THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN
The domain of Louis XIV in the midst of America (between the Great Lakes
and the gulf, the Alleghanies and the Rockies) embraced over seven hundred
and fifty million acres. One-half of it, roughly, was covered with giant
forests inhabited by fur-bearing animals with opulence upon their backs.
One-half was covered with vegetation, varying from the luxuriant prairie
grass to the sage-brush of the shadeless plains, plains roamed by beasts
clothed with valuable robes. Two-thirds of this domain was arable, with
only the irrigation of the clouds, and all of it was destined some day to
be cultivated, the clouds having the assistance of man-made irrigation or
dry farming.
The portion east of the Mississippi (about three hundred million acres)
was at one time estimated to be worth not more, politically and
physically, than the island of Guadeloupe-an island represented by a pin-
head on an ordinary map-producing forty thousand tons of sugar and about
two million pounds each of coffee and cocoa.
Even the people of the Atlantic States were accused by westerners as late
as 1786 of threatening secession and of being as ignorant of the trans-
Alleghany country as Great Britain had been of America, and as
inconsiderate. The western half, urged by the minister of Louis XV upon
Spain after sixty or seventy millions of francs had been spent fruitlessly
upon it by France, recovered by Napoleon and sold to the United States for
one-fourth of the amount that was expended a century later for the
celebration of the purchase, was regarded at the time of the purchase,
even by many seacoast Americans, as useless, except as it secured control
of the mouth of the Mississippi. An important New York paper said
editorially:
"... As to the unbounded region west of the Mississippi, it is, with the
exception of a very few settlements of Spaniards and Frenchmen bordering
on the banks of the river, a wilderness through which wander numerous
tribes of Indians. And when we consider the present extent of the United
States, and that not one-sixteenth part of its territory is yet under
occupation, the advantage of the acquisition, as it relates to actual
settlement, appears too distant and remote to strike the mind of a sober
politician with much force. This, therefore, can only rest in speculation
for many years, if not centuries to come, and consequently will not
perhaps be allowed very great weight in the account by the majority of
readers. But it may be added, that should our own citizens, more
enterprizing than wise, become desirous of settling this country, and
emigrate thither, it must not only be attended with all the injuries of a
too widely dispersed population, but, by adding to the great weight of the
western part of our territory, must hasten the dismemberment of a large
portion of our country, or a dissolution of the government. On the whole,
we think it may with candor be said, that whether the possession at this
time of any territory west of the river Mississippi will be advantageous,
is at best extremely problematical. For ourselves, we are very much
inclined to the opinion that, after all, it is the Island of N. Orleans by
which the command of a free navigation of the Mississippi is secured, that
gives to this interesting cession its greatest value, and will render it
in every view of immense benefit to our country. By this cession we
hereafter shall hold within our own grasp, what we have heretofore enjoyed
only by the uncertain tenure of a treaty, which might be broken at the
pleasure of another, and (governed as we now are) with perfect impunity.
Provided therefore we have not purchased it too dear, there is all the
reason for exultation which the friends of the administration display, and
which all Americans may be allowed to feel." [Footnote: York Herald, July
6, 1803.]
I quote this to show how far from appreciating France's generosity the
easterners, and especially the anti-Jeffersonian Federalists in America,
were at that time. Other and less conscientious newspapers put the
prodigality of Jefferson's commissioners more graphically:
"Fifteen millions of dollars! they would exclaim. The sale of a wilderness
has not usually commanded a price so high. Ferdinand Gorges received but
twelve hundred and fifty pounds sterling for the Province of Maine.
