Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776-1936 (1942).
CHAPTER VI
LAND FOR THE LANDLESSBy the 1840's the West was beginning to sense its power and to look askance upon the scanty pittance that was being doled out so grudgingly by Congress. The most rapidly growing part of the country was being frightfully neglected, while Congress -- so the West charged -- granted millions of dollars for splendid ships upon the Atlantic Coast, and for commerce.1 In fact, the amount of outlay on the Delaware breakwater alone exceeded "all appropriations of every sort" for "intercommunication for commercial purposes" in the "whole immense region included between the lakes and the Gulf of Mexico and stretching from the Appalachian range to the Rocky Mountains." Eastern manufacturers and merchants, so the Westerners claimed, exerted an influence out of all proportion to their relative wealth and numbers; they acted in "masses, and their appearance" was "in that way, much more imposing, and their real power greatly strengthened." The western agricultural section, they maintained, was being treated "as a foreign territory"; and Congress seemed "hardly to have been aware that this far country had any interests to foster."2
Notwithstanding western feelings, this favoritism toward the East was already disappearing. With millions of dollars from England and the East invested in western lands and improvements, banking interests were becoming deeply concerned about the welfare of the West. The exploiters of the West, many of whom had suffered much in the Panic, were now ready to aid the West, doubtless hoping thereby to increase the returns from their own investments. Even that spokesman of New England, Daniel Webster, who had personally invested money in western lands, began to express a sympathy for that section. In the 1840's considerable wealth from Boston was being invested in Lake Superior mineral lands. Other eastern interests were sinking capital into the forest lands of Michigan, Wisconsin and the Southwest. The returns from investments in canals and railroads would to a very large extent be determined by the prosperity of the regions which these improvements served. The East began to realize that as long as the representative principle continued in operation, the Mississippi River Valley would hold the dominant place in the Republic.
When the Preemption Act of 1841 failed to satisfy the West, the East became fearful lest this triumph be turned into another victory march for the West. This fear is evident in the concerted effort among the Whigs to reenact their cherished distribution plan which, after being skilfully pushed through Congress by Henry Clay in 1841, had been automatically repealed in 1842 when the tariff was raised above the 20 per cent level.
Horace Greeley, editor of the New Yorkk Tribune, headed the Whig press campaign in the East to make the land question an important issue in the election of 1844. His editorial on July 9, 1842, succinctly stated the eastern view that distribution was "a measure of strict justice to the states, of relief to the impoverished and bankrupt, and of encouragement to education and internal improvement." It was essential that distribution should be secured at once, "since the very next Congress" would "feel the influx of an enormously increased proportion of Representatives of the squatter interest, clamorous for the spoliation of the Old States altogether, by measures of graduation, loose preemption, or direct cession of these lands."
The East believed the "adoption of either of these measures would be at once a robbery of the Old States and a demoralization of the New, by alluring their citizens from the pursuits of industry to swarming in search of choice tracts of land on which to pounce at a nominal price. But beyond all this, . . . there can be no efficient and steady protection to home industry without the land distribution; for, one year of prosperous industry will lead to heavy purchases of public lands; then comes an excessive revenue, next a reduction of the tariff in the midst of good prices, next excessive importations followed by derangement, bankruptcy and distress. Friends of American industry!" the editorial concluded, "stand by the land distribution! it is the sheet anchor of our safety!"
A month later Greeley, in answer to an editorial in the Portland (Maine) Argus, took a stand against Calhoun's cession proposition and Benton's graduation scheme, though he admitted that these plans had a good chance of passage as soon as "Iowa, Wisconsin and Florida take their place in the Union."3 The Whig Almanac, the next year affirmed its belief that this "noblest patrimony ever yet inherited by any people" should be "husbanded and preserved with care, in such manner that future generations shall not reproach us with having squandered what was justly theirs, and left them penniless."4
Van Buren voiced the Democratic viewpoint that the income from the public domain would be more faithfully and equitably applied to the common benefit of the country if retained in the national treasury.5 The South naturally approved Van Buren's view, for as long as revenue was coming into the treasury from the public lands there was less likelihood of a higher tariff. Thus the issue was joined between the Whig and Democratic parties.
