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Show 360 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT little indeed. One railroad, the Missouri River, Fort Scott and Gulf, received so little in relation to the obligations it assumed in land grant rates that, as is discussed later in this chapter, it urged the forfeiture of its grant. There is no evidence that the Mobile and Ohio valued its land grant this lightly. Yet, it did assume large obligations for the amount of land it received as shown by the fact that it obtained an average of 2,346 acres for each mile of road whereas the Illinois Central received an average of 3,652 acres to the mile.58 Although George W. Jones of Tennessee and Andrew Butler of South Carolina inveighed against land grants for railroads, holding them to be beyond the power of Congress to convey, they were a generation behind public sentiment. Enlightened self-interest was replacing the fear of change voiced by such southern conservatives. The success of both the Illinois Central and the Mobile and Ohio, a north-south railroad, in financing their lines with the aid of Federal land grants paved the way for numerous later requests for Federal aid to railroads. In 1852 and 1853 two additional land grant measures were enacted giving to the State of Missouri a similar grant-even numbered sections for 6 miles on either side, with lieu land provisions for an indemnity area from 6 to 15 miles from the line-for the building of railroads from Hannibal to St. Joseph and from St. Louis to a point on the western border of Missouri, to be selected by the state, and a grant to Missouri and Arkansas for a line from opposite Cairo by way of Little Rock to Fort Smith. Instead of allotting the first of these grants for a railroad from St. Louis to Kansas City, (later the Missouri Pacific main line) along which very little public land remained, Missouri assigned it to a railroad to run southwest from St. Louis where it would find a far greater amount of land within both primary and lieu areas. The General Land Office accepted this change, if change it was, since it came within the scope of the law and the maps of survey had not been received for the main line. Thereafter, however, the Land Office was not to accept any material change of route once the maps of location had been filed. Only minor deflections made necessary by natural obstacles would be permitted.59 The land grants of 1852 and 1853 added 1,322 miles to the 1,333 miles of land grant railroads already projected and 4,400,576 acres to the 3,751,788 acres already granted for railroads.60 Politics and the Views of Pierce In discussion of the adoption of the 1852 measure, Timothy Jenkins of upstate New York advanced all the negative arguments that had been voiced since 1827 and included a table showing the mileage of railroads which Congress was being asked to aid and the acreage these measures would take from the public domain. It may be useful to include this table, though if anything it was an underestimate of measures under consideration at the time. The brief lull that followed the legislation of 1852 and 1853 may be attributed partly to concentration upon other issues, notably the Kansas Struggle, but more to the fact that Franklin Pierce, unlike his immediate predecessors, looked more dubiously on land grants and wanted no "reckless or indiscriminate extension" of them.61 In his veto messages of 19. Rae, "Railway Land Subsidy Policy," pp. 18- 58 John B. Rae. "The Development of Railway Land Subsidy Policy in the United States" (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1936), p. 15. 60 Included in the latter figure is a considerable acreage resulting from the enlargement of the grant of the Act of 1853 by the Act of 1866 from 6 to 10 sections to the mile. I have not been able to segregate the acreages of the acts. For construction of railroads in Missouri from 1852 to 1870, together with maps showing construction by years, see Gates, "The Railroads of Missouri, 1850-1870," Missouri Historical Review, XXVI (January 1932), 126 ff. 61 James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, V, 217. |