ment of public land. Here, then, when the emigrants came pouring over the mountains by thousands, was a currency within the reach of all, which could in a moment be converted into land. The opportunity was gladly seized, and everybody who, by mortgaging his farm or his chattels, could raise a sum of money, large or small, made haste to do so and bought land, paying the first instalment in State bank paper, supposing that the second, third, and fourth could be discharged with the same kind of currency. But before these fell due Congress forbade the Secretary of the Treasury to receive State bank paper not convertible into specie. The buyers were forced to default, and by 1820 the debt due the Treasury for land rolled up to the enormous sum of twenty-two million dollars. Almost all of it had been contracted since the war. The credit system, after a trial of twenty years, having thus signally failed, was abolished by Congress, and cash payments resorted to instead. On and after July first, 1820, the new law provided, all publie land when offered for sale should be sold to the highest bidder in blocks of eighty acres for cash, but no bid of less than a dollar and a quarter an acre was to be received. This, it was believed, would cure two serious evils of the old way, which bore heavily on the small buyer and easily on the speculator. To get a right to enter on a quarter section, or one hundred and sixty acres, the poor settler must attend the public auction at which it was offered and compete with such as chose to bid against him, or, after the auction sale was over, he must go to the land office, select an unsold quarter section, deposit eighty dollars, and trust to being able to pay two hundred and forty dollars more in the course of four years. If he failed, the land with all its betterments reverted to the Government, and the eighty dollars was lost. Under the new system the poor settler for one hundred dollars might buy eighty acres outright, get his title deed, and enter on his farm owing the Government nothing. Again, while the old method was in use the rich man, the speculator with eight thousand dollars to spare, might purchase one hundred quarter sections on credit, hoping before five years went by to sell them all at a handsome profit. Should anybody buy one of his sections, he would receive the 1824. THE PUBLIC LANDS. 173 eighty dollars he had paid to the Government, together with the profit he wished to make on each acre, and would then transfer his certificate, leaving the purchaser to settle with the Treasury for payments yet due. Should the speculator make no sales, he might petition Congress at the end of five years for additional time, and would be certain to have his prayer granted. Now, it was said, the land-grabber will pay for what he buys, and will receive no more consideration than the poor man. The change, it was confidently predicted, would plant in the West a population of independent, unembarrassed freeholders, would cut up speculation and monopoly, would prevent the accumulation of an enormous debt which could never be paid, and would place it within the power of the poorest man to acquire a freehold of eighty acres. All this was true; but there were economic conditions to which Congress had not given a moment's thought, which, in the estimation of western men, made the new system no better than the old. The minimum price of an acre was, indeed, less than before; but the fact that the price was the same for good land and bad, for timber and prairie, for well-watered land and tracts without a rivulet or a spring, was declared to be ruinous to the prosperity of the West. * Benton, as the great friend of all western interests, therefore took up the matter, and laid before the Senate a bill to sell and dispose of what he called "the refuse lands belonging to the United States." Land which had once been offered at a dollar and a quarter an acre and not sold should, he proposed, after five years be offered at public sale for not less than fifty cents an acre. If nobody would buy it even at that price, then any head of a family, widow, or man of twenty-one should be given permission, on application, to settle on a half-quarter section of it, and should receive a patent for the land after cultivating it for three years. The questions involved and the interests concerned were of so serious a kind that Benton did not press the bill, but suffered it to lie on the table while the sentiment in its favor gained ground in April 28, 1824. the West. Nor was it slow in doing so. Ohio, where much of the public land had been sold, was indifferent. But from Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Alabama came memorials praying for a graduated scale of prices. A distinction, said Illinois, ought to be made between land recently offered for sale and that long in the market. In the latter case, the best having been taken up by bidders at the public auctions, by non-residents who buy on speculation, and by the early settlers, what remains is either poor in quality or is subject to some local disadvantage, and the price ought to be reduced. The emigrant seeking a home will not pay for it the price asked for better soil in better situations. He is therefore driven to new and distant settlements, where few have preceded him. The tide of population is thus made to roll over immense regions, creating feeble and thinly scattered settlements, separated by vast tracts of wilderness. In such a state public institutions are not established, systems of education are not matured, moral restraints are tardily enforced, laws feebly executed, and revenue raised with difficulty and at great cost. Land unsold after being offered for five years should, Illinois proposed, be valued at fifty cents an acre.