History of public land law development

page 166

166 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Leading States in Public Land Sales (acres) Ohio Indiana Illinois Missouri Michigan Alabama ] Mississippi United States 1830 156,793 476,352 316,452 214,917 147,062 373,204 108,440 1,929,734 1831 335,393 654,437 339 411 296,468 320,477 661,832 160,798 2,777,857 1832 412,715 546,844 227,376 251,280 252,211 412,683 261,314 2,462,342 1833 551,154 554,682 260,241 226,286 447,780 451,320 1 ,121,495 3,856,228 1834 478,847 673,656 354,013 253,792 512,760 1,072,458 1 ,064,055 4,658,219 1835 661,436 1,586,905 2 ,096,629 662,180 1,817,248 1,587,008 2 ,931,181 12,564,479 1836 1,282,992 3,245,344 3 ,199,709 1,655,688 4,189,823 1,901,409 2 ,023,710 20,074,871 1837 470,421 1,249,818 1 ,012,849 663,988 773,522 381,774 271,075 5,601,103 1838 343,096 602,425 778,560 510,423 97,534 159,969 256,354 3,414,907 1839 242,445 618,748 1 ,132,876 1,039,066 134,984 121,936 17,787 4,976,383 1840 33,059 118,869 389,275 572,498 26,106 56,785 19,175 2,236,890 For the entire public land area 143,767,025 acres had been surveyed and proclaimed for sale by September 1834, of which 35,552,070 acres had been sold.57 The excitement which occurred at the Huntsville and St. Stephen's land offices in Alabama in the years 1817 to 1819, and in a somewhat lesser degree at other offices, did not recur for nearly a generation. In fact, land sales were less than a million acres a year from 1820 to 1828 and only reached 1,929,734 in 1830. In a large measure the sales of these years were made to settlers. Thereafter sales increased rapidly. New economic forces were soon to reproduce the scramble for land that had existed earlier, the difference being that in the thirties it was not only Alabama but Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, and Missouri as well which attracted immigrants and large amounts of capital. This second period of inflation and investment in wild lands was the result of the great expansion of state bank issues and the numerous internal improvement schemes undertaken by the states which were drawing in large amounts of foreign capital; the beginnings of railroad construction in the East; growing immigra- tion, which reached a high point in 1837 when 79,340 people reached American shores; and the forward movement of industry. Not to be disregarded in this enumeration are the favorable agricultural prices which reached their peak in 1836. Cotton then brought 13.1 cents a pound, tobacco 7.1 cents, sugar 8.6 cents, and wheat $1.63 a bushel.58 By the thirties America was producing an increasing amount of capital, which was being invested to a considerable extent in western land, while at the same time it was importing many millions in capital from abroad. In the thirties occurred the first big thrust of outside capital in western land investments. There were few opportunities for investing in stocks and bonds of corporations at that time, whereas facilities for acquiring western lands were available to almost everyone. In most of the larger cities there were agencies advertising that they would buy land for others, pay taxes on it, safeguard it from intrusions or pilfering, and sell it when the time was ripe. Ralph Osborn and Demas Adams, for example, announced in the National Intelligencer of May 16, 1833, that they had opened a land office in Columbus, Ohio 57 Dallas L. Jones, "The Survey and Sale of the Public Lands in Michigan, 1815-1862" (Master's thesis, Cornell University, 1952), pp. 17-19; Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts and Rednecks, p. 175; American State Papers^Public Lands, VII, 530. 58 Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United Stales to 1860 (2 vols., Washington, 1933), II, 1027 ff.; George R. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (New York, 1951), passim.