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Show CASH SALES, 1840-1862 191 were inconveniencing speculators who were trying to buy up large quantities of graduated land. The Land Office was especially criticized for its second major circular which compelled additional proof of residence and improvement after the entrymen had met all the requirements of the first circular. Entry-men were forced to make an extra trip to the local land office at considerable expense and annoyance to comply with these additional requirements and were given the impression that their entries would lapse if the additional proof were not provided. It was in the South that Wilson's instructions and his rigorous efforts to eliminate fraud in the acquisition of graduation land aroused the greatest resentment. Clement C. Clay, Senator from Alabama, and Stephen Adams and Albert G. Brown, Senators from Mississippi, were most bitter in their denunciation of him and his superior, Robert McClelland, Secretary of the Interior, who had accepted Wilson's judgment in the matter. They called the second instructions arbitrary, tyrannical and altogether a "lawless proceeding" because they were applied retroactively to those who had conformed to all the requirements of the first instructions. Even Lyman Trumbull, Senator from Illinois, became upset at the complaints coming to him about Wilson's "arbitrary" actions. At the same time John Wentworth and Stephen A. Douglas were expressing their dissatisfaction with the agents who were ferreting out and prosecuting cases of timber stealing in the pineries of Wisconsin and Michigan.32 Whether it was the uproar created by Wilson's determination to prevent abuse of 32 D. P. Roberts, Kaskaskia, 111., April 6, 1856, and Amos C. Babcock, Canton, 111., April 16, 1856, to Trumbull, and W. H. Sweet, Saginaw City, Mich., April 22, 1856, to William H. Seward, all in Trumbull Papers, Vol. 3, in Library of Congress. Also, "Protest of the Michigan Settlers, 1854. The Graduation Lands Acquired by Settlers under the Graduation Act of 1854: a Review of Secretary McClelland's Circular. By a Citizen of Central Michigan." the Graduation Act, the efforts of the Land Office to reduce timber stealing on government land in the pinery states, the Commissioner's "Whiggish and Know-Nothing" principles, as one historian has suggested, or a combination of all three factors that led to his downfall is not clear. The evidence seems to suggest that Wilson had offended too many private interests in trying to protect public interests and that his political tendencies were used solely as a pretext to justify his removal.33 The dismissal of Wilson, who was an able and honest man serving in a weak administration, and his replacement by Thomas A. Hen-dricks, a more adaptable politician who was acceptable to the larger economic interests of the West, took some of the heat off the Department of the Interior.34 Although Hendricks and his superior, Robert McClelland, continued to show concern about the amount of fraud and perjury being committed under the Graduation Act, they directed critics of that measure to Congress. McClelland in his Annual Report for 1856 spoke of the "looseness" with which the Graduation Act was drafted, the "want of proper guards to protect its principles," the "many fraudulent entries" under it; he repeated and slightly strengthened Hendrick's statement of the previous year that care would 33 Jenks Cameron, The Development of Governmental Forest Control in the United States (Baltimore, 1928), p. 151, passim; Roy Franklin Nichols, Franklin Pierce. Young Hickory of the Granite Hills (Philadelphia, 1958), p. 391. 34 The difference between Wilson's adamant position that proof of occupancy and improvements on land must be provided before patent might issue and Hendricks' attitude may be seen in the following statement by Hendricks to McClelland, of Sept. 22, 1855. In reply to an inquiry whether failure to occupy the land more than a year after it was entered would prevent the issue of the patent, Hendricks declared that where the failure to settle upon the land was proved the patent would not issue but where no fraud was proved it would automatically be delivered. To prove fraud, which existed so widely, required much time and attention by the land officers; if not pressed by their superiors to investigate every case, it was easy for them to let matters slide. |
