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Show CASH SALES, 1840-1862 183 diana there were 201 townships which contained approximately 4,628,000 acres.9 In 1854, 82 townships contained no land that had been on the market 10 or more years, 15 had only a single 40-acre tract, 14 contained only 80 acres, and 40 contained from 120 to 320 acres. In the entire district there were only 71,350 acres which had been open to purchase for 10 years. In the Indianapolis district only one township contained land that had been open to entry for that length of time. The 4,040 unsold acres in this district had been subject to entry for 35 years. In the rougher and poorer land districts of southern Indiana there was much more refuse land. The total for the state amounted to 458,700 acres. In all of Ohio only 70,495 acres were left and they had been available for 35 years. In Illinois the remaining lands were widely scattered, with few large tracts. Elsewhere in areas long opened to settlement the story was different. Scattered tracts of 40 to 160 acres in good townships and blocks of 5,000 to 20,000 acres, even entire townships, had been left behind as settlers rushed westward. In the Jackson district of southwestern Missouri there were many townships proclaimed for sale as early as 1820 in which the entire acreage was still open to entry. Though Missouri had nearly a million people, 13,850,020 acres had not attracted buyers for 10 or more years and of these 6,468,020 acres had been offered in 1820. Actually, more land remained unsold after it was offered than had been sold. We may conclude, then, that in Missouri surveys and proclamations of sales had been pushed far beyond the demands of settlers and other land buyers-that is, if the primary goal had been compact settlement of the country. Politicians, anxious to provide patronage for 9 Taken from a report of Thomas A. Hendricks, GLO Commissioner, Dec. 24, 1855, showing the status of all land subject to graduation entry in the various land districts. H. Ex. Doc, 34th Cong., 1st sess. 1855-56, Vol. V, No. 13 (Serial No. 847), pp. 1-470. The table showing the acreage of land subject to graduation entry by states is on page 470. the faithful, found pushing surveys without regard to the actual pressures for land a way to make jobs and contracts available for their supporters. As of 1854 the public land states except California and Florida had been largely, if not entirely, surveyed and in all but Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois there were large areas, even entire townships which had long been neglected by land buyers. In a tier of nine townships in the St. Stephen's district of Alabama, one township had not yet been offered for sale. In seven others which had been proclaimed for sale in 1834 either no sales or sales of less than a thousand acres had been made and in the last township only 3,000 acres had been sold. Yet, in the same district some townships had no public lands left and a few had scattered 40- or 80-acre tracts unsold. In the Elba district of southern Alabama practically the entire area of 88 townships remained unsold-2 million acres that had been on the market from 16 to 32 years. Westerners were irked that so many acres were neither being developed nor taxed (some tracts may have harbored squatters with the most meager improvements and little concern about ownership) and reasoned that they did not sell because they were held at prices beyond the current values. A practical way of dealing with them would have been to have had them appraised and sold at what was a fair value, but such a policy would have involved planning and the employment of many people to investigate and report on them. Conflicting ideas as to the value of wild land on the frontier made such a solution of the problem impossible. Thomas Hart Benton came up with a simple way of handling the matter that did not involve any additional bureaucratic machinery and seemed certain to bring about the purchase of much land: to reduce the price of land in relation to the length of time it had been on the market. Throughout his congressional career, which began in 1820, Benton worked per- |