On December 11, 1843, Robert J. Walker of Mississippi introduced into the Senate a bill to graduate the price of public lands in favor of settlers and cultivators, thus inaugurating a new western drive for graduation.6 The New York Tribune and a few other eastern newspapers threw themselves into the thick of the battle hoping to make land policy the leading issue. To a subscriber who complained that the Whig program of distribution and protection would lead to monopolies which would "work great mischief to a community," leading perhaps to the necessity of regulating "the prices of labor in manufacturing industries ... by law," Greeley replied: "We must watch and foil the demagogues who are incessantly trying to squander the public lands by reducing their price. Let any graduation bill be passed which reduces the price of these lands ultimately to twenty-five cents an acre, or nothing, and whole counties . . . will be monopolized by heavy capitalists and speculators, and covered with a dependent tenantry, or held for exorbitant prices. The public lands are the great regulator of the relations of Labor and Capital, the safety valve of our industrial and social engine; and woe to this people should [they by] any cheating pretense of favoring 'poor settlers' be alienated, or suffered to be absorbed by the few."7
But land policy did not become a leading issue in the campaign of 1844. The Democrats found a more popular issue in expansion, though it must not be forgotten that the Whig campaign for protection and distribution fell short of ultimate victory by only a few votes in the electoral college. Polk's appointment of Robert J. Walker of Mississippi as Secretary of the Treasury heralded a new day for the South and West. Second only to Benton in his championship of graduation, and an apostle of free trade, Walker was to add great impetus to the western movement for cheaper land.
The Polk administration, from Land Commissioner to President, was one in its demand for graduation.8 In his annual message to Congress in December 1845, Polk asked that "lands some time since surveyed and still remaining unsold because they are inferior quality, that is, swampy, or sterile, or difficult to bring into cultivation ... be reduced in order to let the poor biiy them." Greeley pointed out that so long as the government persisted in bringing into the market some ten or twenty million of acres of land annually, while the demands for settlement required but one to three million, a heavy and increasing surplus of unsold lands was inevitable. Because lands remained unsold did not therefore necessarily prove they were of bad quality. Any hardy settler, he declared, should be able to save the price of an eighty-acre homestead out of the proceeds of a year's faithful industry.9 A little later Greeley paid his respects to graduation. He believed that "if ever there was a scheme full of mischief and injustice, this is one. It ought to be entitled 'A bill to discourage and prevent all payment for the public lands, and enable speculators to get them ultimately for a song.' "10 But in spite of this view, Greeley himself was soon to take a stand in favor of homesteading.
The speech of Jacob Thompson in the House of Representatives, July 9, 1846, clearly portrays the Whig position on the land question. The entire responsibility for the poor showing of the Whig party, he insisted, must rest on the shoulders of Henry Clay whose "course on the public lands" had "always lost him the vote of the new states, and it must and will be the fate of all those who" followed "in his footsteps." Pointing to the eastern interests, he wondered whether they would "never learn that distribution of the proceeds of the sales of the public lands among the States is an exploded, an 'obsolete idea,' condemned by the people, unauthorized by the Constitution, and founded in injustice and a false economy?" Speaking of Mr. Clay he observed that "there were many points in his character which challenged the admiration of our people. His boldness and frankness in taking his positions, his glowing eloquence, and his manly bearing, were traits which would have won the esteem of the daring pioneer. But his opposition to preemption; his unjust and impolitic aspersions . . . [upon] honest squatters; and his advocacy of distribution which led him into opposition to graduation . . . gave to the cup, which otherwise might have been sweet and palatable to the taste, such gall and bitterness as to induce the people of those states to turn away with odium and disgust."11
Here was the key to the Whig difficulties. Their program had no appeal to the most rapidly growing part of America. In fact, the more rapid the growth of the West the faster the strength of the Whigs in that area decreased.
