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Show 210 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT the idea behind the Foote Resolution that led to the great debate on land and constitutional questions in 1829-30. It was wholly unacceptable to the West, whose people for a half-century had been successful in speeding up the process of removing Indians and widening the area of public land available to settlers. Buchanan, peculiarly sensitive to the pro-slavery wing of the Democratic Party, was not sympathetic to granting free homesteads or to extending the period of grace during which preemptors were not required to pay for their land. Furthermore, when it came to granting land for western railroads, he had to move cautiously, for he knew the dominant element among his supporters would favor a railroad to the Pacific only if it were to be built from some southern city.84 Buchanan could not give up the notion that the public lands should be a source of revenue to the government even though revenue from this source had progressively declined from the high level it had reached in 1855 when the first big rush for graduation lands had occurred and when buyers were anxious to secure locations near projected railroads as withdrawn public lands were restored to entry. Income from Public Land Sales* Income from Percentage of Year Land Sales Federal Income 1851 $2,352,000 4 1852 2,043,000 4 1853 1,667,000 2 1854 8,471,000 11 1855 11,497,000 17 1856 8,918,000 12 1857 3,829,000 5 1858 3,514,000 7 1859 1,757,000 3 1860 1,779,000 3 1861 871,000 2 a For convenience I have used the statistics in Historical Statistics of the United States, p. 712. 84 Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, V, 459-60. In his veto of the homestead bill of June 22, 1860, Buchanan deplored the loss of revenue it would entail and predicted that if he signed it, future revenues from sales were illusionary. His Secretary of the Interior, he declared, had told him that not a million dollars would be raised from sales if the bill were signed. The bill was not signed and the income from land sales the following year was $871,000. Buchanan had the misfortune to come to power just before a great financial panic and depression set in. Since 1849, when the extraordinary expenditures occasioned by the Mexican War ended, the United States Treasury had enjoyed substantial surpluses, reducing the national debt from $63,062,000 to $28,701,000 in 1857. The first year of the depression saw government income melt away while expenditures increased, leaving the largest peace-time deficit-$27,530,000-the country had thus far suffered. The administration panicked and rushed public lands into market as the Van Buren administration had done in 1838-40. Altogether 35,500,000 acres were ordered to sale in comparison with less than 11 million proclaimed for sale in the days of the Pierce administration. No longer did officials feel the government could afford to allow settlers the long period of grace they had been enjoying. Money was needed to meet the deficit and, if necessary, it must come from the pioneers creating farms on the frontier. It may have been a mere coincidence that only 2,500,000 acres in the slave states were proclaimed for sale, while the balance was all in free state territory. However, the difference was noted by people in the Upper Mississippi Valley who were hard hit by the proclamations. At the very time the sales were being held, the leaders of the administration in Congress were trying to defeat the free homestead measure that had gained wide support in the West, especially during the months following the Panic. Failing to defeat that bill, the administration's supporters amended it almost to the point of |