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Show 122 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT debt with revenue from public land sales. Yet Alexander Hamilton, in his famous report of 1790 on the public credit, was optimistic enough to suggest that if the western lands were to sell for 20 cents an acre, the prospects for profit to speculators would encourage large purchases and would provide sufficient income from sales to retire one-third of the debt.2 Hamilton's optimism was not shared by members of Congress. Those who were engaged in land speculation were having difficulty in carrying their commitments and fully realized that capital for land investments, as compared with investments in government securities, was no longer easy to secure. Neither Congress nor the administration attempted to bring additional lands on the market for some years.3 Whatever the many politician-investors in public lands may have thought of the economic opportunities of the Ohio country, there were thousands of settler-squatters either already on the land or anxious to buy it. They could not buy public land for there was no Federal office in Ohio in which to file their entries. A representative of the frontier school of thought on land questions, Thomas Scott of Pennsylvania, in an able speech in Congress on May 29, 1789, had expressed keen dislike for large sales to speculators, urged that a land office be created in Ohio and warned that, unless the seven thousand people waiting to buy land there were not soon satisfied, they would either turn to Spanish Louisiana for their homes or would rush upon the land as squatters. Scott drew some support for his views from James Madison and one or two others. Perhaps unfortunately, he wanted to combine preemption rights with indiscriminate location as was 2 Harold C. Syrett, (ed.), The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1962), VI, 91-92. 3 American State Papers, Public Lands, III, 459, 613; Journals of the Continental Congress, September 30, 1788, XXXIV, 564. A special committee of the House further explained the delay in bringing lands into market was owing to the "difficulty attending the appointment of a Surveyor General." Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 2d sess., p. 2064. the practice in southern states. The principal opponent of Scott in the debate was Elias Boudinot, a speculator associate of Symmes.4 Nothing was accomplished by the discussion. This rift of opinion between eastern, conservatively oriented Congressmen-they hoped for substantial revenues from the public lands, feared the depressing effect favorable land terms in the West would have on eastern land values, and did not wish to make any concession to the squatters' demands for preemption-and the spokesmen for the frontier was to characterize debates on public land policies until the Civil War. A System of Disposal Studied Alexander Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury, was charged by the House of Representatives in 1789 with reporting "on a uniform system for the disposition of lands and property of the United States." Washington was quite familiar with and deeply reprobated the practice of squatting but Hamilton, less familiar with the West, was not sufficiently impressed with the evils of squatting to suggest remedies or preventive measures. Yet the practice had been a source of anxiety from the first cessions of land. It has been seen that General Harmar in 1783 drove off many squatters who had planted themselves on "all the most valuable land" for several hundred miles from the mouth of the Mus-kingum. As soon as the troops left the squatters returned, and from that time on the government was never free from such illegal intrusions upon public lands, and even on Indian lands, except when the Indians were threatening the settlements. Henry Knox, who was later to be a colleague of Hamilton in Washington's Cabinet, in 1787 spoke of the lawless "usurpation of the public lands," the "audacious defiance" of the will of Congress by squatters, against whose actions he felt the most drastic steps should be taken. 4 Annals of Congress, 1st Cong., pp. 427-32, 645-57; Payson J. Treat, The National Land System, pp. 74ff. |