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Show PREEMPTION 233 If there had been no misuse of the preemption privilege and no resort to intimidation at public sales, Brown would still have been dubious about allowing the first settlers to select the "most valuable lands, and most desirable situations" at $1.25 an acre, because he felt this sum was well below the actual value. He abstained from appraising the over-all justification for preemption but did say that a 40- or 80-acre right was generous enough. He despaired of eliminating the many abuses in past measures: It seems to me a hopeless task to project any modification of existing enactments that shall silence perjury, and defeat the devices of sagacious speculators, so long as their ingenuity shall be sharpened and stimulated by the prospect of an immense gain attending their success. The conscientious will resort to no dishonest tricks, but the contagion of speculation is proverbial; and when an expectation may be entertained of obtaining, by indirection, for the lowest price, land worth from five to forty dollars per acre in the market, the inducement to perjury and fraudulent shifts will be too strong to be resisted, by many of weaker morality. Brown thought that extreme liberality toward settlers might diminish the number of fraudulent cases by removing the motives for such practices, but he believed that the Intrusion Act of 1807 had brought public law into such contempt as to render any palliatives ineffectual until that act was repealed.39 The Commissioner's lack of sympathy for settlers on the public lands naturally won him no friends in the West, but Henry Clay found his report sufficiently helpful in his attack on preemption and squatters that he quoted from it in the Senate and allowed its strictures to carry him to a rare expression fraud in the operation of the preemption law in S. Ex. Doc, 24th Cong., 1st sess., Feb. 6, 1836, Vol. Ill (Serial No. 281), No. 230, pp. 17 ff. Also Letter of Brown to the Register and Receiver of Fayetteville, Ark., April 21, 1836, in "Preemption Bureau, Letters," Vol. 1, GLO Files, National Archives. 39 H. Ex. Doc, 24th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. V (Serial No. 290), No. 211, pp. 6-7. of hatred of settlers. Clay called preemption a "fraudulent, heartless, abominable speculation," a system that "putrified and corrupted all it touched." Squatters were a "lawless rabble." Clay's reckless and ill-timed condemnation of squatters, his opposition to preemption, graduation, cession, and to the removal of the 5-year tax exemption on public lands after sale, and his constant defense of speculators probably hurt him more in defeating his political ambition to be elected to the Presidency than his Raleigh letter of 1844 in which he tried to straddle the question of Texas' annexation. The West could not forget Clay's harsh castigation of that element of the population which it regarded as worthy of generous treatment by the government for its part in pushing the frontier westward. Nor could it forget that he had opposed measures most westerners regarded as essential for the development and prosperity of their section. Western papers kept before their readers Clay's denunciation of them as a "lawless rabble."40 Between 1834 and 1838 Congress had before it for consideration a stream of petitions and measures to provide preemption to all settlers on the public lands. An illustration follows: To the Honourable Body of House of Representatives We the undersigned, Citizens of Porter County & its vicinity, in the State of Indiana, most Respectfully represent to your Honourable Body in Congress assembled that Whereas much of the Public Domain in said County and adjacent thereto will probably be exposed to Public Sale the Present year, Induces your Memorialists to pray your Hon'ble Body that Some Steps may be taken, by which the Settler may not loose [sic] his improvements, his home, and his all. Experience have heretofore taught us that the Poor was indeed but the tool of the Opulent, that at the land Sale, at LaPorte but a few months Since to our Knowledge and deep regret, our Neighbours, fathers, Mothers, and little children, were turned off to the Cold hand of Charity by Speculators, i0Cong. Globe, 25th Cong., 1st sess., Jan. 26, 1838, pp. 142, 143, and App. to the same, p. 134; Iowa Territorial Gazette and Burlington Advertiser, Oct. 26, 1839. |
