PUBLIC LANDS.--DISTRIBUTION TO THE STATES.
The efforts which had been making for years to ameliorate the public
land system in the feature of their sale and disposition, had begun
to have their effect--the effect which always attends perseverance
in a just cause. A bill had ripened to a third reading in the
Senate reducing the price of lands which had been long in market
less than one half--to fifty cents per acre--and the pre-emption
principle had been firmly established, securing the settler in his
home at a fixed price. Two other principles, those of donations to
actual settlers, and of the cession to the States in which they lie
of all land not sold within a reasonable and limited period, were
all that was wanting to complete the ameliorated system which the
graduation bills proposed; and these bills were making a progress
which promised them an eventual success. All the indications were
favorable for the speedy accomplishment of these great reforms in
the land system when the session of 1831-'32 opened, and with it
the authentic annunciation of the extinction of the public debt
within two years--which event would remove the objection of many
to interfering with the subject, the lands being pledged to that
object. This session, preceding the presidential election, and
gathering up so many subjects to go into the canvass, fell upon
the lands for that purpose, and in the way in which magazines of
grain in republican Rome, and money in the treasury in democratic
Athens, were accustomed to be dealt with by candidates for office
in the periods of election; that is to say, were proposed for
distribution. A plan for dividing out among the States for a given
period the money arising from the sale of the lands, was reported
from the Committee on Manufactures by Mr. Clay, a member of that
committee--and which properly could have nothing to do with the sale
and disposition of the lands. That report, after a general history,
and view of the public lands, came to these conclusions:
"Upon full and thorough consideration, the committee have come
to the conclusion that it is inexpedient either to reduce the
price of the public lands, or to cede them to the new States.
They believe, on the contrary, that sound policy coincides with
the duty which has devolved on the general government to the
whole of the States, and the whole of the people of the Union,
and enjoins the preservation of the existing system as having
been tried and approved after long and triumphant experience.
But, in consequence of the extraordinary financial prosperity
which the United States enjoy, the question merits examination,
whether, whilst the general government steadily retains the
control of this great national resource in its own hands, after
the payment of the public debt, the proceeds of the sales of the
public lands, no longer needed to meet the ordinary expenses of
government, may not be beneficially appropriated to some other
objects for a limited time.
"Governments, no more than individuals, should be seduced or
intoxicated by prosperity, however flattering or great it may
be. The country now happily enjoys it in a most unexampled
degree. We have abundant reason to be grateful for the blessings
of peace and plenty, and freedom from debt. But we must be
forgetful of all history and experience, if we indulge the
delusive hope that we shall always be exempt from calamity and
reverses. Seasons of national adversity, of suffering, and of
war, will assuredly come. A wise government should expect,
and provide for them. Instead of wasting or squandering its
resources in a period of general prosperity, it should husband
and cherish them for those times of trial and difficulty,
which, in the dispensations of Providence, may be certainly
anticipated. Entertaining these views, and as the proceeds
of the sales of the public lands are not wanted for ordinary
revenue, which will be abundantly supplied from the imposts,
the committee respectfully recommend that an appropriation
of them be made to some other purpose, for a limited time,
subject to be resumed in the contingency of war. Should such
an event unfortunately occur, the fund may be withdrawn from
its peaceful destination, and applied in aid of other means,
to the vigorous prosecution of the war, and, afterwards to the
payment of any debt which may be contracted in consequence of
its existence. And when peace shall be again restored, and the
debt of the new war shall have been extinguished, the fund may
be again appropriated to some fit object other than that of the
ordinary expenses of government. Thus may this great resource be
preserved and rendered subservient, in peace and in war, to the
common benefit of all the States composing the Union.
"The inquiry remains, what ought to be the specific application
of the fund under the restriction stated? After deducting the
ten per cent. proposed to be set apart for the new States, a
portion of the committee would have preferred that the residue
should be applied to the objects of internal improvement, and
colonization of the free blacks, under the direction of the
general government. But a majority of the committee believes it
better, as an alternative for the scheme of cession to the new
States, and as being most likely to give general satisfaction,
that the residue be divided among the twenty-four States,
according to their federal representative population; to be
applied to education, internal improvement, or colonization, or
to the redemption of any existing debt contracted for internal
improvements, as each State, judging for itself, shall deem
most conformable with its own interests and policy. Assuming
the annual product of the sales of the public lands to be three
millions of dollars, the table hereto annexed, marked C, shows
what each State would be entitled to receive, according to the
principle of division which has been stated. In order that the
propriety of the proposed appropriation should again, at a day
not very far distant, be brought under the review of Congress,
the committee would recommend that it be limited to a period
of five years, subject to the condition of war not breaking
out in the mean time. By an appropriation so restricted as to
time, each State will be enabled to estimate the probable extent
of its proportion, and to adapt its measures of education,
improvement, colonization, or extinction of existing debt,
accordingly.
