly to quiet resentment against the extension of American control over areas previously Spanish, French, or British, 24 special acts were adopted before 1820 granting preemption privileges to special groups or within certain territories and states. For example on May 10, 1800, Congress granted to persons who had erected or begun to erect gristmills or sawmills north of the Ohio the preemption right to buy the sites on which the mills were located, up to 640 acres, at $2 an acre.11 In an Act of March 3, 1803, persons improving and inhabiting land in Mississippi Territory were promised a donation of 640 acres and were given a preferential right to purchase an additional and seemingly unlimited amount of land on the usual credit terms. Three later measures extended the time in which such preemption payments had to be made.12 Five special acts tried to correct the many errors of John Cleves Symmes by allowing a preemption right to those who had purchased land from Symmes for which he had no title.13 Other measures of April 25, 1808, and February 15, 1811, granted persons cultivating land on rivers and creeks for a distance of 40 arpents extending back from the water the right to preempt an additional 40 arpents of back land provided they acquired no more than they held in their original grant from the predecessor government.14 Residents of Illinois and Indiana had a special claim on the government for leniency because the public lands along the Mississippi and Wabash Rivers were surveyed and brought into market only very slowly. The delay was caused by the numerous private 11 2 Stat. 78. 12 2 Stat. 229, 400, 447, 668. 13 Act of March 2, 1799, 1 Stat. 728; Acts of March 3, 1801, May 1, 1802, March 3, 1803, and March 26, 1804, 2 Stat. 112, 179, 237, 280. 14 2 Stat. 503, 619, 640, 663, 711, 807. land claims left from the period of French control; here, as elsewhere, it seemed to many to take an unconscionably long time to adjudicate and survey them. Not until 1804 was a land office opened in Illinois and not until 1814 was any public land offered for sale. Over the years small numbers of people had filtered into the area bordering the two rivers and made their improvements. Though they were intruders just as much as squatters elsewhere, there was much sympathy for these people as the land sales approached, because they had been on the land so long. When the matter was brought to its attention, Congress responded with a special preemption act authorizing every person who had actually inhabited and cultivated land in the two districts of Illinois Territory and who had not removed from the territory to preempt not more than 160 acres. They were required, however, to file their applications at least 2 weeks before the sale; if they failed to do so their right to the land was forfeited and it was to be put up at auction. Five additional acts passed in 1814, 1815, 1816 (two acts), and 1820 further liberalized the preemption privilege for settlers and extended the period in which the entries could be made.15 The liberal preemption privileges allowed Illinois and Indiana settlers in 1813 were extended to Missouri settlers on April 12, 1814. Private land claims had long held up surveys and sales of public lands in that state also, and indeed it was not possible to hold sales until 1818. To quiet the apprehensions of settlers long on the land, Congress granted all who had inhabited and cultivated land a right to preempt a quarter-section. The act 16 Act of Feb. 5, 1813, 2 Stat. 798; Acts of April 16, 1814, Feb. 27, 1815, April 27 and 29, 1816, and May 11, 1820, 3 Stat. 126, 218, 307, 330, 573. Solon J. Buck, Illinois in 1818 (Springfield, 1917), opposite p. 52 has a map showing the entries of land in Illinois in the three land offices from 1814 to 1818, and says that the entire 8,837 acres sold at the Shawneetown office in 1813 were preemptions but does not give the acreage of preemptions thereafter. |