William Penn gave for the wilderness that now bears his name but a trifle
over five thousand pounds. Fifteen millions of dollars! A breath will
suffice to pronounce the words. A few strokes of the pen will express the
sum on paper. But not one man in a thousand has any conception of the
magnitude of the amount. Weigh it and there will be four hundred and
thirty-three tons of solid silver. Load it into wagons, and there will be
eight hundred and sixty-six of them. Place the wagons in a line, giving
two rods to each, and they will cover a distance of five and one-third
miles. Hire a laborer to shovel it into the carts, and, though he load
sixteen each day, he will not finish the work in two months. Stack it up
dollar on dollar, and supposing nine to make an inch, the pile will be
more than three miles high. It would load twenty-five sloops; it would pay
an army of twenty-five thousand men forty shillings a week each for
twenty-five years; it would, divided among the population of the country,
give three dollars for each man, woman, and child.... Invest the principal
as school fund, and the interest will support, forever, eighteen hundred
free schools, all owning fifty scholars, and five hundred dollars to each
school." [Footnote: McMaster, "History of the People of the United
States," 2:630.]
Napoleon had, indeed, made a good bargain for France, selling a
wilderness, which at best he could not well have kept long, for a price
which all the specie currency in the poor young republic would not be
adequate to meet.
It was of this domain (a part of the claim of La Salle for Louis XIV in
1682, divided between England and Spain in 1763, made one again in 1803 by
the will of Napoleon, under the control of the United States, added to by
the purchase of Florida from Spain and the acquisition of Texas, filling
all the Great Valley)--it was of this valley that, as late as the early
fifties, a member of Congress (afterward to become vice-president of the
United States, then President), Andrew Johnson, although an earnest
advocate of a liberal land policy, predicted that it would take "seven
hundred years to dispose of the public lands at the rate we have been
disposing of them." [Footnote: Speech on the Homestead bill, April 29,
1852.] Seven hundred years--as long as from the founding of Charlemagne's
new empire of the west to the discovery of the coasts of a still newer
empire of the west.
But in two hundred years from the day that La Salle so miserably perished
on the plains of Texas, in exactly one hundred years from the time when,
under the epoch-making "Ordinance of the Northwest" (as it has been
called), the parcelling of the land began, and in less than half a century
from the year when Andrew Johnson's seven-hundred-year prophecy began to
run, practically the entire domain had been surveyed and sold or given by
the nation to private or municipal or corporate possession. It was the
24th of July, 1687, that La Salle died; it was July 27, 1787, that the
first great sale of a fragment of the domain was made; and it was in 1887,
approximately, that all the humanly available domain was occupied by at
least two persons to a square mile; for in 1890 it was officially declared
by the government of the United States that it had no frontier. Not that
the land was all sold, but all that was immediately valuable.
As soon as the War of Independence was over, and even during the struggle,
the territories of several of the Atlantic States (or colonies) expanded
to the Mississippi. There was a quadrilateral, trans-Alleghany
Massachusetts, as indifferent to natural boundaries as a "state of mind"
(which Massachusetts has often been defined to be), respectful only of
imaginary lines of latitude and the Mississippi River, the Spanish border.
Little Connecticut multiplied its latitude by degrees of longitude till it
reached in a thin but rich slice from Pennsylvania also to the
Mississippi. Virginia disputed these mountain-to-river claims of her New
England sisters, but held unquestioned still larger territories to the
north and south--and so on from the sources of the river to Florida, South
Carolina even claiming a strip a few miles wide and four hundred long.
There was almost a duplication of the Atlantic front on the Mississippi
River. These statements will not interest those who can have no particular
acquaintance with the personalities of those several commonwealths, quite
as marked as are those of Normandy and Brittany; but even without this
knowledge it is possible to appreciate the magnanimity and the wisdom
which prompted those States, many with large and rich claims, to surrender
all to the central government, the Continental Congress, for the benefit
of all the States, landful and landless alike. [Footnote: LANDS CEDED BY
THE STATES TO THE UNITED STATES
NORTHWEST OF THE OHIO RIVER SQUARE MILES
Ohio......................................................... 39,964
Indiana.......................................................33,809
Illinois..................................................... 55,414
Michigan......................................................56,451
Wisconsin.................................................... 53,924
Minnesota, east of the Mississippi River......................26,000
-------
265,562
or 169,959,680 acres.
Virginia claimed this entire region. New York claimed an indefinite
amount. Connecticut claimed about 25,600,000 acres and ceded all but
3,300,000. Massachusetts claimed about 34,560,000 acres.
