All debts contracted and engagements entered into before the adoption of
this Constitution shall be as valid against the United States under this
Constitution as under the Confederation.
For a correct understanding of the terms used in the third section of
the fourth article, above quoted, reference should be had to the history
of the times in which the Constitution was formed and adopted. It was
decided upon in convention on the 17th September, 1787, and by it
Congress was empowered "to dispose of," etc., "the territory or other
property belonging to the United States." The only territory then
belonging to the United States was that then recently ceded by the
several States, to wit: By New York in 1781, by Virginia in 1784, by
Massachusetts in 1785, and by South Carolina in August, 1787, only
the month before the formation of the Constitution. The cession from
Virginia contained the following provision:
That all the lands within the territory so ceded to the United States,
and not reserved for or appropriated to any of the before-mentioned
purposes or disposed of in bounties to the officers and soldiers of the
American Army, shall be considered a common fund for the use and benefit
of such of the United States as have become or shall become members of
the Confederation or Federal Alliance of the said States, Virginia
included, according to their usual respective proportions in the general
charge and expenditure, and shall be faithfully and _bona fide disposed
of_ for that purpose and for no other use or purpose whatsoever.
Here the object for which these lands are to be disposed of is clearly
set forth, and the power to dispose of them granted by the third section
of the fourth article of the Constitution clearly contemplates such
disposition only. If such be the fact, and in my mind there can be no
doubt of it, then you have again not only no implication in favor of the
contemplated grant, but the strongest authority against it. Furthermore,
this bill is in violation of the faith of the Government pledged in the
act of January 28, 1847. The nineteenth section of that act declares:
That for the payment of the stock which may be created under the
provisions of this act the sales of the public lands are hereby pledged;
and it is hereby made the duty of the Secretary of the Treasury to use
and apply all moneys which may be received into the Treasury for the
sales of the public lands after the 1st day of January, 1848, first,
to pay the interest on all stocks issued by virtue of this act, and,
secondly, to use the balance of said receipts, after paying the interest
aforesaid, in the purchase of said stocks at their market value, etc.
The debts then contracted have not been liquidated, and the language of
this section and the obligations of the United States under it are too
plain to need comment.
I have been unable to discover any distinction on constitutional grounds
or grounds of expediency between an appropriation of $10,000,000
directly from the money in the Treasury for the object contemplated and
the appropriation of lands presented for my sanction, and yet I can not
doubt that if the bill proposed $10,000,000 from the Treasury of the
United States for the support of the indigent insane in the several
States that the constitutional question involved in the act would have
attracted forcibly the attention of Congress.
I respectfully submit that in a constitutional point of view it is
wholly immaterial whether the appropriation be in money or in land.
The public domain is the common property of the Union just as much as
the surplus proceeds of that and of duties on imports remaining
unexpended in the Treasury. As such it has been pledged, is now pledged,
and may need to be so pledged again for public indebtedness.
As property it is distinguished from actual money chiefly in this
respect, that its profitable management sometimes requires that portions
of it be appropriated to local objects in the States wherein it may
happen to lie, as would be done by any prudent proprietor to enhance the
sale value of his private domain. All such grants of land are in fact
a disposal of it for value received, but they afford no precedent or
constitutional reason for giving away the public lands. Still less do
they give sanction to appropriations for objects which have not been
intrusted to the Federal Government, and therefore belong exclusively
to the States.
To assume that the public lands are applicable to ordinary State
objects, whether of public structures, police, charity, or expenses of
State administration, would be to disregard to the amount of the value
of the public lands all the limitations of the Constitution and confound
to that extent all distinctions between the rights and powers of the
States and those of the United States; for if the public lands may be
applied to the support of the poor, whether sane or insane, if the
disposal of them and their proceeds be not subject to the ordinary
limitations of the Constitution, then Congress possesses unqualified
power to provide for expenditures in the States by means of the public
lands, even to the degree of defraying the salaries of governors,
judges, and all other expenses of the government and internal
administration within the several States.
The conclusion from the general survey of the whole subject is to
my mind irresistible, and closes the question both of right and of
expediency so far as regards the principle of the appropriation proposed
in this bill. Would not the admission of such power in Congress to
dispose of the public domain work the practical abrogation of some
of the most important provisions of the Constitution?