"In conformity with the views and principles which the committee
have now submitted, they beg leave to report a bill, entitled
'An act to appropriate, for a limited time, the proceeds of the
sales of the public lands of the United States.'"
The impropriety of originating such a bill in the committee on
manufactures was so clear that acquiescence in it was impossible.
The chairman of the committee on public lands immediately moved its
reference to that committee; and although there was a majority for
it in the Senate, and for the bill as it came from the committee
on manufactures, yet the reference was immediately voted; and Mr.
Clay's report and bill sent to that committee, invested with general
authority over the whole subject. That committee, through its
chairman, Mr. King of Alabama, made a counter report, from which
some extracts are here given:
"The committee ventures to suggest that the view which the
committee on manufactures has taken of the federal domain, is
fundamentally erroneous; that it has misconceived the true
principles of national policy with respect to wild lands; and,
from this fundamental mistake, and radical misconception, have
resulted the great errors which pervade the whole structure of
their report and bill.
"The committee on manufactures seem to contemplate the federal
domain merely as an object of revenue, and to look for that
revenue solely from the receivers of the land offices; when
the science of political economy has ascertained such a fund
to be chiefly, if not exclusively, valuable under the aspect
of population and cultivation, and the eventual extraction of
revenue from the people in its customary modes of taxes and
imposts.
"The celebrated Edmund Burke is supposed to have expressed the
sum total of political wisdom on this subject, in his well-known
propositions to convert the forest lands of the British crown
into private property; and this committee, to spare themselves
further argument, and to extinguish at once a political fallacy
which ought not to have been broached in the nineteenth century,
will make a brief quotation from the speech of that eminent man.
"'The revenue to be derived from the sale of the forest lands
will not be so considerable as many have imagined; and I
conceive it would be unwise to screw it up to the utmost, or
even to suffer bidders to enhance, according to their eagerness,
the purchase of objects wherein the expense of that purchase
may weaken the capital to be employed in their cultivation. *
* * The principal revenue which I propose to draw from these
uncultivated wastes, is to spring from the improvement and
cultivation of the kingdom events infinitely more advantageous
to the revenues of the Crown, than the rents of the best landed
estates which it can hold. * * * * It is thus that I would
dispose of the unprofitable landed estates of the Crown--throw
them into the mass of private property--by which they will come,
through the course of circulation, and through the political
secretions of the state, into well-regulated revenue. * * * *
Thus would fall an expensive agency, with all the influence
which attends it.'
"This committee takes leave to say that the sentiments here
expressed by Mr. Burke are the inspirations of political
wisdom; that their truth and justice have been tested in all
ages and all countries, and particularly in our own age and
in our own country. The history of the public lands of the
United States furnishes the most instructive lessons of the
inutility of sales, the value of cultivation, and the fallacy
of large calculations. These lands were expected, at the time
they were acquired by the United States, to pay off the public
debt immediately, to support the government, and to furnish
large surplusses for distribution. Calculations for a thousand
millions were made upon them, and a charge of treachery was
raised against General Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury,
for his report in the year 1791, in which the fallacy of all
these visionary calculations was exposed, and the real value
of the lands soberly set down at an average of twenty cents
per acre. Yet, after an experiment of nearly fifty years,
it is found that the sales of the public lands, so far from
paying the public debt, have barely defrayed the expenses of
managing the lands; while the revenue derived from cultivation
has paid both principal and interest of the debts of two wars,
and supported the federal government in a style of expenditure
infinitely beyond the conceptions of those who established it.
