In 1800, as the new American nation began two generations of the greatest expansion in its history, the guidelines for public land policy reflected the Ordinance of 1785. The Land Ordinance (as it was known) embodied certain lasting principles that would continue to guide the evolution of land policy throughout the new century. These fixed principles included: (1) The federal government would acquire title to Indian lands through honorable negotiations; (2) the government would then survey the land before sale based on rectangular divisions of land into townships of six miles square, with the townships divided into 36 sections, or one mile square; (3) section 16 would be set aside to maintain public schools; (4) the government would sell the surveyed lands in minimum lots of 640 acres at the price of $1 per acre; (5) the title would pass in fee simple, that is to say, absolutely, without other annual dues.
Under the Land Act of 1796, the Congress of the new national government under the Constitution of 1789 confirmed the rectangular survey system. The new law raised the minimum price of public land from $1 to $2 an acre with credit of one year. Alternate tiers of townships would be sold in quarter-township lots (5,760 acres) at the national capital, and the other townships would be sold in sections of 640 acres at the newly established land offices at Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Sales under the new law were few because of the high price, the short period of credit, and the large minimum size of salable tracts. Furthermore, the designated land offices were great distances from settler families. But Congress had begun its first adjustment of terms and the size of tracts; there would be many others. Between 1800 and 1860, Congress would enact more than 3,000 laws dealing with the public domain, but the basic principles of rectangular survey before sale, public auction, and title in fee simple issued by the federal government would remain constant.
The first major change in the land system was the Land Law of 1800 (sometimes known as the Harrison Law for its sponsor, William Henry Harrison, territorial delegate from the Northwest Territory). Within the broad guidelines of the Land Ordinance, the Land Law of 1800 offered several important modifications to the advantage of individual settler families. It retained the price of $2 an acre but offered four years of credit; the minimum size of a tract to be purchased was reduced from 640 to 320 acres; and it provided for establishing four district land offices in the Northwest Territory, making it more convenient for settler families to transact their land business. Tracts of land would first be sold at public auction held at the district land offices; after the individual tracts had been offered for sale, these lands would be open for private entry at the minimum price. The easier terms and more convenient access encouraged sales, and settlers and speculators alike responded. The credit provisions, however, produced a continuing administrative nightmare of payment calculations. In 1804, Congress further reduced the minimum tract that might be purchased to 160 acres. The sales of the public domain immediately increased.
With the close of the War of 1812, a great surge of immigration to the West began. Settler families moved down the Ohio River and up tributaries into the Old Northwest, across the mountains and into the new southwest of Alabama and Mississippi Territories. Land sales surged; competitive bidding, especially on cotton lands in the South, rose to unheard-of levels of $40 an acre and, in a few cases, to $70 an acre. The credit system encouraged cultivators and speculators to bid and to acquire beyond their means. With the collapse of the economy in the panic of 1819, a reckoning was at hand. That year, the secretary of the Treasury, William H. Crawford, reported that since 1789, the government had sold lands for $44 million, but only half that sum had been paid, while the other half was still owed. Congress eventually passed 12 relief acts to retire these debts incurred in optimistic times. For the future, and to ensure that the system would never again produce a large land debt owed by the nation’s citizens, Congress enacted the Land Law of 1820. This new law abolished the credit system, requiring that all land be paid for in cash (hereafter known as “land office money”). The price was reduced to $1.25 an acre, and the minimum tract was fixed at 80 acres. A family could now buy a farm for $100. Unfortunately for the government, the process of public land sales was completely disrupted by the panic of 1819. The ensuing depression made it virtually impossible for most prospective pioneers to come up with the requisite $100. The government compounded the problem by ending all land sales on credit and demanding cash. The result was a surge of illegal squatters who settled and cultivated unsurveyed land in the hopes of eventually raising the money to purchase a title. The practice became so widespread that Congress was forced to enact new policies the following decade to accommodate them.
Land legislation over the next generation reflected several threads of settlement patterns and sectional politics. Congress had to pass numerous laws to deal with land claims dating from French and Spanish grants, attempting to meld the two legal and land traditions. The purchase of Louisiana in 1803 and the subsequent organization of the Territory of Orleans (later the state of Louisiana) and the Territory of Louisiana (later the state of Missouri) came to involve the large-scale examination of earlier land grants in these territories west of the Mississippi River. The acquisition of Florida in 1819 would raise the same issues in this new territory. Congress also made numerous gifts of land to individuals and special interests, ranging from veterans of the War of 1812 to educational institutions to cultivators of the vine and the olive. The rising sectional issues reflected the emergence of the West as a distinctive section with its representatives and senators in the Congress and its own special interests. Among these interests was the liberalization of land laws. Whatever the differences that emerged between the Northwest and the Southwest over the issue of slavery, they would agree that liberal access to land would serve the interests of the nation’s frontier peoples.