SOUTH OF KENTUCKY South Carolina ceded about 3,136,000 acres. North
Carolina ceded (nominally) 29,184,000 acres. Georgia ceded 56,689,920
acres.--Payson J. Treat, "The National Land System, 1785-1820."]
So it was that even before the National Government was organized under a
federal constitution in 1789, the land beyond the western boundaries of
the several colonies, out as far as the Mississippi, was held for the good
of all. And later the same policy followed the expansion to the Rockies
and beyond. Can one imagine a greater or more fateful task than confronted
this young, inexperienced republic--to have the disposal of a billion
acres of timber lands, grazing lands, farm lands, ore lands, oil lands,
coal lands, arid lands, and swamp lands for the good not only of the first
comers and of those then living in the Atlantic States but also of the
millions that should inhabit all that country in future generations as
well--for the good of all of all time?
This one-time bed of the Paleozoic sea between Archaean shores, raised in
time above the ocean and enriched of the mountains that through millions
of years were gradually to be worn down by the natural forces of the
valley, and finally, as we have seen, opened by the French as a new-
created world to be peopled by the old world, then overflowing its brim,
became all of it in the space of a single lifetime the property of a few
million human beings, their heirs, and assigns forever. The "men of
always" [Footnote: The Iroquois, according to Châteaubriand, called
themselves Ongoueonoue, the "men of always," signifying that they were a
race eternal, immortal, not to fade away.--"Travels in America," 2:93.]
had actually come and were to divide and distribute among themselves the
stores of millions of years as if reserved for them from the foundation of
the world.
When Deucalion and Pyrrha went forth to repeople the world after a flood,
they were told by the oracle to cast over their shoulders the bones of
their mother. These they rightly interpreted, according to the myth, to be
the stones of the earth, and so the valleys of the ancient world became
populous. Peopling _per se_ was not, however, the object or the first
object of the act under which the government, after the manner of
Deucalion, went across this new-world valley, casting in stoneless areas
clods of earth and tufts of virgin sod before it and behind it. It was not
people that the government wanted. Indeed, it was afraid of people. What
it desired, the "common good," was the immediate payment of the debt
incurred in the War of Independence, and the only resource was land. The
land that the French had discovered, whose nominal transfer to England
Choiseul had said he had made to destroy England's power in America, was
now to meet a portion at least of the expense of the brave struggle for
the winning of independence. France's practically untouched wilderness was
now to supplement the succor of French ships and arms and sympathy in the
firm founding of the new nation. The acres that France under other
fortunes might have divided among her own descendants, children of the
west, she gave to a happier destiny than La Salle could have desired in
his wildest dreams as he traversed the streams that watered those first-
parcelled fields.
So, incidentally, the French pioneers before the fact and the first
settlers of the west after the fact had their part, witting or unwitting,
willing or unwilling, written or unwritten, along with George Rogers Clark
and his men, who seized the British forts in that territory during the
Revolution (and thus gave standing to the claim for its transfer), and
along with the men of the Atlantic colonies who sacrificed their fortunes
and their lives--these all had their part in the inauguration of this
experiment in self-government. There was no higher, more far-reaching
"common good" than this to which acres prepared from Paleozoic days and
consecrated of unselfish adventure could be devoted.
I cannot find anywhere in our history an appreciation of this particular
contribution to the foundation of free institutions in America. But it is
one that should be recorded and remembered along with the more tangible
contributions. Every perilous journey of the French across that territory
for which France got not a franc, every purchase which Scotch-Irish or New
England or other settlers went out to conquer, was a march or a skirmish
in the War of Independence, for all was turned to the confirming of the
fruits of victory of the American Revolution.
Those who have written of the land policy which prescribed the conditions
of sale have divided its history roughly into two periods: the first, from
1783 to 1840, in which the fiscal considerations of the general government
were dominant; and the second, from 1840 to the present time, when the
social conditions, either within the territory itself or in the nation at
large, were given first consideration.
