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Show 18 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT and to swamp their representation in Congress as new territories were raised to statehood. In 1840 the public land states contained 28 percent of the entire population of the country, 33 percent in 1850, and 40 percent in 1860. If the population of Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas is added to that of the public land states, the population of the new states amounted to 39, 44, and 50 percent of the total in the same years. By 1861 there were 34 states, of which 16 were public land states, anxious to gain as large a share as possible of the public lands within their borders and equally anxious to keep the original and older states from sharing in those lands. Although virtually all the public lands were gone in three of those public land states-Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois-their Representatives were sometimes found voting with Representatives of the Original States on land questions. Accelerating Demands on the Public Lands Neither cession to the new states--their ultimate objective-nor grants to the old were to come in the form requested, but increasing liberality to the new states and a form of grant to the old were attained. The grant for common schools to public land states, originally one section in each township, became two sections in 1850 and four in 1896. Grants for other purposes were progressively increased. Thus Ohio, the first of the public land states, received 10 percent of its acreage for state purposes; Florida and Arkansas, by virtue of large swampland grants, received 68 and 35 percent, respectively, of their total acreages; Alaska, admitted in 1958, is scheduled to have 27 percent of its land. Had the land grants to the transcontinental railroads been given directly to the states, as they were in the states of the Mississippi Valley, the share of those like California. Montana, and Washington would be much greater than they appear-as is shown in the chapters on "Grants to States on Admission to Union" and "General Grants to States." Bv 1850, well over 100 million acres of public land had been given to the states in which they were located for schools, universities, canal and railroad building, and swamp drainage, but not an acre had yet been granted to the Original States for any such purpose.41 Congress, under growing pressure from its new western Representatives and Senators, showed a marked tendency to meet their demands for an increasing proportion of the public lands for local purposes. Meanwhile, the older states watched this development with concern and, indeed, exasperation, fearing that their opportunity for benefiting from the public lands was waning rapidly. In the forties and fifties several attempts were made to give the eastern states a share in the public lands. In 1845 Kenneth Rayner of North Carolina offered an amendment to a bill to grant additional land to the Wabash and Lake Erie Canal; the amendment would have given 500,000 acres of public land to each non-public-land state. The defeat of the amendment by a vote of 46 to 87 showed that if the East was to get its share of the lands, it would have to unite solidly behind some generally acceptable measure, as westerners did when they wanted land grants for their section.42 The next move to bring some direct benefit from the public lands to the Original States came through the efforts of Dorothea Dix. In 1848, Miss Dix presented a memorial asking Congress for 5 million acres of land to be divided among the 30 states and sold by them for funds to build modern facilities for the care of the insane.415 This most dedicated woman, who had spent years of her life studying the care of the mentally ill both in the United States and abroad, described in vivid language the frightfully bad housing condi- 41 I arrived at this figure by adding the grants made through 1850 as shown in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1929, passim. 42 Home journal, 28th Cong., 2d sess., 1845 (Serial No. 462), pp. 538-39. 43 S. Misc. Doc, 30th Cong., 1st sess., 1848, No. ISO (Serial No. 511). |