The first major issue was preemption. The principle of preemption affirmed that settlers who made improvements as evidence of their serious intention to occupy and cultivate the land should be entitled to purchase their tracts, up to 160 acres, for the minimum price without competitive bidding. Eastern representatives in Congress argued that preemption rewarded trespassing and illegal settlement, and they were right. But whatever their feelings, it was not possible for the federal government to evict illegal settlers, for no elected official who had hope for a future in politics would use force to eject settler families from the public domain.
While the Congress in Washington debated the merits of preemption, settlers on the frontier fashioned their own remedy. The claim CLUBS brought together settlers in a land district to protect their holdings against bidding by
Western Land Sales, 1800-60
Year
Speculators at public auctions. Settlers thus agreed to bid only the minimum, and they physically threatened competitors who might bid against them. Although an extralegal institution, most state, territorial, and local governments accepted claim clubs.
In 1830, the West mustered sufficient support to enact a temporary preemption act. It provided that settlers who had cultivated land on the public domain might purchase their improvements and as many as 160 acres at the minimum price of $1.25 an acre. The act was approved for a year, and Congress renewed the law annually until a permanent preemption law was enacted on 1841. The Preemption Act of 1841 reflected a shift in principle that dated back to the Ordinance of 1785 by making settle-ment by individuals and families a priority over revenue. Henceforth, the land laws of the nation would reflect an increasing liberalization and an acknowledgement that the public domain was to be distributed as widely and generously as possible to actual settler families. Legislation would reflect both the liberalization of terms and attempts to benefit individuals and families as opposed to large-scale speculators. The new policy also received a unique political twist when opposition Whigs, determined to return some of the land-generated revenue back to the seaboard states, managed to pass the Distribution Act of 1841 (repealed 1842).
The question of land and how to best dispense it also gave rise to a unique third party movement. In the late 1830s, several politicians including Henry Clay sought to keep the price of land artificially inflated in order to generate monetary surpluses subject to distribution among established states. Others with a more altruistic bent argued that land prices west of the Mississippi should be kept high to discourage western settlement and keep Native Americans living there free from additional depredations. But in eastern circles, labor leader George Henry Evans and New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley championed the notion of free land in the West to draw off surplus workers from eastern cities, thereby improving labor’s bargaining power throughout the East. This free-soil movement was strongly resisted by slave-owning southerners, who feared the addition of new free states, but in 1848 it resulted in creation of the Free-Soil Party to formalize its advocacy. One of the largest third parties to arise in the 19th century, it was partly responsible for passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, one of the most significant land distribution schemes in American history. The Free-Soil philosophy also marked a complete shift in attitude toward land from a source of revenue to one of guaranteeing ownership and the creation of small farms to ensure the nation’s republican heritage.
Despite this general tendency toward liberalism and leniency, the admission of California to the Union in 1850 turned the process against Californio (Mexican) residents living throughout that region when the new Land Law of 1851 required all non-American inhabitants of California to produce valid titles to be approved in U. S. courts. Most landowners consequently spent several years in litigation to prove their ownership. The courts eventually approved 14 million acres as legal, while the remaining 700,000 were declared null and void. Meanwhile, many Californios were forced to sell off portions of their holdings to finance legal expenses. Others fell heavily in debt to lenders, bankers, and tax collectors and likewise lost additional acreage to cover their obligations. In turn, the existing rancho system of landownership gradually vanished as Spanish-speaking rancheros, vaqueros, sheepherders, and other laborers relocated to the new urban barrios of Los Angeles and other cities to find work. As a new minority subject to intense discrimination, they never recovered their former social or economic significance.
In 1854, in the next landmark law, Congress enacted the principle of graduation. It was introduced largely at the behest of Missouri’s influential senator Thomas Hart Benton, whose state had the largest supply of unsold public land. This act provided that lands unsold on the market for long periods would be offered at graduated prices. Lands available on the market for more than 10 years would be sold at $1 an acre; more than 15 years, 75 cents an acre; more than twenty years, 25 cents an acre; more than 30 years, 121/2 cents an acre. The law represented a political alliance between East and West (with the South opposed), coming as it did in the midst of a decade characterized by growing sectional feeling. Millions of acres were sold as a result of this liberal law, which was repealed in 1862.
