OCR Text |
Show 288 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT in Tennessee came in 1841 when Congress made Tennessee its agent in managing the lands within the reservation, and in 1846 when it gave the state the ownership of the remaining lands and the right to dispose of the funds received from sales since 1841. The requirement in the compact concerning the use of Tennessee's public lands for colleges, academies, and public schools seems not to have been taken seriously or carried out constructively.7 Ohio, Proving Grounds for Statehood The movement of population into the Northwest Territory and the anxiety of some notable Republican leaders, such as Thomas Worthington and Nathaniel Massie, to free themselves from the Federalist control of Governor Arthur St. Clair brought about the admission of Ohio into the Union in 1803. The majority of Ohio's settlers were from states which owned their own lands. There was, therefore, strong feeling that the new state should not be denied rights that the older states enjoyed. However, the Congress of the Confederation had stipulated in the Northwest Ordinance that the legislatures of the new states "shall never interfere with the primary disposal of the soil by the United States . . . nor with any regulations Congress may find necessary for securing the title in such soil to the bona fide purchasers. No tax shall be imposed on lands the property of the United States; and in no case, shall nonresident proprietors be taxed higher than residents."8 The first Congress under the new Federal Constitution had carefully extended 7 Act of April 18, 1806, 2 Stat. 382; Thomas B. Jones, "Tennessee's Public Lands," MS. Study, author's possession, pp. 24 ff. Frederick L. Paxson, History of the American Frontier (Boston, 1924), provides the best general account of state making and admission acts; Earl S. Pomeroy, The Territories and the United States, 1861-1890 (Philadelphia, 1947), is the standard treatment of the relations between the territories and the United States. 8 Article IV of the Northwest Ordinance, Com-mager, Documents, p. 131. the Northwest Ordinance on August 7, 1789, with these safeguarding provisions, thereby making it clear that states thereafter created out of American territory were not to interfere with the management or disposal of the public lands.9 These restrictions led Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin in 1802 to propose to William B. Giles of the House of Representatives, which was then considering admitting Ohio into the Union, that the state be offered an equivalent for control over the public lands to which it was being asked to disclaim any right. The equivalent, he thought, should not affect the value of the pledge which the public creditors had been given when the income from the lands was committed for the retirement of the debt, and it should be fully acceptable to the state and prove beneficial to the Union. In addition to these limitations on the states, Gallatin proposed that every tract of public land sold should be exempt from taxes of every kind for 10 years after the completion of the final payment. Gallatin's anxiety to gain revenue from the public lands for the retirement of the public debt blinded him to the harshness of the 14-year period of tax exemption on newly sold land from the date of a purchase on credit, with the possibility that Congress might pass extension laws for the benefit of delinquent debtors and thus prolong their exemption from taxation still further. Since Gallatin's proposal was to apply only to new purchasers, not to landowners already established in the Seven Ranges, the two military tracts, the Ohio 9 1 Stat. 50. The taxability of Federal land on which homesteaders were making improvements and moving toward ownership, and of land granted to railroads but not patented came into dispute after the Civil War, as Leslie Decker has shown in his admirable study of Railroads, Lands, and Politics. The Taxation of Railroad Land Grants, 1864-1897 (Providence, R. I., 1964), passim. The right of states to tax Federal land, irrespective of any compact they made with the United States, never existed, as shown in Van Brocklin v. Tennessee in 1885, 117 U.S. Reports, 151. |