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Show CASH SALES, 1840-1862 207 While these conflicts over land titles were occurring in Iowa, Wisconsin, and California, the feeling was growing in the West, and indeed among workingmen in the East, that wild land on the outer edge of settlement had little or no value, that it was the labor of those who improved it, did road work, and paid taxes for schools and for the support of other social institutions, which gave value to their own land and to that of absentees. Those who held these views agitated for a reduction in the price of public land, the withholding of land from market to allow settlers to establish their preemption claims, restrictions on the amount of land open to cash purchase, and, finally, for free lands and the cessation of public land sales. With public sales ending, the only route to ownership would be through preemption or homestead so far as Federal lands were concerned. The huge quantities of land that speculators had engrossed during the boom years of the early fifties was commented on frequently and at length by western papers and given even more attention in the influential New York Tribune, a powerful Whig, later a Republican, organ. A brief summary of the anti-speculator attitude and the move to restrict sales to settlers which began in the mid-thirties is useful here. In 1837 Senator William S. Fulton of Arkansas advocated restrictions on sales, declaring that whole counties had been entered by speculators in 1836 and almost immediately sold to settlers at large increases in price, but on credit. Only the issuance of the much reprobated Specie Circular had saved even larger tracts from the speculator. The Ohio People's Press deplored the "nabobs and desperate speculators who will make immense fortunes out of the hard earnings of the western farmers ... a Landed Nobility not perhaps in title but in overbearing and oppressive power." Look, it said, "at this scandalous gambling in your sweat-bought earnings, for the purpose of buying up and monopolizing the beautiful and fertile lands of your country .... Are you willing to be- come the beasts of burden for a proud and haughty Landed Aristocracy?"72 Jackson was commended by the Indiana Democrat on January 3, 1837, for issuing the Specie Circular and urging that the public lands be sold only to actual settlers. Such a policy should have been adopted long ago, it maintained. "Instead of now having the public lands engrossed by a horde of speculators, who never will and who never intended to settle among us, Indiana would have had a larger population of industrious farmers." The "merciless speculator" is a positive injury. The West's criticism of a land system that had allowed speculators to monopolize many million acres of land increased support in Congress in 1837 for a bill to restrict sales to settlers, but the measure became bogged down in amendments and got nowhere. Continued attacks were made upon the wide-open character of public land sales. Allen's Land Bill Almanac For The Tear 1846 declared that the settler was preceded by the speculator in new areas and had to buy from the latter or become a squatter. "The real price to the actual settler is nearer ten dollars an acre . . . ." it maintained.73 In 1851 the St. Paul Minnesota Democrat warned that land sharks were about, and that speculators from abroad were out "to plaster" land warrants over our soil, and lock up our fair domain. "This is a nuisance, a sore evil and injury to our people, and the prosperity of Minnesota that demands a speedy remedy."74 Limit land sales to actual settlers, urged the Illinois State Register of March 11, 1851. "Had we our own way about the matter, not a foot of land should 12 Cong. Globe, 24th Cong., 2d sess., Jan. 31, 1837, p. 143; Ohio People's Press quoted in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, July 6, 1836. 13 Logansport Canal Telegraph, Aug. 4, 1838, Ignatius Mattingly, Corydon, Ind., Jan. 28, 1838, to John Tipton, in Nellie Armstrong and Dorothy Riker, The John Tipton Papers (3 vols., Indianapolis, 1942), III, 527; Allen's Land Bill Almanac for the Tear 1846 (Columbus, Ohio), p. 22. 74 April 15, 1851. |