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Show STATE CESSIONS OF WESTERN LAND CLAIMS 53 bounties west of the mountains in what are today the States of Tennessee and Kentucky. Their haphazard land systems which permitted prior settlement or location of warrants in any manner the owner wished, so long as he was not trespassing on Indian land or on the property of other grantees, resulted in duplicate and overlapping land claims or "shingling." In desirable areas where large speculative holdings were established, claims were sometimes three to five deep. Neither state had developed a well-maintained land office where titles and vacant lands could be investigated and neither had any adequate local title registration system. When residents of the western portions of these states were trying to frame constitutions and to obtain admission to the Union, it was impossible to determine what amount of land was still owned by Virginia or North Carolina. After the meeting of 10 conventions to draft a constitution and the adoption of four enabling acts by Virginia, Kentucky finally was admitted to the Union in 1792 as the Fifteenth State. Ungranted land, if any, was turned over to the new state which entered into a compact with Virginia, later interpreted by Justice Story to mean that the rights and interests of the grantees of Virginia "shall be exclusively determined by the laws of Virginia, and that their security and validity shall not be in any way impaired by the laws of Kentucky." Kentuck-ians could not accept such an inferior and subordinate position and they openly flouted the two decisions upholding it.12 North Carolina took a more devious path in dealing with its western lands. Before it ceded them a wily group of land speculators secured favorable state legislation and the appointment of cooperative land entry offi- 11 Paul W. Gates, "Tenants of the Log Cabin," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLIX (June 1962), 3 ff., esp. 17. For the two decisions by Joseph Story and Bushrod Washington see 8 Wheaton, 11 and 69. cials in the North Carolina area beyond the mountains; thus they were enabled to gain rights to huge acreages of the best land. Having secured the desired land and kept out competitors, the speculators had the land office closed. Then, in 1784, they carried through the North Carolina Legislature a measure to provide for the cession of the western lands to the United States with conditions calculated to enhance the value of their holdings. The unpopularity of the act of cession led to its repeal the same year, before Congress had time to act upon it. In 1789-90 the legislature again enacted a cession measure on the following conditions, essentially the same as those in the previous act: the claims of the state's Revolutionary War soldiers to land bounties should be satisfied; if there was not sufficient land fit for settlement in the Military Reservation in central Tennessee, other unappropriated land should be made available for the payment of the bounties; all claims to land under earlier North Carolina statutes, even though they had not ripened into grants at the time of cession, were to be valid; the North Carolina occupancy and preemption laws were to remain in force for any rights previously established; and lands of nonresidents were not to be taxed higher than those of residents. North Carolina seems to have assumed that there would be some vacant land in Tennessee, to which the United States would have title. Borrowing from the Virginia cession of 1784 the idea and phraseology that the lands thus ceded were for the benefit of all states, North Carolina insisted that "all the lands intended to be ceded by virtue of this act. . . shall be considered as a common fund for the use and benefit of the United States of America, North Carolina inclusive, . . . and shall be faithfully disposed of for that purpose, and for no other use or purpose whatever."13 These conditions in the Act of Cession and 13 Donaldson, The Public Domain, pp. 76 ff. |