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Show MILITARY BOUNTY LAND POLICIES 265 stead of confining them to land within the military tracts. Members of Congress had not yet realized all the evils growing out of the use of warrants, nor for that matter had Cook, and they were not ready to free warrants from restrictions on their location.43 An early hazard that pioneers in the military tract had to contend with was the high incidence of illness resulting from lack of sanitation facilities, drinking of contaminated water, and mosquitoes that carried the germs of malaria. Major J. D. Wadsworth, who was said to have acquired 48,000 acres in the tract, took out five families of settlers in 1818. He was reported to be selling his lands at $1.50 to $2.00 an acre in 1818, giving settlers the same terms as the government granted. Unfortunately, both he and a number of the people who came west with him became ill and died shortly afterwards.44 Tax Muddle When Illinois was made a state in 1818 it accepted the terms of the Enabling Act, according to which it agreed not to tax public lands after their sale for a period of 5 years (the same provision that had earlier been applied to Ohio and Indiana) and not to tax the military bounty lands for 3 years after they were patented, if they remained for that time in the hands of the patentees. It also agreed not to tax the property of nonresidents higher than that of residents. Unwittingly Congress thus provided for one of the most confused and chaotic title muddles in all American history. According to the statement of Daniel Cook, the 3-year tax exemption of lands if retained by the patentee did little to discourage speculators from buying the bounty land though it became taxable the very year they purchased it. Since the speculators were mostly nonresidents and they owned at the outset the only taxable property, they constituted practically the only taxpayers in the military tract and, indeed, in the state. Private land claims and donations were ultimately to amount to 185,000 acres but they were mostly unsettled in 1818, not clearly identified and bounded, and not taxable. The table of land sales shows that there were in 1818 no lands taxable that had been sold, as a result of the 5-year exemption. In 1819, 8,836 acres would become taxable and in 1820 an additional 82,740 acres, provided they had not been forfeited and the final payments had been made on them. But on few tracts had final payments been made and the numerous re-linquishments and forfeitures kept the taxable lands outside the military tract to a minimum. Settlers coming into the tract had two alternatives: either squatting upon the poor remaining government land or on the better Land Sales in Illinois, 1814-1834 (Acres) 1814 8,836 1821 50,382 1828 96,093 1815 82,740 1822 27,764 1829 196,246 1816 46,740 1823 60,535 1830 316,246 1817 249,265 1824 43,988 1831 339,411 1818 459,291 1825 45,804 1832 227,376 1819 298,950 1826 81,084 1833 360,241 1820 36,848 1827 58,605 1834 354,013 43 Annals of Congress, 16th Cong., 1st sess., Feb. 25, 1820, II, 1489. 44 George Churchill, Madison County, Sept. 9, 1818, to Swift Eldred, of Warren, Conn., in Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, XI (April 1918), 63; E. Dana, A Description of the Bounty Lands in the State of Illinois (Cincinnati, 1819), p. 47. Churchill provides an optimistic view of the settlement of the tract and the price of lands but conditions turned downward not long afterward. |