The gross proceeds of the sales are but thirty-eight millions
of dollars, from which the large expenses of the system are to
be deducted; while the clear receipts from the customs, after
paying all expenses of collection, amount to $556,443,830. This
immense amount of revenue springs from the use of soil reduced
to private property. For the duties are derived from imported
goods; the goods are received in exchange for exports; and the
exports, with a small deduction for the products of the sea, are
the produce of the farm and the forest. This is a striking view,
but it is only one half of the picture. The other half must be
shown, and will display the cultivation of the soil, in its
immense exports, as giving birth to commerce and navigation, and
supplying employment to all the trades and professions connected
with these two grand branches of national industry; while the
business of selling the land is a meagre and barren operation,
auxiliary to no useful occupation, injurious to the young
States, by exhausting them of their currency, and extending
the patronage of the federal government in the complicated
machinery of the land office department. Such has been the
difference between the revenue received from the sales and from
the cultivation of the land; but no powers of cultivation can
carry out the difference, and show what it will be: for, while
the sale of the land is a single operation, and can be performed
but once, the extraction of revenue from its cultivation is
an annual and perpetual process, increasing in productiveness
through all time, with the increase of population, the
amelioration of soils, the improvement of the country, and the
application of science to the industrial pursuits.
"This committee have said that the bill reported by the
Committee on Manufactures, to divide the proceeds of the sales
of public lands among the several States for a limited time,
is a bill wholly inadmissible in principle, and essentially
erroneous in its details.
"They object to the principle of the bill, because it proposes
to change--and that most injuriously and fatally for the
new States, the character of their relation to the federal
government, on the subject of the public lands. That relation,
at present, imposes on the federal government the character of a
trustee, with the power and the duty of disposing of the public
lands in a liberal and equitable manner. The principle of the
bill proposes to substitute an individual State interest in the
lands, and would be perfectly equivalent to a division of the
lands among the States; for, the power of legislation being
left in their hands, with a direct interest in their sales, the
old and populous States would necessarily consider the lands as
their own, and govern their legislation accordingly. Sales would
be forbid or allowed; surveys stopped or advanced; prices raised
or lowered; donations given or denied; old French and Spanish
claims confirmed or rejected; settlers ousted; emigrations
stopped, precisely as it suited the interest of the old States;
and this interest, in every instance, would be precisely
opposite to the interest of the new States. In vain would some
just men wish to act equitably by these new States; their
generous efforts would expose them to attacks at home. A new
head of electioneering would be opened; candidates for Congress
would rack their imaginations, and exhaust their arithmetic, in
the invention and display of rival projects for the extraction
of gold from the new States; and he that would promise best for
promoting the emigration of dollars from the new States, and
preventing the emigration of people to them, would be considered
the best qualified for federal legislation. If this plan of
distribution had been in force heretofore, the price of the
public lands would not have been reduced, in 1819-'20, nor the
relief laws passed, which exonerated the new States from a debt
of near twenty millions of dollars. If adopted now, these States
may bid adieu to their sovereignty and independence! They will
become the feudatory vassals of the paramount States! Their
subjection and dependence will be without limit or remedy. The
five years mentioned in the bill had as well be fifty or five
hundred. The State that would surrender its sovereignty, for ten
per centum of its own money, would eclipse the folly of Esau,
and become a proverb in the annals of folly with those who have
sold their birthright for 'a mess of pottage.'"
After these general objections to the principle and policy of the
distribution project, the report of the Committee on Public Lands
went on to show its defects, in detail, and to exhibit the special
injuries to which it would subject the new States, in which the
public lands lay. It said:
"The details of the bill are pregnant with injustice and unsound
policy.
"1. The rule of distribution among the States makes no
distinction between those States which did or did not make
cessions of their vacant land to the federal government.
Massachusetts and Maine, which are now selling and enjoying
their vacant lands in their own right, and Connecticut, which
received a deed for two millions of acres from the federal
government, and sold them for her own benefit, are put upon
an equal footing with Virginia, which ceded the immense
domain which lies in the forks of the Ohio and Mississippi,
and Georgia, which ceded territory for two States. This is
manifestly unjust.
"2. The bill proposes benefits to some of the States, which
they cannot receive without dishonor, nor refuse without
pecuniary prejudice. Several States deny the power of the
federal government to appropriate the public moneys to objects
of internal improvement or to colonization. A refusal to accept
their dividends would subject such States to loss; to receive
them, would imply a sale of their constitutional principles for
so much money. Considerations connected with the harmony and
perpetuity of our confederacy should forbid any State to be
compelled to choose between such alternatives.
"3. The public lands, in great part, were granted to the federal
government to pay the debts of the Revolutionary War; it is
notorious that other objects of revenue, to wit, duties on
imported goods, have chiefly paid that debt. It would seem,
then, to be just to the donors of the land, after having taxed
them in other ways to pay the debt, that the land should go
in relief of their present taxes; and that, so long as any
revenue may be derived from them, it should go into the common
treasury, and diminish, by so much, the amount of their annual
contributions.