The ever-increasing political power of the Mississippi Valley was evident in the fight over the graduation bill in 1846. The bill passed the Senate by a strict party vote, but was tabled in the House on August 5 by vote of 104 to 79.12 After the passage of the bill in the Senate, Horace Greeley saw "but one hope left. That rests on the principle of the freedom of the lands in small tracts (not over 160 acres) to actual settlers only, each paying the sum adequate to the cost of survey, etc. for the right of occupancy only, subject to the right of eminent domain [by] the whole people, of course, inalienable except by the free consent of the holder, and not alienable then except to one who possesses no other land."13 This rather surprising statement by the long prominent Whig spokesman offered to the Whigs a new approach to the land problem. The question was: would the Whigs accept it?
It is important to understand, however, that Greetey's sudden demand for homesteads was not entirely due to his intense hatred of graduation. In fact the Mexican War which had used up the treasury receipts from public lands had put a temporary damper on the demand for graduation. Greeley's stand was rather an outgrowth of his ever-increasing humanitarian interest, his sympathy with the poor and unemployed, his interest in socialism and, after 1844, his cooperation with the National Land Reformers. To understand the nature of this over- whelming force of humanitarianism, it is necessary to go back a few years to 1837.
The attempts to secure "equal opportunities for all" during the Jackson administration had brought forth few real advantages for the common man of America.14 The "right to vote" was after all an empty victory in view of the economic and social disruption emanating from the Panic of 1837. As the first effects of panic began to paralyze the economic structure around New Yorkk City, a few eastern editors began to preach emigration, not as a cure for the distresses of the time, but as a means of alleviating their most malignant consequences. Horace Greeley, then editor and joint owner of a none too successful literary sheet, The New Yorker, observing that there were already twenty thousand mechanics and thirty thousand seamstresses out of work in New York City alone, began to advise "every laborer, of whatever trade, to take up the march for the new country."15 In early June, pointing out that a winter of fearful and unexampled severity was in prospect, he cried: "Do not wait here to share and increase its horrors. Fly -- scatter through the country -- go to the Great West -- anything rather than remain here."16 The horrible conditions produced by the Panic of 1837, in addition to the wretched environment of his youth, gave to Greeley a social viewpoint. Here was the beginning of the "back to the land" gospel, and the conception of that famous epigram, "Go West, young man, go forth into the country" -- or as it is often quoted, "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country." For its effects upon American thought and action, the social crusade thus inaugurated is comparable to the Wakefield experiment in England.
The failure of the country to return to better times after the panic led many people to join the crusade for reform. Many of the intellectuals of the country studied conditions in England, fearing that similar conditions might arise in the United States. In 1840 the Reverend William Ellery Channing, in a series of sermons on "The Elevation of the Laboring Classes" which were published in Greeley's paper, noted that the improvement in steam navigation had placed Europe and America side by side. Channing hailed this development, but asked what was "to be the effect of bringing the laboring classes of Europe twice as near as they are now ... anything, everything should be done to save us from the social evils which deform the old world. . . . One thing is plain," he concluded, "that our present civilization contains strong tendencies to the intellectual and moral depression of a large portion of the community."17
The presidential campaign of 1840 was fought out in favor of the West and the common man, but politics offered no solution to the depression problem. Meanwhile Greeley, groping for a cure for the nation's ills, became acquainted with Albert Brisbane, an earnest advocate of Fourieristic socialism, who had just returned from France. Brisbane in an editorial in Greeley's Tribune declared: "Social evils are less intense in this country than in Europe, it is true -- and why? Because we have a vast extent of soil and a thin population, and because there are outlets and new fields of action offered to the increasing population, and to those who cannot find employment, or who have been mired in their fortunes. But we are verging gradually toward the frightful misery which exists in older civilized countries; nay we are already a part of it."18
Greeley came under the scathing attack of some of his Whig friends for allowing Brisbane to preach his socialistic doctrines of Association in his newspaper. Ridicule of Brisbane became so strong that Greeley finally came to his defense with the challenge: "Do not stand there quarreling with those who have devised or adopted a scheme which you consider absurd or impracticable, but take hold and devise something better. For, be assured, friend! that this generation will not, must not pass without the discovery and adoption of some method whereby the right to labor and to receive and enjoy the honest reward of such labor, shall be secured to the poorest and least fortunate of our people."19 For four years Greeley preached Association in his Tribune, but in 1847 he suddenly dropped it.
