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Show 100 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT whose claims still remained unconfirmed. On the eve of the election, Auguste and Pierre Chouteau and others of their associates met to assure the necessary votes for Benton's election. They managed to bring over to their side Marie Phillipe LeDuc, one of the largest landowners who had previously been a bitter enemy of the Missourian.36 Although clearly in their camp before, Benton thereafter was at the command of the claimants, anxious to ease the process of adjudication. In every session of Congress until 1824 he introduced bills to provide for the establishment of another land commission to which the unconfirmed claims could be taken for trial, whether or not they had been considered and acted on before. His persistent efforts succeeded in 1823-24 when a memorial of the Missouri Legislature calling for the establishment of such a tribunal, which he presented on December 17, 1823, enabled his colleague David Barton to report a bill for a commission which was quickly approved by the House and became a law on May 26.37 The last major grievance of Missourians concerning the land system came as a result of the great cataclysm, the New Madrid earthquake of 1812 that destroyed the town of the same name. In 1815 Congress provided that the sufferers should receive scrip locat-able elsewhere in Missouri for the loss of land and other damages they had sustained. The scrip could be exchanged for public land, "the sale of which is authorized by law," in the territory. Persons owning lots or small 36 The story of the land claimants' efforts to win sufficient votes for Benton has been accepted by all historians. John F. Darby, Personal Recollections (St. Louis, 1880), p. 31, says Auguste Chouteau declared that if Lucas were elected the French inhabitants would never get their claims confirmed, whereas Benton was friendly to and would vote for laws to confirm the claims about which there was so much question. See Houck, History of Missouri, III, 53, 267; William Nisbet Chambers, Old Bullion Benton. Senator from the New West (Boston, 1956), pp. 98-99. 37 Annals of Congress, 18th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 47, 152, 790, 2617; 4 Stat. 52. tracts in New Madrid could obtain 160 acres in scrip; others might obtain scrip to the amount of 640 acres, the actual amounts and the criteria for determining them not being provided. Speculators swiftly moved in before the sufferers were aware of the value of their rights, bought up many of the rights, manufactured others by perjury and forgery, and proceeded to locate them on unconfirmed claims, on village commons, and on settler-improved lands for which the occupant was waiting to file his preemption when the land office opened, and on unsurveyed land. Even more demoralizing to an already complicated surveying problem, were the irregularly placed land claims which did not at all coincide with the rectangular system of survey, and the insistence of the scrip owners that they could wholly disregard the official survey lines and make their selections of land in the haphazard way scrip holders had done in the Virginia Military Tract of Ohio.38 Thus the New Madrid scrip owners, because of the vagueness and impreciseness of the law providing for issue of the scrip, were in conflict with land claimants who had not given up their fight for confirmation, with settlers who had been promised preemption rights and then denied them by the Presidential Proclamation and delay in opening the land office, and finally with land office personnel who were trying to save the rectangular surveys.39 Throughout 1816 few Missourians were content with the handling of the land claims, the slow rate at which the public land system 38 Of the 516 certificates issued, 149 were for more land than was relinquished. A Federal examiner of Missouri land matters reported in 1822 that the New Madrid law gave rise "to more fraud and more downright villainy than any law ever passed by the Congress of the United States." It took six amendatory acts to settle all the questions growing out of the New Madrid Act. Floyd C. Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians: Land of Contrasts and People of Achievements (5 vols., Chicago, 1943), I, 203-204; Lemont K. Richardson, "Private Land Claims in Missouri," pp. 130-52. 39 Act of Feb. 17, 1815, 3 Stat. 211; Territorial Papers, XV, 237 45. |