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Show CASH SALES, 1840-1862 the Mexican War. Unlike the warrants of the Revolution and the War of 1812, the new issues were not limited to any area but could only be used to acquire lands which were open to private entry. This restriction prevented warrants from being used to preempt land before the auction sale, unless they were used by the warrantees themselves. Furthermore, warrants were not divisible. Persons wanting to enter a fractional tract of 135 acres had to surrender the entire 160-acre warrant. These factors plus the great volume of warrants depressed their price and they never brought a full $1.25 an acre. Actually they sold for much less most of the time they were in circulation. To the degree that they brought less than $1.25 an acre they depreciated the price of land but, as we shall see, it was speculators rather than settlers who benefited from this boon. Next in the process of making public lands easier to acquire were the Swamp Land Acts of 1849 and 1850 by which 64,910,000 acres were turned over to the states to aid them in draining lands classified by them as wet. For the most part the states quickly disposed of their swampland grants without accomplishing the purpose for which the land had been granted. If we may judge by the records of the disposal of swamplands in Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, and California the greater part of the lands went to parties who were already large investors in land which they might or might not be developing. The concentration of ownership in these four states was largely accentuated by the Swamp Land Acts. A third major innovation in land policy which, however, had its origin in 1824 and 1827 when grants of land were made to the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois for the construction of canals and roads, reached a new phase in 1850 when Congress began granting the states alternate sections of land within a 12-mile strip along proposed rights-of-way to aid in the construction of railroads. The first major impact of this subsidization policy was felt in the fifties when a number 181 of canals were brought to completion and railroad construction was being pressed forward rapidly in the West. Military bounty lands, the Swamp Land Acts, and the railroad land grants are dealt with in more detail in later chapters; suffice it to say here that they speeded up the transfer of public lands to private ownership, and enabled speculators to acquire large blocks of land and to create land companies, bonanza farms and ranches. More than all this, it was the advertising by these land companies and railroads, territorial and state immigration officials that made the attractions of the American West known to the farm population of the worn-out hill areas of the Northeast and the southern Appalachians, and to peasants of western Europe. Never before had so many people decided to abandon their homes and to strike out for western America as in the 1850's. To use charts of public land entries or income from public land sales as an index of economic conditions in the United States, and especially of those in the newly developing West, calls for careful qualification.6 For example, many millions of acres of attractive and promising land were withdrawn from sale or entry of any kind to prevent persons from anticipating railroads in selecting land which the companies had been promised as subsidies. When the railroads had completed their surveys, selected their routes, and located their primary and lieu grants, the remaining public lands were restored to entry. The first withdrawals for railroads were made by telegraphic order to the land offices in Illinois, Alabama, and Mississippi immediately after the passage on September 20, 1850, of the grant for a railroad from Chicago to Mobile. During the Pierce administration the scramble for grants by Representatives from all the public land states 6 Arthur H. Cole, "Cyclical and Sectional Variations in the Sale of Public Lands, 1816-60," Review of Economic Statistics, IX (January 1927), 41-53; Paul W. Gates, "Charts of Public Land Sales and Entries," Journal of Economic History, XXIV (March 1964), 22-28. |