While the "intellectuals" were initiating and encouraging Fourierism, a new movement -- agrarianism -- had sprung up from the ranks of the laboring classes. The Land Reform movement originated with a few intelligent workingmen of New Yorkk City. Prominent among these men were George Henry Evans and John Cummerford. Evans was a labor leader whose hopes for a new industrial order had been blasted by the Panic of 1837. Realizing the difficulties of gaining the desired ends by organizing labor, these men in 1844 hit upon the idea of free land as a means of attracting the redundant population westward and consequently bringing about higher wages and better working conditions for laboring men in the eastern industrial areas. With the eastern laboring interests launching a crusade for free land, the time seemed ripe for an agrarian alliance between the East and West.
In 1841, the Westerners secured the passage of the Preemption Act, an agrarian measure which democratized the land system, legalized trespassing on the public domain, and allowed persons who had settled a quarter-section of land the preference of buying that land at the established minimum price to the exclusion of all other persons. To the West, free land was the logical next step after this preemption victory. The success of an East-West political union would depend largely upon the strength of labor forces in the East, which was the stronghold of conservatism, a region dominated by manufacturers, employers, and property holders fearful of all leveling influences and determined to maintain the established order.
Evans centered his Land Reform crusade around the ager publicum -- the vast public domain. His party was always to remain weak as to numbers, but because of the intelligence of its members and the publicity of their ideas it began to attract considerable attention. Evans went further than Fourierism in his crusade to assure "equal opportunity for all men." His program aimed to insure the individual's right to the natural resources of the country against creditors by the enactment of a law exempting homesteads from attachment for debts. More than that, the homestead was to be made inalienable. He would prohibit disposal of the public lands in large blocks to moneyed and speculative interests by granting to every poor man a farm of 160 acres of public land. In fact, the Land Reformers' program embraced: free homesteads, homestead exemption, and land limitation.20 In spite of persecution, these intellectuals steadfastly adhered to their conviction that Land Reform was destined to affect a social revolution which would place the country beyond the possibility of disunion, which would check speculation in land, and at the same time open up an avenue whereby the industrial classes in town and country would be enabled by the strength of their own right arms to avoid being crushed by capital, or becoming bondsmen to cunning speculators.