If the systematic reservation of a definite portion of the public lands
(the sixteenth sections) in the States for the purposes of education and
occasional grants for similar purposes be cited as contradicting these
conclusions, the answer as it appears to me is obvious and satisfactory.
Such reservations and grants, besides being a part of the conditions on
which the proprietary right of the United States is maintained, along
with the eminent domain of a particular State, and by which the public
land remains free from taxation in the State in which it lies as long
as it remains the property of the United States, are the acts of a mere
landowner disposing of a small share of his property in a way to augment
the value of the residue and in this mode to encourage the early
occupation of it by the industrious and intelligent pioneer.
The great example of apparent donation of lands to the States likely
to be relied upon as sustaining the principles of this bill is the
relinquishment of swamp lands to the States in which they are situated,
but this also, like other grants already referred to, was based
expressly upon grounds clearly distinguishable in principle from any
which can be assumed for the bill herewith returned, viz, upon the
interest and duty of the proprietor. They were charged, and not without
reason, to be a nuisance to the inhabitants of the surrounding country.
The measure was predicated not only upon the ground of the disease
inflicted upon the people of the States, which the United States could
not justify as a just and honest proprietor, but also upon an express
limitation of the application of the proceeds in the first instance
to purposes of levees and drains, thus protecting the health of the
inhabitants and at the same time enhancing the value of the remaining
lands belonging to the General Government.
It is not to be denied that Congress, while administering the public
lands as a proprietor within the principle distinctly announced in my
annual message, may sometimes have failed to distinguish accurately
between objects which are and which are not within its constitutional
powers.
After the most careful examination I find but two examples in the acts
of Congress which furnish any precedent for the present bill, and those
examples will, in my opinion, serve rather as a warning than as an
inducement to tread in the same path.
The first is the act of March 3, 1819, granting a township of land to
the Connecticut asylum for the education of the deaf and dumb; the
second, that of April 5, 1826, making a similar grant of land to the
Kentucky asylum for teaching the deaf and dumb--the first more than
thirty years after the adoption of the Constitution and the second more
than a quarter of a century ago. These acts were unimportant as to the
amount appropriated, and so far as I can ascertain were passed on two
grounds: First, that the object was a charitable one, and, secondly,
that it was national. To say that it was a charitable object is only
to say that it was an object of expenditure proper for the competent
authority; but it no more tended to show that it was a proper object of
expenditure by the United States than is any other purely local object
appealing to the best sympathies of the human heart in any of the
States. And the suggestion that a school for the mental culture of the
deaf and dumb in Connecticut or Kentucky is a national object only
shows how loosely this expression has been used when the purpose was
to procure appropriations by Congress. It is not perceived how a school
of this character is otherwise national than is any establishment of
religious or moral instruction. All the pursuits of industry, everything
which promotes the material or intellectual well-being of the race,
every ear of corn or boll of cotton which grows, is national in the same
sense, for each one of these things goes to swell the aggregate of
national prosperity and happiness of the United States; but it confounds
all meaning of language to say that these things are "national," as
equivalent to "Federal," so as to come within any of the classes of
appropriation for which Congress is authorized by the Constitution
to legislate.
It is a marked point of the history of the Constitution that when it was
proposed to empower Congress to establish a university the proposition
was confined to the District intended for the future seat of Government
of the United States, and that even that proposed clause was omitted in
consideration of the exclusive powers conferred on Congress to legislate
for that District. Could a more decisive indication of the true
construction and the spirit of the Constitution in regard to all matters
of this nature have been given? It proves that such objects were
considered by the Convention as appertaining to local legislation only;
that they were not comprehended, either expressly or by implication,
in the grant of general power to Congress, and that consequently they
remained with the several States.
The general result at which I have arrived is the necessary consequence
of those views of the relative rights, powers, and duties of the States
and of the Federal Government which I have long entertained and often
expressed and in reference to which my convictions do but increase in
force with time and experience.
I have thus discharged the unwelcome duty of respectfully stating my
objections to this bill, with which I cheerfully submit the whole
subject to the wisdom of Congress.