"4. The colonization of free people of color, on the western
coast of Africa, is a delicate question for Congress to touch.
It connects itself indissolubly with the slave question, and
cannot be agitated by the federal legislature, without rousing
and alarming the apprehensions of all the slaveholding States,
and lighting up the fires of the extinguished conflagration
which lately blazed in the Missouri question. The harmony of
the States, and the durability of this confederacy, interdict
the legislation of the federal legislature upon this subject.
The existence of slavery in the United States is local and
sectional. It is confined to the Southern and Middle States. If
it is an evil, it is an evil to them, and it is their business
to say so. If it is to be removed, it is their business to
remove it. Other States put an end to slavery, at their own
time, and in their own way, and without interference from
federal or State legislation, or organized societies. The rights
of equality demand, for the remaining States, the same freedom
of thought and immunity of action. Instead of assuming the
business of colonization, leave it to the slave-holding States
to do as they please; and leave them their resources to carry
into effect their resolves. Raise no more money from them than
the exigencies of the government require, and then they will
have the means, if they feel the inclination, to rid themselves
of a burden which it is theirs to bear and theirs to remove.
"5. The sum proposed for distribution, though nominally to
consist of the net proceeds of the sales of the public lands,
is, in reality, to consist of their gross proceeds. The term
net, as applied to revenue from land offices or custom-houses,
is quite different. In the latter, its signification corresponds
with the fact, and implies a deduction of all the expenses of
collection; in the former, it has no such implication, for the
expenses of the land system are defrayed by appropriations out
of the treasury. To make the whole sum received from the land
offices a fund for distribution, would be to devolve the heavy
expenses of the land system upon the custom-house revenue: in
other words, to take so much from the custom-house revenue to be
divided among the States. This would be no small item. According
to the principles of the account drawn up against the lands, it
would embrace--
"1. Expenses of the general land office.
"2. Appropriations for surveying.
"3. Expenses of six surveyor generals' offices.
"4. Expenses of forty-four land offices.
"5. Salaries of eighty-eight registers and receivers.
"6. Commissions on sales to registers and receivers.
"7. Allowance to receivers for depositing money.
"8. Interest on money paid for extinguishing Indian titles.
"9. Annuities to Indians.
"10. Future Indian treaties for extinguishing title.
"11. Expenses of annual removal of Indians.
"These items exceed a million of dollars. They are on the
increase, and will continue to grow at least until the one
hundred and thirteen million five hundred and seventy-seven
thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine acres of land within the
limits of the States and territories now covered by Indian
title shall be released from such title. The reduction of
these items, present and to come, from the proposed fund for
distribution, must certainly be made to avoid a contradiction
between the profession and the practice of the bill; and this
reduction might leave little or nothing for division among the
distributees. The gross proceeds of the land sales for the
last year were large; they exceeded three millions of dollars;
but they were equally large twelve years ago, and gave birth
to some extravagant calculations then, which vanished with a
sudden decline of the land revenue to less than one million. The
proceeds of 1819 were $3,274,422; those of 1823 were $916,523.
The excessive sales twelve years ago resulted from the excessive
issue of bank paper, while those of 1831 were produced by the
several relief laws passed by Congress. A detached year is no
evidence of the product of the sales; an average of a series
of years presents the only approximation to correctness; and
this average of the last ten years would be about one million
and three quarters. So that after all expenses are deducted,
with the five per centum now payable to the new States, and ten
per centum proposed by the bill, there may be nothing worth
dividing among the States; certainly nothing worth the alarm
and agitation which the assumption of the colonization question
must excite among the slaveholding States; nothing worth the
danger of compelling the old States which deny the power of
federal internal improvement, to choose between alternatives
which involve a sale of their principles on one side, or a loss
of their dividends on the other; certainly nothing worth the
injury to the new States, which must result from the conversion
of their territory into the private property of those who are to
have the power of legislation over it, and a direct interest in
using that power to degrade and impoverish them."
The two sets of reports were printed in extra numbers, and the
distribution bill largely debated in the Senate, and passed that
body: but it was arrested in the House of Representatives. A
motion to postpone it to a day beyond the session--equivalent to
rejection--prevailed by a small majority: and thus this first
attempt to make distribution of public property, was, for the time,
gotten rid of.