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Show WHOSE PUBLIC LANDS? auctions with a minimum price of 6 pence per acre.- Thomas Jefferson in his "Summary View of the Rights of British America of 1774" took up the challenge, denying that the Crown had any right to grant lands or to withhold the granting right from the Colonies.3 From the nature and purpose of civil institutions, all the lands within the limits which any particular society has circumscribed around itself, are assumed by that society, and subject to their allotment only. This may be done by themselves assembled collectively, or by their legislature to whom they may have delegated sovereign authority: and, if they are allotted in neither of these ways, each individual of the society may appropriate to himself such lands as he finds vacant, and occupancy will give him title. This broad claim to ownership of land, based firmly on the views of John Locke, was to be reasserted in the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and achieved by the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Thereafter the question of Whose Public Lands was no longer to be thrashed out between a distant Mother Country and its young upstart in the New World, but between the sovereign states and the central government created by the Articles of Confederation. Thomas Perkins Abernethy in his near classic Western Lands and the American Revolution has analyzed the position of the two sides which, during the American Revolution and the critical era, were disputing where control over the western lands should rest. He shows that Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, and other like-minded men favored placing control over the western lands with the Confederation, but the states with claims to land in the West were reluctant to consent. Advocates of state control were powerful enough to prevent the Articles of Confederation from being so worded as to give that power to the Government of the Confederation. Possibly 2 St. George L. Sioussat, "The Breakdown of the Royal Management of Lands in the Southern Provinces," Agricultural History, 3 (April 1929), 67-98. 'Julian P. Boyd, et al., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 1 (Princeton, 1950), 133. the critical era was not as serious as John Fiske maintained but the weaknesses of the Articles were sufficient and the need for strengthening them so pressing that the states were later persuaded to surrender their western land claims to the Union, and in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 the states surrendered to the new Federal government the power to regulate commerce with the Indian tribes. In the acts of cession of their lands, however, were sown the seeds of persistent controversies over the question, Whose Public Lands.4 (See map, Chapter V.) Once the seven original states with claims to land west of the Alleghenies had surrendered them to the central government, issues of sales policy, price, credit, preemption, free grants to settlers, and donations for education, canals, railroads, and colleges took up increasing attention. But transcending these topics, and at the same time intimately associated with them, were nagging questions. Did the acts of cession of those early years and the later acquisitions of Florida, Louisiana, and California require that the lands be administered for the benefit of all the states, as the Original Thirteen States were inclined to maintain? Or should they be managed to assure speedy settlement of the newer communities into which they were being divided, without regard to the effects their rapid development would have on the older ones? Should the development of the western states be promoted by generous grants of public land within their boundaries to aid educational institutions and finance internal improvements such as roads, canals, and railroads? Should the states in which the lands lay, and not the Federal government, be the major dispenser of land titles? Had the older communities no right to a share in this largesse? The first new commonwealth to emerge in the public land area was Ohio, which in 1803 attained the required population of 60,000- aristocratic landlords in the Military Tract; 4 Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (New York, 1959), passim. |