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Show MILITARY BOUNTY LAND POLICIES 255 come to terms with the owner after the balloting. There was no way they could predict where their land would be located in a tract containing 1,680,000 acres. The average enlisted soldier was in need of money when he was discharged into civilian life in the midst of a marked period of depression. Consequently, most of them had to dispose of their military bounties long before they became available in the form of actual land. Of 2,045 officers and privates entitled to land, all but 158 of those who were living at the time the patents became available had conveyed their rights, not, it must be said, to members of their families, but to an astonishing degree to men who were speculating in the bounties, as well as in other tracts in New York, on an extensive scale. Among these large holders were Michael Connolly who acquired 169 lots of either 500 or 600 acres, Jeremiah Van Rennselaer who obtained 77 lots, and others including such well-known names as Van Cortlandt, Fish, Bayard, and Platt got from 17 to 88 lots. Forty-six holders controlled one-third of the tract. Although numerous ex-soldiers settled in the tract they came not as owners of a lot but as squatters or potential purchasers of land which had long since passed into the hands of speculators.15 The Virginia Military Tract Public land administration in the Virginia Military Tract of Ohio was unique in that the United States kept ownership of the soil but permitted original grantees of bounties offered by Virginia, or their assignees, to select their land by the typical Virginia system of indiscriminate location and in- dividual survey.16 Holders of Virginia bounty warrants could locate their land either in the area set aside for this purpose in Kentucky or in the tract in Ohio, or they could locate part in each. After they had chosen the land they wanted in the military tract and were convinced it had not previously been entered, they turned over rough diagrams of their selections to the official surveyor-ultimately declared to be a Federal employee-who ran the lines, marked the corners by blazes or notches on trees or other impermanent devices. The description of such surveys was entered in the Survey Book of the Virginia Military Tract and a copy with the warrant was sent to the Secretary of War, or after 1812 to the General Land Office. There the patents were prepared and transmitted to the state office in Richmond which, in turn, delivered them to the grantees or their legal re presentatives.17 Searching out and surveying land for others was a regular business undertaken by men who received from a quarter to a half of the land as compensation for their services. Such men also had representatives 151 have drawn heavily upon Merrick's manuscript study of "The Military Tract of New York State," in my possession. The author used the Balloting Book, the deed records of three of the counties in the tract, and the appropriate state documents. 16 Ohio's history of public land administration is marked by unique features. (1) It had the right, as had two other states-Virginia and Connecticut-to distribute the land in designated areas as it wished; (2) one of these tracts was surveyed into townships of 5 miles square, not 6. like the Federal public lands, and the other had no rectangular survey but reverted to the indiscriminate location and subsequent survey system of Virginia; (3) three parts of the Federal lands, the Seven Ranges, the Ohio Company lands, and the Symmes purchase had a system of numbering sections different from all other parts of the public domain; (4) sectioning of townships and division of sections in the United States Military Tract and in the Connecticut Western Reserve differ from that of other parts of Ohio; (5) section 29 in each township of a part of the Ohio Company lands and of the Symmes purchase was called ministerial land and reserved for religion and was subject to state management. Readers will find other unique features, but of less significance, in William E. Peters, Ohio Lands and Their Subdivisions (Athens, Ohio, 1918), passim. Similar legal studies for other states should be useful. 17 Act of Aug. 10, 1790, 1 Stat. 184. |