The statistical story of the first period, under that accurate
classification, would be about as interesting as a bulletin of real-estate
transactions in Chicago would be to a professor of paleontology in the
Sorbonne. It is only when those sales are considered teleologically (as
the philosophers would say) that they can seem absorbingly vital to others
than economists or to the fortunate heirs of some of the purchasers. I am
aware (let me say parenthetically) that customs duties might have a
somewhat like interpretation under a higher imaginative power; but this
possibility does not lessen to me the singularly spiritual character of
this series of transactions-of land sales, or transmutations of lands, on
the one hand, into the maintenance of the fabric of a government by the
people, and, on the other, into the ruggedest, hardiest species of men and
women the world has known in its new hemisphere.
Land-offices, as I have seen them described in the newspapers of the early
part of the nineteenth century, gave no outward suggestion of being places
of miracles--sacred places. They were noisy, dirty, ephemeral tabernacles
of canvas or of boards in the wilderness, carried westward till the day of
permanent temples should come. But like the Ark of the Covenant in the
history of Israel, they blessed those in whose fields they rested on the
way, even as the field and household of Obed-edom the Gittite were blessed
by the presence of the ark on its way up to Jerusalem in the days of
David.
The initial policy of the government was to sell in as great tracts as
possible (the very reverse of the present conserving, anti-monopolistic
policy, as we shall see). The first sale (1787) was of nearly a million
acres, for which an average of two-thirds of a dollar per acre in
securities worth nine or ten cents was received. This sale, whatever may
be said for it as a part of a fiscal policy, was significant not only in
opening up a great tract (one thousand three hundred square miles) but in
the fact that the purchase and holding were conditioned by certain
provisions of a precious ordinance--the last of importance of the old
Continental Congress-only less important than the Constitution, which it
preceded by two years--the "basis of law and politics" in the northwest.
It, moreover, gave precedent for a policy of territorial control by the
central government that has been effective even to the present time.
Daniel Webster said of it: "I doubt whether any single law of any
lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct,
marked, and lasting character." [Footnote: First Speech on Foot's
Resolution in "Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster," national edition,
5:263.] It forbade slavery and had in this provision an important
influence on the history of the valley. But there was another far-reaching
and a positive provision which must be of special interest to the people
of France even to-day. Its preamble lies in this memorable passage:
"Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and
the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever
be encouraged." As to the specific means of encouraging religion,
morality, and knowledge, and so, ultimately, of promoting good government
and the happiness of mankind, it was proposed by the representative of the
Ohio Company, which stood ready to purchase a million acres, that the
government should give support both to education and religion, as was done
in New England, and as follows: one lot in each township (that is, a
section one mile square in every tract six miles square) to be reserved
for the common schools, another for the support of the ministry, and four
whole townships, in the whole tract, for the maintenance of a university.
Congress thought this too liberal, but finally, under the stress of need
of revenue which the high-minded, reverend lobbyist, Reverend Menasseh
Cutler, was prepared through his company to furnish, acceded, with a
reduction only of the proposed appropriation to the university. The
provision specifically was: "Lot number sixteen to be given perpetually by
Congress to the maintenance of schools, and lot number twenty-nine to the
purpose of religion in the said townships; two townships near the center
and of good land to be also given by Congress for the support of a
literary institution, to be applied to the intended object by the
legislature of the State."
A second great tract was sold the same year under similar conditions. This
was the last occasion on which provision for the support of religion was
made by the national Congress, and what came of this particular grant I
have not followed beyond the statement below. [Footnote: In 1828 Ohio
petitioned for permission to sell the lands reserved for religious
purposes, and in 1833 this was granted. The proceeds of the sales were to
be invested and used for the support of religion, under the direction of
the legislature within the townships in which the reserves were located.--
Payson J. Treat, "The National Land System, 1785-1820."]
But the "section-sixteen" allotment for the aid of public schools
continued as a feature of all future grants within the Northwest
Territory, and also in all the new States of the southwestern and trans-
Mississippi territory erected prior to 1850, from which time forward two
sections in each township (sixteen and thirty-six) were granted for school
purposes, besides specific grants for higher education amounting to over a
million acres.
