OCR Text |
Show Chapter IX Cash Sales, 1840-1862 The attitude of the West was ambivalent on the question of having the public lands surveyed and opened to purchase far in advance of need or ability of settlers to buy. The ideas of a closed or limited frontier, of directed and compact settlement, and of rigidly accepting the boundaries separating Indian reserves and unsurveyed lands from those that had been prepared for sale, were anathema to the usual westerner, as Benton had shown in his colorful condemnation of the Foote Resolution in 1829.1 Westerners wanted freedom to go wherever the spirit moved them, to strike into new territory, to get far away from settlement. At the same time they wanted a stake in the land with the privilege of selling a relinquishment of their improvements or of mortgaging the land they had selected to obtain capital for additional improvements. As we have seen, squatters protected themselves against the loss of their claims at public land sales by their claims associations and by arranging with moneylenders to enter claims for them. After 1841 they were protected by the Preemption Act. With the exception of squatters' or preemption claims, capitalists could enter at the public land sales and afterwards whatever tracts looked most promising and could buy as much land as their resources permitted. In the earlier years, westerners took pride in the fact that capitalists were buying land in their midst, thereby showing confidence in the region; they watched the statistics of rising public land sales with much approval. Disillusion- 1 Register of Debates, 21st Cong., 1st sess., Dec. 30, 1829, Jan. 18, 1830, pp. 2-7, 23. ment soon came, however, when they saw the absentee-owned lands barren of improvements, not carrying their weight in the community, and yet held for prices beyond those new settlers could afford to pay. Then residents of the frontier communities turned from approval to sharp disapproval and to questioning the Jackson-Van Buren policy of opening huge areas of land to sale. An increasing element in the West that had no part in the land business as representatives of absentee capitalists or as landlookers or agents, came to feel that it would be far better to allow settlers to spread over newly surrendered Indian land, unhampered by the speculators or by the need to raise funds to purchase their claims until they had become well established. The Panic of 1837 reversed the long period of economic expansion in industry and in domestic and overseas commerce and checked somewhat the growth of urban centers, immigration from Europe, the westward movement of population, and the creation of new farming commonwealths. Specie payments were resumed in 1838 and conditions seemed to be improving until 1839 when a second and worse crisis hit the economy. Banks again suspended specie payments, more banks closed their doors for good, internal improvement programs of the states were abruptly halted, land sales tumbled, and the country entered a long sustained depression that reached a low point in 1842 and 1843.2 2 The low point of immigration, land sales, tobacco and wheat prices was 1843; for cotton it was 1844. Thomas Senior Berry, Western Prices Before 1861 (Cambridge, 1943), pp. 425, 434, shows that the low point in commodity prices was reached in 1843. 177 |