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Show 132 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT By reducing the unit of sales from townships and quarter-townships to tracts as small as 160 acres (in 1817 and 1820 to 80 acres), setting up local land offices, providing a wide choice of settlement by ordering surveys well in advance of actual demand, granting credit to small as well as to large buyers, abolishing interest on installments until they became due, and ending the elaborate fee system, Congress had done much to please the West. It still had a long way to go, however, to equal the ease with which land could be acquired in the colonial period, to guarantee settlement improvements to squatters, or even to reduce the price of lands to levels more competitive with those in other areas. Some Effects of the Liberalization Gallatin and Harrison had rightly prophesied that land sales would quickly increase if the size of the tracts that could be purchased were reduced, if longer credit were extended, and if land offices were opened in the tracts being sold. From practically nothing, sales shot up to 396,646 acres in 1801, 340,000 in 1802, 199,080 in 1803, and 373,611 in 1804, and for the balance of the decade did not fall below 143,409 acres annually. Collections reached a high of $850,106 in 1806. Forfeitures were few but collections began to fall into arrears after that date. These were good years, during which there was a sizable surplus of Federal revenues, more from customs collections than from land. Nevertheless, the receipts from public lands were doing in a small way what Congress had pledged them to do, reduce the Federal debt. New customers attended the land offices, people of some means and large ambitions to make money, others eager to create farms for themselves. These two classes of purchasers- business economists call the first "petty capitalists"-plus the larger and better financed speculative purchasers that Hamilton wanted to attract, have been the subject of much historical speculation, but not much actual statistical examination. Some writers have Annual Sales of Public Land and Collections North of the Ohio" Year Acres Price Collections 1801 396,646 $834 ,887 $248,461 1802 340,000 680 ,000 220,867 1803 199,080 398 ,355 245,999 1804 373,611 772 ,851 431,029 1805 619,266 1,235 ,953 575,859 1806 473,211 1,001 ,358 850,106 1807 284,180 688 ,610 680,861 1808 195,579 433 ,444 545,087 1809 143,409 355 ,783 484,752 1810 156,017 449 ,502 (344 ,256) 610,317 1811 207,017 449 ,502 599,773 1812 391,664 849 ,632 746,897 a Compiled from the Reports of the Secretary of the Treasury in American State Papers, Finance, Vol. II. Another table showing the sales by states is in Senate Documents, 27th Cong., 3d sess., 1843, No. 246, pp. 3ff. The totals are different, perhaps owing to the use of different fiscal years. suggested that many, if not most, of the original purchasers of land who bought from a quarter-section to a full section were speculators who were prepared to sell when op~ portunity offered, and had no intention of developing their land themselves. They can cite contemporary writers and travellers who observed that every man had a price for his farm and was prepared to sell and try farm making again elsewhere. This does not prove that every pioneer in the West was a speculator for there were other factors which induced men to sell, including heavy mortgage payments, dissatisfaction with their choice and a hope of finding better land elsewhere. That there were numerous absentee speculators who were investing funds through others and who hoped for a quick turnover to avoid taxes, interest, and expensive agents' costs is clear from an examination of the abstracts of land entries of different land offices, now in the National Archives. Also it is clear that, as anticipated by Hamilton, many persons bought land to retail to settlers in small quantities in accordance with prior agreements. |