A recent student [Footnote: Joseph Shafer, "The Origin of the System of
Land Grants for Education." Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No.
63. History Series, Vol. i, No. i, August, 1902.] of this subject has
traced this policy of public aid to education back through New England,
where colonies, in grants to companies or townships, made specific
stipulations and reservations for the support of schools and the ministry
and where townships voluntarily often made like disposition of surplus
wild lands; and through New England to England of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, where, the monasteries and other religious
foundations being destroyed and the schools depending upon them perishing,
schools were endowed by the kings, sometimes out of sequestered church
lands, or were established by towns and counties, in addition to those
chartered under private patronage, so strong was the new educational
movement of the time.
In the Mississippi Valley, then, or the greater part of it--whatever the
historical origin of the provisions may be-from one-thirty-sixth to one-
eighteenth of the public land has been set apart to the education of
generation after generation till the end of the republic--or as Americans
would be disposed to put it in synonymous phrase, "till the end of time."
Acres vary in size, one of our eminent horticulturists has reminded us,
measured in terms of productivity. And the gifts to the various townships
have been by no means of the same size, measured in terms of revenue for
school purposes. "Number sixteen" may sometimes have fallen in shallow
soil or on stony ground and "thirty-six" in swamp or alkali land. The
lottery of nature is as hard-hearted as the lotteries of human devising;
but the general provision has put an obligation upon the other thirty-five
or thirty-four sections in every township that I suppose is seldom evaded.
The child's acres are practically never, I suspect, less valuable than the
richest and largest of those in the township about it, for the reason that
the difference is made good by the local taxpayer. The child's acre is, as
a rule, then, as large as the largest, the most productive acre. And
roughly there are fifty thousand of those little plots in that domain--
fifty thousand sections a mile square, thirty-two million acres reserved
from the beginning of time, theoretically at least, to the end of time. As
a matter of fact, they are not to be distinguished objectively from other
acres now; they are to be distinguished only subjectively, that is, as one
thinks of what is grown year by year in the schools, to which their
proceeds, if not their products, are given.
I quoted above an estimate made in 1803 of what might have been done with
the fifteen million dollars, paid to the French for Louisiana. One
alternative suggested was the permanent endowment of eighteen hundred free
schools, allowing five hundred dollars a year per school and accommodating
ninety thousand pupils. The public-school allotment for that part of the
valley alone is fifteen million acres. Even at two dollars an acre (a very
low estimate), the endowment is twice the total amount paid for Louisiana
--and I am estimating this school acreage at but one thirty-sixth instead
of one-eighteenth of the total acreage. Therefore, France may, in a sense,
be said to have given these acres to the support of the "children of
always"--since these plots alone have probably yielded many times the
purchase price of the entire territory.
To be sure, these white plots, as I would have them marked on a map of the
valley, have in many States been sold and occupied as the other plots,
with only this distinction, that the proceeds are inviolably set apart to
this sacred use, as certain parts of animals were, under Mosaic law,
reserved for public sacrifice. In one trans-Mississippi State, Iowa, for
example, of a total grant of 1,013,614.21 acres [Footnote: Iowa,
1,013,614.21 acres from section 16 and 535,473.76 acres by congressional
grant in 1841.] (less what the boundary rivers, the Mississippi and the
Missouri, had carried away in their voracious encroachments, and plus what
other natural agents had added), only 200 acres remained unsold in 1911.
As we view the policy from the year 1903 and from the midst of a populous
valley, in which land values have risen from one dollar and twenty-five
cents per acre to a hundred or two hundred dollars in most fertile farm
tracts, and to thousands in urban centres, we can but regret that these
lands themselves had not been held inviolate, and can but wish that only
their rentals had been devoted to the high uses to which the nation and
State had consecrated these lands. This policy would have put in the heart
of every township a common field whose rental would have grown with the
development of the country. It would have furnished fruitful data for
comparison between two systems of land tenure. And it would have kept ever
visibly, tangibly before the people their heritage and their obligation.
