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Show 192 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT be taken to prevent the making of entries not intended for occupancy and improvement. But he seemed to invite Congress to sanction all entries thus far made, regardless of whether there had been "compliance with the spirit and intention of the law" or not.35 A dispatch in the Keokuk Post (Keokuk, Iowa) of 1859, indicates that abuses of the law continued. It mentions the great number of "sharks" at the St. Louis and other land offices who had been entering or getting others to enter graduation lands for them, especially the "bit" land, which they then sold in a few weeks' time at $1 to $15 an acre. The Post complained that these sharks swore they wanted the land for actual settlement, then hired "worthless scoundrels" to enter it who conveyed it to them for a small payment.36 Thus were perfected many of the devices which land grabbers were to employ even more extensively at a later period to secure homestead and preemption lands. The efforts of the Land Office to prevent speculators and other nondevelopers from accumulating large ownerships by abusing the Graduation Act gave rise to many thousands of contested cases in much the same way as the preemption laws had done earlier. The following items illustrate the principal types of cases.37 One person filed application for a tract on which there was an existing settlement. An entry was made for the use of an adjoining farm but the addition did not make a compact unit or there was no adjoining farm and the entry was fraudulent. The entry was made for the use of an 35 Thomas A. Hendricks, Sept. 28, 1855, to R. McClelland, Secretary's Files, Department of the Interior; S. Ex. Doc, 34th Cong., 3d sess., Nov. 29, 1856, Vol. II, No. 5, Part 1 (Serial No. 875), p. 175. 36 Keokuk Post, quoted in the Vermilion County Press (Danville, 111.), March 23, 1859. 37 S. Ex. Doc, 34th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. I, No. 1 (Serial No. 810), Part 1, p. 147. adjoining farm but all land adjoining was wild and unoccupied. After making the entry for actual settlement and cultivation the party sold the land at an advanced price before any settlement had been made. Entries were made by minors. Assignment of the land was made either before or immediately after the patent was issued. By 1857 Senator Albert G. Brown was complaining that more than a hundred thousand people, whom he pictured as hard working, honest but poor, were being denied ownership of the land they were entitled to by the arbitrary action of the Land Office. Other evidence in the files of the Land Office and many other accounts of the time reveal that the vocal part of the "hundred thousand" had much more than 320 acres at stake. An easy solution seemed to be congressional action to validate all graduation entries, whether or not they conformed to the instructions the Department had drafted. A move in that direction was made in 1856 but was checkmated by the Senate Committee on Public Lands. In an attempt to by-pass that committee, which was controlled by Charles E. Stuart of Michigan and George E. Pugh of Ohio, three southern Senators proposed referring to the Senate Committee on Private Land Claims a House bill to validate all graduation entries. This committee was headed by Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana, who was extraordinarily generous in recommending the confirmation of land claims in the South, and who, with two others, controlled the committee. The proposal to take the matter out of the hands of the Committee on Public Lands greatly angered Stuart and Pugh, who were on the defensive because they had not acted more promptly. Stuart accused Brown of making a stump speech for home consumption, declared that some of Brown's "hundred thousand" poor settlers were actually speculators who had hired others to make false affidavits and who were now trying |