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Show CASH SALES, 1840-1862 Graduation was not designed largely to get refuse lands into private ownership unless one assumes that whole townships were refuse, nor to aid small farmers to get land, although there was much talk about the small man buying the low priced lands which otherwise he could not afford. In fact there was a movement led by Roland Jones of Louisiana to remove all limits on the purchase of graduated land. Jones maintained that there were many hundreds of thousands of acres in his state which would never sell for $1.25 or even 75 cents an acre but might sell for 12^ or 25 cents for grazing or for timber. He opposed the 320-acre limitation in the bill on the ground that it was class legislation.14 John Wilson of the General Land Office came closest to understanding the objectives of Benton, Cobb, and other supporters of graduation. He showed that for years it had been the practice to survey and bring into market each year 10 million acres, when 1 to 3 million would have supplied the demand. Thus as much as four-fifths of the offered land was annually left unpurchased. It would be absurd, he declared,"to suppose that there was not much, very much, as good land remaining as any that had been sold." In this way the millions of acres of offered and unsold land which it was now proposed to unload through graduation had accumulated. He feared that after the first settlers had selected land in new communities, those who came later would wait for the graduation price and that henceforth the government would sell fewer acres at $1.25 than if graduation were not adopted.15 In the light of later developments we may conclude that the advocates of graduation were primarily concerned with lowering the price of land, that the limitation of 320 acres to each purchaser was window dressing, for no effective way of enforcing the restriction was included other than the threat that persons 185 swearing falsely that they had only acquired a half-section under the act would be subject to the penalties for perjury. By 1854 this threat had little effect in the West where perjury in public land matters was notoriously common and rarely punished. Congressmen could have learned about the prospects of sales from graduation if they had looked critically at the result of the sale of the Chickasaw trust lands of Mississippi. By the Treaty of October 20, 1832, as modified by a Treaty of May 24, 1834, the Chickasaws had ceded their 6,718,000-acre reserve in northern Mississippi to the United States to be sold for their benefit. Some 2,685,000 acres were patented as individual allotments to Chickasaw Indians. Most of these allotments quickly passed to white settlers and speculators. No claims to preemption were to be allowed on the trust lands and the United States bound itself to use its best endeavors to interdict any combinations planned to keep the land from selling for its full value.16 After the Indians had left and the lands had been surveyed into townships, sections, and quarter-sections, they were to be offered at public auction at a minimum price of $1.25 an acre and if not sold were to be subject to private entry at the same price for a year. For the next year the remaining lands were to be open to purchase for $1.00, in the third year for 50 cents, the fourth year for 25 cents and the fifth year for 12J/2 cents. If the cost of managing the lands in the fourth or fifth year proved greater than the return from them, the residue might be abandoned to the United States. Here the principle of graduation was applied for the first time. Between 1836 and 1850 these Chickasaw lands were being sold, first at the minimum price and after 1837 at the graduated prices. Not all were offered at the same time and as late as 1850 a few tracts were still subject to entry at 50 cents an acre. The balance of the unsold lands was open to purchase at liCong. Globe, 33d Cong., 1st sess., April 13, 1854, p. 959. "Ibid., p. 906. 16 Charles J. Kappler, Indian Affairs. Laws and Treaties (2 vols., Washington, 1904), II, 358, 421-22. |