As it is, one has to use the greatest imagination in translating the
figures in a State treasurer's or county supervisor's report, back into
the little plots that gathered into the soil of their acres the noblest
purposes that ever animated a nation--these spots where one generation
made its unselfish prayer and sacrifice for the next.
That the purpose still exists, despite the passing of the tangible symbol,
and that the prayer is still made in every township of that territory,
where even a few children live, is evidenced by the fact that every two
miles north and south, east and west of settled region there stands a
schoolhouse. I shall speak later of this wide-spread provision, not only
for universal elementary education but also for secondary and higher
education, ordained of the people and for the people, to be paid for by
the people out of their common treasury. But attention must here be
called, in passing, to the fact that the parcelling of the domain of Louis
XIV in the new world fixed irrevocably the public school in the national
consciousness and purpose and made it the foundation of a purely
democratic social system and the nourisher of a more highly efficient
democratic political system.
On the Atlantic side of the mountains there was bitter controversy between
those who held that education was necessary for the preservation of free
institutions and those who held that free education increased taxation
unduly; between those who desired and those who regretted the breaking
down of social barriers which both claimed would ensue as a result of such
education; between those who regarded education as a natural right and
those who considered taxation for such a purpose a violation of the rights
of the individual; between those who saw in it a panacea for poverty and
distress and those who urged that it would not benefit the masses; and,
finally, between those of one sect and race and those of another. But in
the trans-Alleghany country north of the Ohio, and in all the territory
west of the Mississippi (practically coterminous, let me again remind you,
with that region where the French were pioneers within the present bounds
of the United States) there was practically no dissension, though the
provision was meagre at the start. The public school had no more of the
atmosphere or character of a charity, a "pauper" school than the highway
provided for out of the same grant, where rich and poor met in absolute
equality of right and opportunity. It became the pride of a people, the
expression of the people's ideal, the corner-stone of the people's hope. I
suppose that three-fourths of the children of the territory whose ranges
have been surveyed by the magic chains forged of this first great
parcelling ordinance have had the tuition of the public schools--future
Presidents of the United States, justices, railroad and university
presidents, farmers, artisans, artists, and poets alike.
So while it was desire for revenue that prompted the early sales of the
public domain in the Mississippi Valley, the nation got in return not only
means to help pay its Revolution debt, but, incidentally, settlements of
highly individualistic, self-dependent, and interdependent pioneers,
gathered about one highly paternalistic or maternalistic institution--the
public school. The credit for this has gone to New England and New York,
but the "white acres" came of the territory and the riches of Nouvelle
France.
You will not wish to follow in detail the ministrations of the priests of
the land-offices and the surveys of the men of the magic chains, for it is
a long and tedious story that would fill thousands of pages, and in the
end only obscure the real significance of the movement. Here is a summary
of allotments made up to 1904 of all the public domain, that of the
Mississippi Valley being somewhat more than half. [Footnote: See Report of
the Public Lands Commission, Washington, 1905.]
