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Show 186 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT \2Vi cents. Total sales for the 15 years were 3,997,558 acres and the total income was $3,181,003, or an average of 79 cents an acre. The table of sales and average prices by years is instructive regarding the market value of the lands:17 Sales of Chickasaw Trust Lands'1 Amount Average Price Year Acres Received Per Acre 1836 1,304,150 $2,168,602 SI .66 1837 192,622 328,895 1.70 1838 281,367 195,020 .69 1839 639,452 246,101 .38 1840 437,654 78,273 .17 1841 304,143 46,356 .15 1842 74,728 10,658 .14 1843 36,345 6,221 .17 1844 124,269 78,352 .63 1845 161,365 51,811 .32 1846 185,414 60,059 .32 1847 138,128 31,674 .23 1848 74,403 13,638 .18 1849 36,419 6,160 .16 1850 34,936 4,584 .13 :1 An additional 36,055 acres reserved for Chickasaw orphans and presumably selected because of the improvements on them sold for $155,728. W. R. W. Cobb of Alabama, commenting on the experience gained from the application of graduation to the Chickasaw lands in Mississippi, maintained that the result was that all the land, "almost every acre," had been taken up by settlers. He was somewhat indiscreet in declaring that there was "nothing but pine deserts and mountains, now vacant" in his state. Almost any land would sell if offered at a sufficiently low price.18 What is important about the experience of the government in selling the Chickasaw 17 S. Ex. Doc, 31st Cong., 2d sess., Vol. II, No. 2 (Serial No. 588), p. 14. James W. Silver has a useful note on "Land Speculation Profits in the Chickasaw Cession," in the Journal of Southern History, X (February 1944), 84 ff. ™Cont>. Globe, 33d Cong., 1st sess., April 12, 1854, p. 905. lands is that without the usual kind of controls that prevented competitive bidding and inflexible basic price the lands were permitted to seek their own price level and that in doing so, well over half of them were appraised by the market at far below the government minimum of $1.25 an acre. It was in 1854, when the movement for free homesteads was making headway in Congress, that the Graduation Act was passed, after a full generation of agitation on its behalf. It received no more than halfhearted support from the advocates of homestead, some of them like Galusha Grow voting against it. They were opposed for they feared that graduation would not only delay, but might even defeat, the chances of free homesteads being voted. The Whig National Intelligencer could not understand why the House, which had already passed a bill to give land away, should not pass a measure to graduate the price of land. In the past graduation had been defeated by dragging out cession as an alternative and so dividing the elements wishing a change in land policy as to make either impossible to attain.19 After graduation was shorn of cession, a policy even more detested by the older states, and homestead legislation "was successfully blocked for the time .... Graduation was not such a large concession for the conservative eastern interests and one which they could politically afford to grant," especially as they were voting for a policy of classifying land and adjusting its price to the classification as any good businessman would do.2" The Graduation Act as finally enacted provided that all public land which had been subject to sale for 10 years-except mineral land held at $1.25 an acre and land reserved for railroads or canals-should be reduced in price in proportion to the length of time it had been on the market. Land that had remained unsold for 10 to 15 years would be priced at $1.00, at 75 cents if unsold for 19 Crandall, op. «7., pp. 3 ff. 20 Ibid., p. 11. |