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Show 392 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT older States to the free lands which could not fail to stiffen wages and diminish the disproportion between labor and the demand for it all over the Atlantic slope.12 Greeley and the National Reformers advocated banning sales to speculators and withholding all arable farmlands for granting in 160-acre tracts as free homesteads to actual settlers. This would, of course, have meant the end of Federal land revenue. But the proportion of Federal income derived from the public lands had already become almost insignificant. Only 6 percent of it was derived from this source on the average during the years 1851 to 1862; from 1859 to 1862 the proportion shrank from 3 percent to 2/10 of 1 percent. To make sure that land accumulation and "monopoly" would not be established, the reformers advocated inalienable homesteads with restrictions on inheritance and provisions for reversion of the land to the government. Land reform, especially free homesteads, gained converts North and West, with Webster, Seward, Sumner, Douglas, Johnson, Grow, and other leading members of Congress taking it up in one form or other. Petitions calling for free lands rained upon Congress in increasing numbers from northern legislatures and groups of various sorts.13 The newly organized Republican Party put free lands into its platforms. Northern Democrats, trying to remain loyal to their national leadership dominated by the proslavery element, knew they ought to do likewise but could not; the proslavery wing of their party could not reconcile free lands with slavery and turned their backs on the proposal. New territories moving toward statehood with slavery banned- among them California, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Minnesota-threatened the control that Slidell, Davis, and other southerners had hitherto maintained in the Senate. It was in these territories and in the free States of Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa that the great growth of population was occurring. Free homesteads would surely attract even more immigrants from Europe and would upset not only the delicate balance of forces in the Senate but would further increase free state representation in the House. Free lands must be opposed at any cost, even though opposition might mean the displacement of northern Democrats in the Senate and House by "Black Republicans" committed to free lands and asserting the right of the people in the territories to determine for themselves whether or not slavery should exist in them. National Reform spokesmen had converted Greeley and many other leaders who came to associate alleviation of urban poverty, low wages, unemployment, and the social ills of the slums with free lands in the West. The newer advocates of free homesteads, however, were less concerned with fundamentally changing the land system, abandoning sales, and enacting the inalienability and reversion clauses proposed by the reformers. Conservatives in the West like Cyrus Woodman, himself a large dealer in land who accumulated a small fortune from buying government land and reselling to settlers and lumbermen, continued to fear the effects of free lands if and when adopted.14 However, an increasing number 12 Lawrence B. Lee, "Kansas and the Homestead Act, 1862-1905" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1957), p. 32: quoting the New York Tribune, May 6, 1852. 13Robbins, "Horace Greeley: Land Reform and Unemployment, 1837-1862," pp. 18-41; Hibbard, History of the Public Land Policies, pp. 358 ff. 14 Woodman called the "vote yourself a farm" bill "outrageous in principle and adverse to the best interests of the west. The effect . . . will be to bring in upon us a vile horde of the most worthless class of emigrants, men who will not pay taxes on land after it is given to them and who will steal their living out of those who have bought and paid for their lands. The poorhouses of the east and of all Europe will be emptied upon us. I have not much sympathy for these cattle." He called free lands an "unmitigated humbug. . . ." He denied that his land investments |
