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Show CASH SALES, 1840-1862 211 emasculation. It then passed and went to the President who vetoed it. This series of events-the proclamations of public sales largely in northern territory which made it necessary for settlers to come to terms with moneylenders and loan sharks at their 24 to 120 percent interest charges; the veto of the severely weakened homestead bill; and the effort to force slavery into Kansas-created a political revolution. It drove normally Democratic westerners into the Republican Party and made it the majority party for years to come. States in which public lands were ordered to sale reported the lowest percentage of votes for Brecken-ridge, the candidate of the slavocracy party that had ruled since 1853; Minnesota gave him 2 percent, Iowa 0.8 percent, Wisconsin and Michigan 0.5 percent. Kansas, which had been most hurt by the land sales of 1858-61, could not vote in 1860 but in 1864, the first year that it could register its attitude toward the party of Buchanan, it voted 5-1 against it. In these states and territories where lands were pushed onto the market in 1858-60 and a heavy burden of mortgages was established, loyalties to the Republican Party were to be persistent in later years. By 1862 the income from public land sales was down to $152,000, which was lower than that of any year since 1800. Caleb Smith, the Secretary of the Interior, lugubriously reported that it was not sufficient to pay the expenses of the land system.85 Farm Making and Dealers in Land We have seen that during the years 1837-62 a substantial portion of the public land was not conveyed directly to actual farm makers but to "speculators." The term has a wide connotation. It included settlers who entered more land than they could use, local real estate agents, politicians, lawyers, and merchants, officers of the Army, Indian agents, 86 Secretary of the Interior, Annual Report, 1862, p. 3. as well as eastern capitalists operating with their own money or that of others entrusted to them for investment in western lands. Few westerners were above speculating in land- Abraham Lincoln was one of the few. One shrewd English observer of western traits remarked in 1862:86 Speculation in real estate . . . has been the ruling idea and occupation of the Western mind. Clerks, labourers, farmers, storekeepers, merely follow their callings for a living, while they were speculating for their fortunes. . . . The people of the West became dealers in land, rather than its cultivators. On every frontier the settler-speculator was present. By claiming 320 acres instead of 160 or even 80, he separated himself that much more from his neighbor. He had to bear a heavier proportion of the cost of building and maintaining roads; either his school costs were increased or the establishment of schools was delayed; the expense of local government when the land tax was the principal source of revenue became burdensome. Other social institutions like churches, granges, and railroads came more slowly because settlers were widely dispersed. The principal difference between the settler-speculator operating in a small way and the absentee, capitalist-speculator was that the former was making a farm and contributing to the development of the community, though his contribution might have been more valuable or larger if he had followed Horace Greeley's advice and acquired only so much land as in a few years he could transform into a productive farm. Yet it might be the small profit the settler could make by selling off a surplus forty or eighty that would provide him with the means to buy necessary livestock, tools or fencing. Profits from his petty speculation were not being drained off to other sections as were those of absentee owners. 86 D. W. Mitchell, Ten Tears in the United States? Being an Englishman1 s Views of men and things in the North and South (London, 1862), 325-28. |