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Show LAND ORDINANCE OF 1785 71 2 million, then a million acres between the Great and Little Miami Rivers. In addition, the Scioto Company still hoped to acquire 3,500,000 acres; the Connecticut Company had acquired 3,800,000 acres in the Connecticut Western Reserve; and two New Jersey groups were preparing to make an offer each for 2 million acres in the Ohio Country.30 Had all these groups been able to carry their plans through, a substantial part of the Federal debt would have been retired and there would have been very little government land left in Ohio. Instead of the United States being the principal dispenser of land under the Ordinance of 1785, there would have been a series of land companies bidding for purchasers. As it was, the United States found little demand for its land from small purchasers, as southern opponents of the ordinance had predicted, and the principal areas of settlement were those being advertised by the Ohio and Connecticut Companies and by the Symmes associates. Various obstacles prevented a number of the land companies from carrying to completion their offers to purchase land; chief of these was the fact that Indian titles to some areas the land companies wanted had not been extinguished. Also, after Hamilton's fiscal reforms were introduced, the rising market value of the Nation's securities gradually diminished the advantage in using them to meet payments on land. The Scioto Company was a complete failure, though this did not become clear before its agent abroad had persuaded a group of Frenchmen to leave 30 Beverley W. Bond, Jr., The Correspondence of John Cleves Symmes (New York, 1926), pp. ii, 26, 204-205. Nicholas Gilman, a New Hampshire delegate to Congress, wrote to John Sullivan on October 31, 1787 (Burnett, Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, VIII, 670): "The sale of the Western lands is going on very well; what is already sold and applied for will amount [to] Seven Million dollars-and if North Carolina and Georgia should make such Cessions as might be expected, it is supposed there will be public lands enough to absorb the most, or perhaps the whole of the domestic debt." their homeland for the lush Ohio country, there to find that they had been deceived; there were no lands waiting for them. Only John Cleves Symmes of the new adventurers in land succeeded in negotiating for himself and a group of New Jersey associates a purchase of a million acres extending north from the Ohio River between the Great and Little Miami Rivers. Symmes was a poor businessman. His accounts were badly deranged and he sold land before he had title, and tracts to which he had no title. He had been too optimistic about collections, was not able to meet his obligations and, though generously treated by the government, fell into increasing difficulties until his creditors had to take over his property. Instead of the one or two million acres that he had dreamed of developing, 311,682 acres were patented to him and his associates. Although the Congress of the Confederation struck out of the Land Ordinance provision for reserving a section in each township for religion, section 29 was reserved for this purpose in the Symmes purchase. Section 16 was also reserved for schools and sections 8, 11, and 26 were reserved for future disposition.31 Though the Symmes land settlement business was anything but a financial success, there had been established a growing community, the most populous in the Northwest, which was to be a center of political, economic, and cultural activity thereafter.32 All these settlements-Marietta, the center of the Ohio Company activities; Losantiville (later Cincinnati) in the Symmes purchases; Chillicothe, a developing center in the Virginia Military Tract; and scattered settlements of squatters in the Seven Ranges-were retarded in their progress by dangers of Indian warfare. As has been seen, many settlers withdrew and abandoned their land during the Indian troubles. After 1795, however, the way was cleared for the settlement of most of Ohio. 31 Copy of patent to Symmes in Territorial Papers, II, 496. 32 Bond, Correspondence, pp. 8 ff. |