That Horace Greeley, supporter of Whig principles and the exemplar of Clay conservatism, should connect himself with this radical, agrarian movement for Land Reform seems almost incredible. Perhaps his deep humanitarian feeling is the explanation. Throughout 1844 and 1845 Greeley carefully watched the activities of Evans and his crusade to establish "the Right to Labor and the Right to the Soil." The reports of the workingmen's associations and their conversion to Land Reform were printed in the columns of the Tribune. When the Courier and Express charged that he was a "Fourierist, an Agrarian, and an Infidel," Greeley replied, "We admit and insist on the legal right of the owner of wild lands to keep them uninhabited forever, but we do not consider it morally right that he should do so when land becomes scarce and subsistence for the landless scanty and precarious . . . yes . . . something will be done, in spite of any stupid clamor that can be raised about 'Infidelity' and 'Agrarianism,' to secure future generations against the faithful evils of monopoly of land by the few."21
On October 1, 1845, the World's Convention of Reformers met in New Yorkk City, adopting as their motto, "Let's All be Unhappy Together." Robert Owen was elected president of the gathering. John A. Collins diagnosed the nation's ills: "All agree that society is sick -- very sick -- but few can agree as to the nature of the complaint, whether it is dyspepsia or dropsy -- headache or heartache. . . . But all agree in one thing -- that it is high time to send for the doctor." L. W. Rychman insisted that the lands were owned by society -- that "the only true title to land" was "the obligation to cultivate." George Henry Evans voiced the plea of his organization of National Reformers for free land. And finally, Alvan E. Bovay "contended for the right of every individual to a free use of the soil for the purposes of subsistence."22
Greeley was more than lukewarm in his sympathy for the principles of these reformers. He studied the columns of Evans's paper, Young America; he attended their weekly meetings; and when they decided to enter politics by nominating individuals for the state elections, he reprinted their ideas in the Tribune. Placards reading "Vote Yourself a Farm" were distributed everywhere by these men who aspired to form a true American party which would advocate the cessation of public land sales and the grant to every landless man of a quarter-section from the public domain.23 If this measure could be enacted, they argued, wealth would consist of the accumulated products of human labor, not of the "hoggish monopoly of the products of God's labor," and strife between capital and labor would cease.
On October 14, 1845, the Industrial Congress of Workingmen assembled and the Young Americans were admitted into the Industrial Brotherhood.24 The principles of the Land Reformers were thus incorporated into the platform of the Industrial Brotherhood, and organized labor became a sponsor of the Land Reform movement.25 The eastern Land Reformers, by enlisting the strength of the workingmen's associations of New England and the Middle States, attracted much attention, but they still lacked a real spokesman for their cause. Evans's Workingman's Advocate, like other reform papers, could not reach all classes. At this time, Greeley had not accepted the cause of the Land Reformers. In fact, after an attack by the New York Courier and Express, Greeley openly denied support of the Land Reformers and dared the Express to state just why it opposed the idea of free land.26
The winter of 1845-46 brought intense suffering to the less fortunate in New Yorkk City, and Greeley once more championed their cause. He estimated the number of jobless at thirty thousand heads of families, and called attention to the daily increases from immigration.27 This problem of destitution was peculiarly acute in New York City alone, a fact which made it difficult for the rest of the country to understand Greeley's plea. Still under the influence of Fourierism, he proposed the erection of a charitable institution on an estate two miles square, with workshops, cotton and woolen factories, and surrounded by farms. He asked for private aid and demanded a public levy, but these bounties were to serve only as temporary expedients. He advised the unemployed to go to the farming districts, but the unemployed lacking money to buy land, and knowing almost nothing about farming did not act on his suggestion.
Under such conditions Greeley decided to risk a new adventure which he hoped would prove more successful than his participation in the Fourieristic movement. On January 23, 1846, he stated the problem and made his resolution:
"Every day's reflection inclines us more and more to the opinion that the plan of holding and settling the public lands of our Union proposed by the little band who have taken the name of 'National Reformers' is the best that can be devised. . . . This system, with such modifications and safeguards as wisdom and experience may suggest, would rapidly cover the yet unappropriated public domain with an independent, substantial yeomanry, enjoying a degree of equality in opportunities and advantages such as the world has not seen. . . . Secure all, so far as possible, a chance to earn a living; then if they will run away from the soil and shiver and starve in cities, why there is no help for them but such as charity will afford. But shame on the laws which send an able, willing man to the almshouse or to any form of beggary when the soil on which he would gladly work and produce is barred against poverty and accorded by this government of freedmen to those alone who have money to pay for it, and therefore are to some extent able to do without it."28