This same East-West alliance worked to enact a Homestead Law that would give free homesteads of 160 acres to settler families. In 1860, President James Buchanan vetoed a homestead law passed by both houses of Congress. In response, the Republican Party inserted a strong homestead plank in its platform for the presidential election of 1860. It was a promise that spoke in the strongest terms to western voters.
After Abraham Lincoln’s victory in November 1860, the South seceded from the Union, and the Civil War began. Amidst the chaos and confusion of a nation at war, the Republican Congress passed a Homestead Act in 1862, fulfilling an important election promise. The law offered any citizen of the republic—or any immigrant who intended to become a citizen, was head of a family, and was over 21 year of age—a tract of 160 acres in the public domain after five years of residence. The entrant had to pay registration fees and administrative costs, but the idea of “free land” to settlers was as much a reality as Congress and the president could make it. As an added benefit, the homestead was exempt from attachment for debt.
With the passage of the Homestead Law, an era in the history of the public domain had ended. This 60-year period was characterized by adherence to the basic principles of the Ordinance of 1785; by the continuous liberalizing of terms under which the public domain might be acquired; and by the gradual acceptance of the principle that the public domain was not a source of revenue but, instead, a resource to be distributed to the citizens of the republic on the most liberal terms possible. The public land system had provided guidelines for the greatest physical expansion in the nation’s history, and it had offered to the citizens of the republic generally fertile and well-watered lands. If it was true that some had benefited more than others in the sense of acquiring larger tracts, it was also true that almost everyone who had sought lands had acquired something. The opportunities for landownership under this system were unique in the history of the world.
In the next generation, from the close of the Civil War to the end of the century, the nation would continue its expansion at an unparalleled pace into the distant lands of the trans-Mississippi West and then to the shores of the Pacific. In so doing, settlers and speculators would find new landscape and new climates that would dramatically transform the ways that Americans thought about the public domain. It would gradually dawn on citizens, pioneer families, and officials alike that the old land laws were inapplicable to the challenges of the new, distant West.
Further reading: Vernon Carstensen, The Public Domain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963); Daniel
Feller, The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Paul Wallace Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1968); Paul Wallace Gates, The Jeffersonian Dream: Studies in the History of American Land Policy and Development (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Laura Jensen, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).
Pushmataha (ca. 1764-1824) ally of Americans in the Creek War, orator, negotiator
Pushmataha was a Choctaw chief who sided with the United States in the Creek War (1813-14). He was born into the Choctaw Nation near the future site of Macon, Mississippi, around 1764. Orphaned at an early age, he displayed unusual prowess as a warrior, rose steadily through tribal ranks, and around 1805 became a war chief and leader of the Six Towns District. That same year he first entered into treaty negotiations with the United States and concluded the Treaty of Mount Dexter, whereby he sold Choctaw land in return for a $500 gift and an annuity of $150 a year for as long as he remained chief.
Through this process Pushmataha met and befriended trader John Pitchlynn and became amicably disposed toward the Americans. Ample proof of this was afforded in 1811, when the Shawnee leader Tecumseh visited the southern Indians and beseeched them to join his antiwhite confederacy. Pushmataha, who was in attendance, then rose and delivered a forceful speech of his own, effectively persuading many of his tribesmen and neighbors not to forsake the friendship of the United States for the sake of a stranger. In August 1813 the Upper Creek Indians attacked American settlements. Pushmataha readily joined the ranks of General Andrew Jackson with 500 Choctaw warriors. These he personally commanded in several stiff engagements with the Creek, gaining Jackson’s respect as an effective leader. In recognition of his conduct Pushmataha was made a brigadier general in the U. S. Army. In 1818-19 his Choctaw warriors performed similar work against the Seminole of Florida, and he became widely hailed as “the Indian general.”
The postwar period proved difficult for the Choctaw, who came under increasing pressure from the United States to sell their lands in Mississippi and migrate across the Mississippi River. Pushmataha was present at several treaty signings in 1816 and 1824, where he proved himself adept as a negotiator in talks with General Jackson. In 1824 Pushmataha visited Washington, D. C., with a tribal delegation to discuss forthcoming land cessions, and he was cordially introduced to President James Monroe and the marquis de Lafayette. However, the aged chief fell ill during the proceedings and died there on December 24, 1824. His final request to his hosts was to “fire the big guns over me,” and he received a formal military funeral replete with a cannon salute. Pushmataha is one of few Native Americans interred in the Congressional Cemetery. His passing created a void in Choctaw leadership that was never filled, and within a decade the tribe was relocated across the Mississippi.
Further reading: James T. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaw from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Gideon Lincecum, Pushmataha: A Choctaw Leader and His People (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004).
—John C. Fredriksen
World History