* A graduation of price, said Indiana,† will stop the wild rush westward, will make settlements compact, and will bring into the market land which otherwise will remain wilderness or be made valueless by interlopers and trespassers, whose rude and temporary settlements are a nuisance to society. Finding that no attention was paid to her memorial, Indiana, in 1826, instructed her senators and requested her representatives to do their best to secure a law graduating the prices of public lands. Then, for the third time, Benton introduced his bill described by his colleague as "a compound of electioneering and speculation," and defended it in a speech which the same fellow-senator called a "studied, popularityhunting, Senate-distressing harangue." # Nevertheless, the Legislature of Alabama approved the bill, and bade her sena * American State Papers, Public Lands, vol. iv, p. 148, December 24, 1824. Ibid., vol. iv, pp. 429, 430, January 21, 1825. American State Papers, Public Lands, vol. iv, p. 483. # Debates in Congress, 1825-'26, vol. ii, part i, pp. 720-753, May 16, 1826. 1826. THE INDIAN LANDS IN GEORGIA. 175 tors endeavor to secure its passage,* and Indiana and Illinois each again memorialized Congress to scale down the price of land. There are in Illinois, said the memorial, some forty millions of acres, of which one million and a half have been sold. At this rate, and if the present price of a dollar and a quarter is held to, "it will be several hundred years before all the soil of the State passes to other hands." + While the Western States, or, as many in the East believed, combinations of speculators who controlled the Legislatures, were begging Congress to reduce the price of the public domain, greed for land in the South bred a serious quarrel between Georgia, the President of the United States, and the Creek and Cherokee Indians. In 1802, when Georgia ceded the territory now part of Alabama and Mississippi, it was stipulated that the United States should extinguish the Indian title to land within the State of Georgia "as early as the same can be peaceably obtained on reasonable terms." When this agreement was made the Indian possessed in Georgia not far from twenty-six million acres, a tract larger than the State of Maine, larger than South Carolina, larger, indeed, than all New England if Maine be excluded. Of this immense area, eighteen million acres belonged to the Creeks and more than seven millions to the Cherokees. True to its pledge, the Federal Government began at once to negotiate for the purchase of the Indian rights, and in the course of twenty years concluded seven treaties, by which fourteen million acres were acquired from the Creeks and one million from the Cherokees. Yet the Georgians were far from satisfied. The deliberate course of the Government was too slow for them, and in their impatience they charged the United States with bad faith, with a violation of the agreement of 1802, and threatened to take the matter into their own hands. That they would have done so is not likely. Nevertheless, when the great rush of population into the West began after the war with Great Britain, when cotton was selling at thirty cents a pound, and * American State Papers, Public Lands, vol. iv, p. 892. + Senate Document No. 17, Nineteenth Congress, Second Session, vol. ii. The Indiana Memorial is No. 37 in the same volume. a wild speculation in land swept over the South, the popular feeling against the Indians rose to such a height that the Legislature, in 1819, made the immediate acquisition of the Creek and Cherokee territories the subject of a memorial to Congress. In it the United States was so flatly charged with bad faith that the House bade a special committee examine and report whether the agreement of 1802 had been faithfully executed according to its terms, and what ought to be done to complete it.* The committee was of the opinion that the United States had not been careful to keep its pledges. By one treaty with the Creeks the Government had accepted land in Alabama, whereas it ought to have insisted on a cession of territory in Georgia. By another treaty with the Cherokees, it bought a great tract in Tennessee, though duty required it to extinguish the Cherokee title in Georgia. Nay, more, it granted six hundred and forty acres to each head of an Indian family, which was an attempt to give lands in fee simple within the limits of Georgia, in violation of the rights of the State; and it permitted Cherokees to become citizens of the United States, which was an unwarrantable disregard of the right of Congress. If the agreement was to be honestly executed, the United States must abandon its policy, in Georgia at least, of civilizing the Indians and keeping them on their lands, and must negotiate such treaties as might be necessary to extinguish all Indian title to land within the State.† Though the report had small effect on the House, it had much on the Executive, and three commissioners were promptly appointed to negotiate a treaty with the Cherokees and secure such a piece of territory as would pacify the State of Georgia. But nine months dragged by before the Senate confirmed the appointments, # and seven more ere the commissioners met the council of the Cherokee Nation at their capital. Three propositions were made. One, that the * January 7, 1822. + Reports of Committees, No. 10, Seventeenth Congress, First Session, vol. i, 12 pp., January 7, 1822. June 15 and August 24, 1822. # Approved by the Senate, March 17, 1823. October 4, 1823. |