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Show HOMESTEADING, 1862-1882 391 be ameliorated by offering free land in the West to which the poor might go when conditions became intolerable in the industrial centers. Government had an obligation to withhold the public lands for actual settlers only and should freely grant them the land instead of allowing it to be monopolized by capitalists who bought it, not for development, but for resale to the land hungry. The holding of large tracts by speculators or by planters who utilized only small portions of this property constituted "monopoly," a bad word in the lexicon of the land reformers. In 1844 Evans organized the National Land Reform Association which gained some important converts, including Gerrit Smith, a rich New York landowner and former associate of John Jacob Astor, and Horace Greeley, America's greatest polemical editor and ardent reformer. Greeley is commonly pictured as an erratic, politically ambitious reformer who went from socialism to Whiggery, to Republicanism and finally to Liberal Republicanism and on the way adopted almost every reform no matter how odd it might appear. The Greeley of land reform, however, was no Utopian dreamer, no impractical idealist, but a down-to-earth critic who knew far better than most contemporaries what was going on in the West. Greeley employed some of the ablest reporters of the time, read widely in the newspapers of the country, and traveled in the West himself. His trenchant editorials, his own letters when on a western tour and those of his reporters constitute some of the best and most informative accounts of pioneering that we have. Greeley scorned speculators, being as harsh in his criticism of the small man who was trying to control several quarter-sections through the claims association as he was of the land companies and rich eastern investors. Converted to National Reform and to the cause of free homesteads, Greeley became a powerful force in the spread of reform sentiment, especially in the West where his paper was widely read. Six hundred newspapers, it has been said, followed Greeley's Tribune in supporting free homesteads.10 Land reform, thought Greeley and the National Reformers, would draw westward not only the thousands of Europeans flocking to America and crowding into New York and other industrial centers, but also those residents of hillside farms in New England and New York where the struggle for survival was harsh. It was this reservoir of labor that depressed wages, kept the working day long, jobs insecure, and weakened the barbaining power of labor. The offer of free land would surely draw the redundant workers of the East to the West and give them an opportunity of establishing themselves on productive farms. The "safety valve theory" which Carter Goodrich, Sol Davison, and Fred Shannon were to discard in 1935 and 1936 as a result of a series of intuitive and analytical studies was fundamental to the position of the free land and reform advocates.11 Greeley said of the attraction free land would have to eastern workingmen: Let it be known that all the Public Lands are open to settlement without charge, while the cost in time and money of transportation Westward is constantly diminishing and there would very soon be a current of emigration from the cities and 10 Roy Marvin Robbins, "Horace Greeley: Land Reform and Unemployment, 1837-1862," Agricultural History, VII (January 1933), 18-41; Benjamin H. Hibbard, History of the Public Land Policies (Madison, Wis., 1965). pp. 358 ff. The best biography of Greeley is Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Horace Greeley, Nineteenth Century Crusader (Philadelphia, 1953), though it is not strong on the great editor's understanding of western land problems. 11 The attack upon the safety valve theory is a part of the larger effort to examine the structure and validity of the Turner emphasis upon the significance of the frontier. For mention of some of the more important works and additional bibliographical aids see Ray A. Billington, America's Frontier Heritage, pp. 288 ff. and elsewhere. |
