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Show 164 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT arguments against preemption that its opponents were ready to throw in the sponge. For years sales prices had come to average but slightly more than $1.25 an acre. Certain it is, that the aims of general prospective preemption had already been achieved before 1841 by settler action. The West had still other ways of striking at speculation in public lands. It felt that the 5 year's exemption from taxes which purchasers of public land enjoyed was an especial boon to absentee owners who contributed nothing to the development of the community during that period, while local property owners were building roads, making improvements on their own land, and taking their part in church and other community enterprises. The tax restriction did not apply to public land in states admitted into the Union after 1820, but it was a major source of complaint in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Finally on January 26, 1847, Congress ended this 5-year exemption feature, which had been retained 27 years after the reason for its existence was ended by the cessation of credit sales in 1820.55 In Illinois there had been a special reason for complaints. Lands in the military tracts were allowed only 3 years of exemption if retained by the warrantee and lost this exemption as soon as they were sold by him. There being little improved land in the state in 1819, and indeed little land in private ownership save the military bounty lands, the cost of the state government was largely placed on them in the form of a state land tax. Resident owners of military bounty lands, resenting the exemption from taxation which purchasers of other land enjoyed for 5 years, made the tax due dates fall so soon after the notices of assessment as to prevent remote absentees from getting their taxes in on time. A high rate of tax delinquency and tax titles followed. 56 Senate Journal, 29th Cong., 2d sess. (Serial No. 492), Jan. 7, 1847, p. 90; House Journal, 29th Cong., 2d sess. (Serial No. 496), Jan. 20, 1847, p. 192; 9 Stat. 118. Also Carlson, The Illinois Military Tract. On January 2, 1837, in the midst of the great speculative boom of the thirties when millions of acres were being acquired by men of capital, Robert J. Walker, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Lands and himself no mean speculator, reported a bill "To arrest monopolies in the public lands, and to prohibit the sales thereof, except to actual settlers in limited quantities." Westerners loved the word monopoly which meant to them anything that was both big and bad. The Second Bank of the United States was a monopoly to them, as were absentee speculators in land, and later the grain elevators, the stockyards, and the railroads. The measure was taken up just at the time when much support for distribution had developed in the East. Party lines in the Senate were close; some Democrats were inclined to wander off the reservation on land and distribution questions, and there seemed strong doubt that the measure would get through. It was amended to limit its application and rid it of a graduation clause and additional preemption privileges. Walker deemed the bill now too weak and innocuous to merit passage and had it referred back to the Public Lands Committee which had a 3-2 majority of Senators from the public lands states. Two days later it re-emerged, with a section making actual occupation and cultivation essential for the purchase of land. Most bitter of the bill's opponents was John P. King of Georgia who declared that it would establish "a system of plunder, and perfidy; a system in which those who had the least merit would make the most profitable speculations," and that it was designed to benefit only squatters, for whom he had no sympathy, and speculators. Walker, who knew the ways of the speculators and the harm they did in a region, declared with some hyperbole that as much as 41 million acres of land had passed to speculators and that the only way to stop their accumulations was to ban further sales to them. The amended and newly reported bill passed the Senate on February 9 by a vote of 27-23 but |