_Private land claims_, donations etc. (the
first of the latter being made to the early French
settlers).............................................(ACRES) 33,400,000
_Wagon-road, canal, and river_ improvement
grants (provision for the narrow strips of common
that intersect each other at every mile of the
settled parts of the valley).................................. 9,700,000
_Railroad grants_ for the subsidizing of
the private building of railways chiefly up
and down and across the valley.............................. 117,600,000
_Swamp-land grants_ (being tracts of wet
or overflowed lands given to the various States
for reclamation)............................................. 65,700,000
_School grants to States_ (those which we
have been considering)....................................... 69,000,000
_Other grants to States_ (largely for
educational purposes)........................................ 20,600,000
_Military and naval land warrants_........................... 61,000,000
_Scrip_ issued for various purposes (chiefly
in view of service to the government)......................... 9,300,000
_Allotment to individual Indians_............................ 15,100,000
_Mineral lands_ (under special entries)....................... 1,700,000
_Homestead entries_ (that is, by settlers
taking claims under homestead acts of which I
shall speak later)........................................... 96,500,000
_Timber-culture entries_ (final).............................. 9,700,000
_Timber and stone entries_.................................... 7,600,000
_Cash entries_, including entries under the
preemption and other acts................................... 276,600,000
_Reservoir rights of way_....................................... 300,000
_Forest reserves_ (tracts of forest land
permanently reserved from sale).............................. 57,900,000
For national reclaiming purposes............................. 39,911,000
Reserved for public purposes (public buildings,
forts, etc.).................................................. 6,700,000
_Indian reservations_........................................ 73,000,000
_Entries pending_............................................ 39,500,000
_Unappropriated public land_................................ 841,872,377
_Total (including Alaska)_................................ 1,852,683,377
By June 30, 1912, homestead entries had increased to 127,800,000 acres;
timber and stone entries to 13,060,000 acres; forest reserves to
187,400,000 acres, and there was left 682,984,762 acres, more than half of
which was in Alaska; that is, of the billion and a half of acres,
exclusive of Alaska, over a billion have been sold to private uses,
granted in aid of private enterprises, used for public improvements,
appropriated forever to public uses, or given to the support of education.
The controlling motive at the start, I repeat, was revenue. But gradually
the people, seeing great tracts of land held unimproved for speculation,
seeing the domain of free land narrowing while the pressure of want was
beginning to make itself felt east of the mountains, as in Europe, and
feeling concerned, as some men of vision did, at the passing of the
world's great opportunity for the practical realization of man's natural
right to the land without disturbing the system in force in older settled
communities, the people strove to effect the subordination of revenue to
the social good of the frontier and the country at large. By the middle of
the century this many-motived feeling had expression in a party platform;
that "the public lands-belong to the people and should not be sold to
individuals nor granted to corporations, but should be held as a sacred
trust for the benefit of the people and should be granted in limited
quantities, free of cost, to landless settlers." [Footnote: Free-Soil
Democratic Platform, 1892, p. 12.]
It was ten years before this doctrine became embodied in law over the
signature of Abraham Lincoln, but the agitation for its enactment had been
active for thirty years, beginning with the cry of a poor printer in New
York City, [Footnote: George Henry Evans.] taught of French doctrine, who
in season and out kept asserting the equal right of man to land. It was as
a voice in the wilderness proclaiming a plan of salvation to the already
congested areas on the seashore and, incidentally, a means of making the
wilderness blossom. He was not then a disciple of Fourier (as many of his
associates were and he himself had been originally), threatening vested
privileges of rights; he did not preach a communistic division of
property; he was an individualistic idealist and saw in the opening of
this wild, unoccupied land, not to speculators or to alien purchasers, but
to actual settlers permitted to pre-empt in quarter-sections (one hundred
and sixty acres) and forbidden to alienate it, a means of social
regeneration that would not disturb the titles to property already granted
to individuals by the State, and yet would bless all the property-less,
for there was enough free land for every landless man who wanted it, and
would be for decades if not for centuries beyond their lives, or so he
thought. [Footnote: See J. R. Commons, "Documentary History of American
Industrial Society," VII:287-349.]
A German economist has expressed the view that it was only this movement,
so inaugurated, that prevented America from going into socialism. One of
our foremost economists in America, in discussing this very subject,
begins with these observations:
"The French are a nation of philosophers. Starting with the theory of the
rights of man, they build up a logical system, then a revolution, and the
theory goes into practice. Next a coup d'état and an emperor.
"The English are a nation without too much philosophy or logic. They piece
out their constitution at the spot where it becomes tight.... They are
practical ... unlogical.
"The Americans are French in their logic and English in their use of
logic. They announce the universal rights of man and then enact into law
enough to augment the rights of property."
