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Show Summary American land policy from Independence to the end of the 19th century had four objectives inherited from the colonial period: (1) to produce revenue for the government; (2) to facilitate the settlement and growth of new communities; (3) to reward veterans of wars; and (4) to promote education, the establishment of eleemosynary institutions, and the construction of internal improvements by grants of land. Spokesmen for all four of these objectives were to clash over the relative importance of each and were to cause the adoption of measures that were inharmonious and incongruous with others. The need to refund the heavy debts contracted during the Revolution which went unpaid under the Confederation, induced Thomas Jefferson, the agrarian radical, Alexander Hamilton, the fiscal conservative, and Albert Gallatin, who represented a midway position between the views of the two, to agree to pledge the income from land sales for the retirement of the debt. The public lands were to be sold and the proceeds "appropriated toward sinking or discharging the debts . . . and . . . applied solely to that use." This solemn pledge of August 4, 1790, and of April 1798 was to hold Congress to a revenue policy until the debt was retired. Land was to be sold in large tracts at competitive bidding on a wholesale basis and it was expected that the buyers would then retail it out to small farmers in the way that James Fenimore Cooper was retailing land on the New York frontier. Agrarian followers of Jefferson disliked the emphasis upon revenue in the dis- posal of the public lands. They agreed with him that "the small landholders are the most precious part of a State" and that "vast grants" or large ownerships tending toward "monopolies" were wrong. They wished to give the common man easy access to the public land and the chance to acquire ownership out of the capital they accumulated from cultivating it. This involved permitting settlers to search out attractive locations, to improve them, and after a few years to preempt them at the minimum price. Frontier settlers wanted no speculators buying at a competitive sale and therefore they demanded the right of preemption and wanted the public land reserved for farm makers. Failing that, they wanted sales postponed as long as possible to give them time to accumulate the $200 for their quarter-section and to assure that settlers took up most of the land. At the same time they wanted no restrictions placed on the areas into which they might move and urged the speedy removal of the Indians from desirable areas and the rapid survey of the lands. In addition to these advocates of a wide-open land system that would permit individuals to settle wherever they wished, there was another element of the population concerned with the business in land, timber, and minerals. No one has essayed a history of the land business but when one thinks of the number of speculators, land agents, landlookers, timber cruisers, dealers in land warrants, scrip, and tax titles, and lawyers who were absorbed in these frontier occupations, and of the fortunes that were made and lost in land specula- 765 |