This new proposal brought a storm of objurgation and vituperation from the opposition press. The Express declared that the Tribune certainly deserved "the cap and bells."29 The Goshen Democrat prophesied that, "If the plan should be adopted, we should soon have the whole contents of European poorhouses emptied down upon our fertile West." To this Greeley replied in a two-column editorial: "If 'the whole contents of European poorhouses' are to be 'emptied down' on us anywhere we certainly prefer that they should be planted on our public lands rather than in our almshouses."30 Similar attacks appeared in the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser; the Boston Daily Mail believed it "much better in the long run . . . that a man should purchase his land, and pay for it, than take it as a pauper entail."31
The fire of the opposition newspapers continued throughout 1846. In July Greeley, boldly addressing the New York Constitutional Convention, asked that august body to declare itself in favor of Land Reform. "To save the public lands from . . . monopoly -- to make them practically free to actual settlers, otherwise landless ... is the duty of Congress, but," he pointed out, "there are still duties devolving upon you. . . . The Convention can forbid future aggregations of great landed estates . . . by breaking up of those which now exist in our State." "Our plan," he continued, "would save our city a good part of the heavy expense of pauperism. . . . Who ever heard of a farmer starving on his land?" The Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Globe answered Greeley in threatening tones; the latter, although admitting the frightful nature of poverty in New York City, stated that it could have no sympathy with the idea of land for the landless.32 The Express asserted that it had knocked Fourierism out of the Tribune and that very shortly it would knock Land Reform out of it.33
In spite of the severe indictment which Greeley received at the hands of the opposition press, no editor was to be successful in forcing Land Reform out of the Tribune. Greeley's agrarian crusade boded ill for the conservative interests of the East; it created dissension within the Whig Party, which appealed to the laboring classes, but did little for them.34 Thurlow Weed was delighted to get the support of the Tribune, but deplored Greeley's adventure on the land question. In 1847, the New York Courier and Express attempted to read Greeley out of the party.35 It looked as though Land Reform would very shortly become a national political issue. Such might have been the case had not this issue been engulfed in the slavery controversy and in the politics of the Mexican War.
Early in 1847 Greeley called attention to Britain's unemployment problem and the famine in Ireland. He elaborated Lord John Russell's proposal to devote one million pounds sterling to the improvement of nearly five million acres of waste land in Ireland. He lauded Roebuck, a leading Liberal of the House, who had exclaimed, "Sire, I say that it is the duty of England . . . to insist that the land shall maintain the people of Ireland." And with biting sarcasm he asked: "Where are the Courier and Enquirers and Expresses of Great Britain?"36
In the light of Greeley's interest in the Land Reform movement it is not difficult to understand his unbounded sympathy for the Irish. The opposition to his Irish program was considerable in New York and elsewhere, but he put his humanitarian crusade on a world-wide basis when he stated his belief "that the right of the human race to live is older, stronger, more sacred, than the right of any individual to retain uncultivated or to exact his own price for liberty to cultivate a whole county or province of God's earth."37 The Irish should be welcomed, for they would "bring and create wealth to an indefinite extent. The unfilled lands of the great West," that required "but moderate attention to be abundantly productive," could "receive, occupy and reward a nation of industrious laborers. . . . Judging of the future by the past, the completion of this century" would "exhibit a mighty empire resting upon the Great Lakes and the Northern Mississippi."38
After this spirited fight, Greeley took a trip into the Northwest, his first west of the Alleghenies since 1831. He displayed considerable interest in the development of the copper mines in the Superior region.39 In Illinois he deplored the amount of vacant land held for speculation. His sincere belief in the imminent greatness of the West led him to predict that by 1900 Chicago would surpass New York City in population.40 He proposed a Pacific railroad.41 He praised Wisconsin for its adoption of the homestead-exemption principle.42
With considerable pride Greeley surveyed the growth of Land Reform: "None who have not taken a decided interest in the subject can realize the rapidity with which the idea of a reform in the laws governing the acquisition and disposition of land is spreading and finding favor in this country. Hardly two years have passed since it first attracted any share of public regard, yet at this moment we think not less than fifty periodicals earnestly advocate it."43