History of public land law development

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290 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT grant had already been made by the Land Ordinance of 1785. St. Clair here seems to have overlooked the fact that the Land Ordinance of 1785, providing for the reservation of section 16 for schools, had not been re-enacted, as had the Northwest Ordinance. The salt springs were most essential for the people of the territory, declared the Governor, but if they were to become revenue producing, as Congress intended, the rents would only add to the price of the salt to the people "so that instead of a benefit, this gift would prove an injury, and an injury that would fall unequally." The promise of a twentieth of the net proceeds from the public lands, he called a "mere illusion; it holds out the prospect of an advantage that will never be realized." The money will be spent on order of Congress, not as determined by the people of Ohio, and it is "coupled with conditions that would defeat it, while they insult us." St. Clair maintained that the 5-year tax exemption of all lands sold after June 30, 1803, would force the new state to tax lands previously sold and personal property at excessively high rates, which would involve rank discrimination against the first purchasers of land in Ohio. He regarded the tax exemption feature as a limitation upon the sovereignty of the state, and as an "odious distinction" not to be found in the admission acts of Vermont and Tennessee. The Governor's philippic was a devastating attack upon the enabling act and on the compromises the Democratic leaders in Congress had made with their principles. It was an able expose of his opponents' inconsistencies-and also of his own. St. Clair was too much of a Federalist to go the entire distance and to contend, as the West was increasingly to do, that the public lands ought to be transferred to the sovereign states as they were admitted into the Union to give them the full equality with the older states that had been promised. He urged the convention to reject the propositions of Congress and advised the delegates to draft their constitution without attention to the requirement of an "irrevocable ordi- nance." If Congress would not admit Ohio to the Union with such a constitution, let her remain a territory. The Governor reminded the convention of the experience of the Vermonters who "had formed their government and exercised all the powers of an independent state" for 8 years before it was admitted.12 "It would be incomparably better" to remain in the territorial state, concluded St. Clair, than that "we should be degraded" to a less than equal basis with other states.13 For his temerity in attacking the enabling act and accusing Congress of "interference" in the affairs of the territory, St. Clair was dismissed from his post as Governor by James Madison, Secretary of State, for "intemperance or indecorum of language toward the legislature of the United States, or a disorganizing spirit of evil tendency and example" and for his violation "of the rules of conduct" enjoined by his public station. Madison's method of dismissing St. Clair was scarcely what might have been expected of such a gentle statesman but was the result of accumulated grievances against the Governor whose actions seemed always to be politically inspired and not in keeping with the views of the majority of people in the territory or in Washington.14 The voters of Ohio had elected as delegates to their constitutional convention men who were predominantly democratically inclined, followers of Jefferson rather than Hamilton and the Federalist leaders. The settlers had been very restive under St. Clair and Winthrop Sargent, disliked the undemo- 12 William Henry Smith, The St. Clair Papers. The Life and Public Services of Arthur St. Clair (2 vols., Cincinnati, 1882), II, 592-97; Alfred Byron Sears, Thomas Worthington. Father oj Ohio Statehood (1958). 13 Smith, The St. Clair Papers, II, 597 ff. Gallatin called the speech "indecent and outrageous." Randolph G. Downes, "Thomas Jefferson and ihe Removal of Governor St. Clair in 1802," Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications, XXXVI (1927), 62 ff. 14 Smith, The St. Clair Papers, II, 599-601 and note.