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Show GRANTS TO STATES ON ADMISSION TO UNION 291 cratic features of the Northwest Ordinance, the appointive officers and the veto power, and wished for early statehood. Yet St. Clair's criticisms of the enabling act were not without effect. Therefore, instead of accepting without change the terms offered them for admission they proposed a number of modifications. The delegates asked for the equivalent of one thirty-sixth of the lands within the Virginia Military Tract and the Western Reserve (neither of which were subject to disposal by the Federal government) and for the same amount in the United States Military Reserve for common schools. This proposal would mean a gain of 271,324 acres for schools. They requested that all the lands for education be vested in the state, not the townships, as was proposed by Congress. They also asked not only for 5 percent of the net proceeds of all future land sales but for the same percentage on all sales previously negotiated, and that three-fifths of the money be expended on "laying out roads within the State, under the directions of the Legislature thereof." Thus, instead of the one-twentieth of the net proceeds being spent by Congress on the construction of roads to Ohio, the state wanted three-fifths of that sum for road building within the state, the routes to be determined by its own legislature. The delegates also recommended that the state be permitted to select land from sections 8, 11, and 26, which earlier legislation had reserved from sale in each township, to replace the township promised John Cleves Symmes for a seminary. If Congress would accept these proposals Ohio would consent that all lands the government sold after June 30, 1803, should be exempted from taxation for 5 years from the day of sale.15 Congress was willing to make all but one of the changes proposed by the Ohio convention. It declined to let Ohio select from the reserved sections 8, 11 and 26, but it granted a township for a seminary.16 Ohio actually received 4 percent of its public lands for schools, more than any other state received until, with the admission of California in 1850, new states were granted not one, but two sections in each township or 5.2 percent of their public land for this purpose. By persuading Congress to accept its recommendation that it be allowed 5 percent of the net proceeds of public lands sold after June 30, 1802, instead of June 30, 1803, Ohio received almost $12,000 more than Congress had originally intended. Ohio had certainly come off well in the bargaining, and St. Clair's criticisms may have been partly responsible. The Ohio Enabling Act did not go unchallenged. Andrew Gregg of Pennsylvania seized the occasion to remind fellow Congressmen that the public lands were common property in which every citizen was equally interested "and to which they all had an equal right." He quoted from the Virginia Act of Cession to show that the lands were ceded for the common benefit of all the states and called the school and 5 percent grants a wholly unwarranted act of usurpation.17 He was thus laying the basis for the claim of the non-public-land states to share in the returns from public land sales, a subject that was to take up much time in Congress during the 1830's. Louisiana In 1804 three territories were created: Orleans, consisting of that part of the Louisiana Purchase south of the 33d parallel (or virtually present Louisiana); Louisiana, that portion north of the same parallel; and Indiana. The Act of March 26, 1804, creating Orleans and Louisiana Territories stipulated that neither the governors nor the legislative councils should have any power over the primary disposal of the soil, nor to tax the lands of the United States, nor to interfere 15 American State Papers, Miscellaneous, I, 343. 16 2 Stat. 226. 17 Annals of Congress, 7th Cong., 2d sess., Feb. 22, 1803, pp. 584-86. |