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Show 266 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT land of the absentee owners. They saw nothing wrong in both using the land of nonresidents and of drawing benefit from the taxes these nonresidents had to pay. Speculators accustomed to the 5-year exemption on lands they bought from the government may not have been aware of the burden they were assuming in purchasing the military bounty lands. Governor Thomas C. Ford of Illinois, writing his reminiscences in the 1850's, recalled the "very bad state of feeling [that] existed towards the non-resident land-owners; the timber on their land was considered free plunder, to be cut and swept away by every comer; the owners brought suits for damage, but where the witnesses and jurors were all on one side, justice was forced to go with them. The non-residents at last bethought themselves of employing and sending out ministers of the gospel to preach to the people against the sin of stealing, or hooking timber, as it was called. ... I have never learned that the non-resident land-owners succeeded any better in protecting their property by the gospel, than they did by law." The people reasoned that "every town built, farm made, road opened, bridge or school-house erected by the settlers . . . added to the value" of the speculators' holdings at no expense to them. They "persuaded themselves that in improving their own farms, they were putting money into the pockets of men who did nothing for the country, except to skin it as fast as any hide grew on it." A land tax-at a time when most residents were either squatters or landowners having property not yet taxable-was planned to make the nonresident owner "contribute his share to the improvement of the country, and thus by burdening his land with taxes, render him more willing to sell it."45 Absentee owners thought the imposition of the tax rank discrimination as, in view of its incidence, it was. Too commonly they had overextended their resources by buying the soldiers' lands, assuming that they would rise in value and make profitable sales possible at an early date. But such proved not to be the case. What was worse, agents who were glad to aid eastern capitalists in locating or buying land in the West were not as ready to aid them in meeting their taxes and keeping their land off the tax delinquent roll, for the fees were too small to make it worth their while to continue to handle the business. Also, there was the difficulty of getting funds to the West in time to make payments before penalties were imposed and the land became tax delinquent. By 1823, 1,440,000 acres had become tax delinquent. The list took 36 pages of the Illinois Intelligencer in 1826, and comparable space each of the next 6 years, as it contained descriptions of the 6,000 to 9,000 quarter-sections of bounty lands that were tax delinquent and were being offered for sale.46 Slow public land sales in Illinois after 1819 and the 5-year exemption of this land from taxes made the bounty lands, which were all taxable after 1822, the principal source of revenue until 1838. Penalties piled up against those absentee owners who doubted the validity of the tax sales and questioned the assessments which, though uniform, were of a necessity very largely levied against nonresidents, for they owned the bulk of taxable land. As late as 1832 the tax receipts from nonresidents constituted 92.9 percent of the 45 Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois from its Commencement as a State in 1818 to 1847 (Chicago, 1854), p. 171. 46 Arthur C. Boggess, The Settlement of Illinois (Chicago, 1908), p. 140, and Carlson, The Illinois Military Tract, pp. 40 ff. Artemas Matteson of Shafts-bury, Vt., acquired 960 acres of the bounty lands of Illinois in 1819 or 1820, paid $45.39 in taxes over the next 4 years and was told in 1824 that such was the scarcity of money in the West that no lands were selling and he must bide his time if he expected to make anything out of his investment. By 1837 his taxes and fees were up still further but without accompaniment of offers for the land at respectable prices. Correspondence of Artemas Matteson and Thomas J. Owen, 1819-37, in the New York Historical Society. |