The homestead law owed its origin to the doctrine of natural rights, whose
transcendental glory faded often into the light of common day during the
discussions but still enhaloes a very practical and matter-of-fact
statute. Economic reasons, both of eastern and western motive, were
gathered under the banner of its idealism, till finally it came to be an
ensign not only of free soil for the landless but of free soil for the
slaves. The "homestead" movement put an end to slavery, even if within a
half century it has exhausted in its generosity the nation's domain of
arable land. The voice in the wilderness cried for a legalized natural
right that would not disturb vested rights, for an individualism based on
private property given without cost, for equality by a limitation of that
property to one hundred and sixty acres, and finally for the
inalienability from sale or mortgage of that little plot of earth. Thirty
years later the natural right to unoccupied land was recognized,
individualistic society was strengthened by the great increase in the
number of property holders, and inalienability was recognized by the
States; but the failure to reserve the free lands to such actual settlers
alone and to limit the amount of the holding left the way open for
railroad grants, which alone have in two generations exceeded the
homestead entries, and for the amassing of great stretches by a few.
The logic of France, speaking through the voice of that leader and other
men such as Horace Greeley, led the later exodus as certainly as her
pioneers opened the way for the first American settlers. And though the
logic was applied in English fashion, yet it had a notable part in making,
as I have just said, the free soil of the Mississippi Valley contribute to
the freeing of a whole people in slavery, inside and outside of the
valley. That logic learned in France would doubtless have accomplished a
conclusion needing less patching and opportunistic repair if the immediate
interests of those of the frontiers, those who wanted immediate settlement
and development, had not disturbed one of the premises. At any rate, a
great and perhaps the last opportunity to carry such doctrines to their
conclusions without overturning all social and industrial institutions has
gone by. A half-billion acres of inalienable farms, all of the same size,
trespassing upon no ancient rights, interspersed with the white blocks
held for the education of the children of that free soil, might have
furnished an example for all time to be followed or shunned-if, indeed,
all acres had been born of the primeval sea and glaciers not only free but
equal in size. As it was, some acres were born large and some small, some
fruitful and some barren, some with gold in their mouths and some with
only the taste of alkali; and only an infinite wisdom could have adjusted
them to the unequal capacities of that army of land lackers who declared
themselves free and equal, and who, with free-soil banners, advanced to
the territory where the squatters became sovereigns and homesteads became
castles.
President Andrew Johnson (who as a congressman, in 1852, made the seven-
hundred-year prophecy) estimated that a homestead (of one hundred and
sixty acres) would increase every homesteader's purchasing ability by one
hundred dollars a year; and if (he argued) the government enacted a 30-
per-cent duty it would be reimbursed in seven years in the amount of two
hundred and ten dollars, or ten dollars more than the cost of the
homestead. By such reckoning he reached the conclusion that the
homesteaders would defray the expenses of the government for a period of
four thousand three hundred and ninety-two years-each homesteader of the
nine millions contributing indirectly twenty-four thousand four hundred
dollars in seven hundred years and all of them two hundred and nineteen
billion six hundred million dollars--a scheme as ingenious, says one, as
Fourier's "scheme to pay off the national debt of France with a setting
hen." [Footnote: Speech on the bill to encourage agriculture, July 25,
1850. Speeches on the homestead bill, April 29, 1852, and May 20, 1858.]
There are approximately nine million homes (or homes, tenements, and
flats) in that domain to-day, and it is quite easily demonstrable that
they not only contribute to the support of government, directly and
indirectly, far more than the seemingly fantastic estimates of Andrew
Johnson suggested but also give to the world a surplus of product
undreamed of even in 1850. It is hardly likely that any system of
parcelling would have more rapidly developed this vast domain. There is a
question as to whether some more logical, conserving, long-viewed policy
might not have been devised for the "common good" of the generations that
are yet to occupy that valley with the generation that is there and the
three or four generations that have already gone. It is that "common good"
that is now engaging the thought of our foremost economists, natural
scientists, and public men. Of that I shall speak later.
Here we celebrate merely the fact that there are fifty or sixty million
geographical descendants of France living in the midst of the valley at
the mouth of whose river La Salle took immediate possession for Louis XIV,
but prophetic possession for all the peoples that might in any time find
dwelling there.