Thirty Years' View (Vol. I of 2). Benton Thomas Hart

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СКАЧАТЬ of the colonies, and expected to do well in a state of independence. They had the exports, and felt secure of their prosperity: not so of the North, whose agricultural resources were few, and who expected privations from the loss of British favor. But in the first half century after Independence this expectation was reversed. The wealth of the North was enormously aggrandized: that of the South had declined. Northern towns had become great cities: Southern cities had decayed, or become stationary; and Charleston, the principal port of the South, was less considerable than before the Revolution. The North became a money-lender to the South, and southern citizens made pilgrimages to northern cities, to raise money upon the hypothecation of their patrimonial estates. And this in the face of a southern export since the Revolution to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars! – a sum equal to the product of the Mexican mines since the days of Cortez! and twice or thrice the amount of their product in the same fifty years. The Southern States attributed this result to the action of the federal government – its double action of levying revenue upon the industry of one section of the Union and expending it in another – and especially to its protective tariffs. To some degree this attribution was just, but not to the degree assumed; which is evident from the fact that the protective system had then only been in force for a short time – since the year 1816; and the reversed condition of the two sections of the Union had commenced before that time. Other causes must have had some effect: but for the present we look to the protective system; and, without admitting it to have done all the mischief of which the South complained, it had yet done enough to cause it to be condemned by every friend to equal justice among the States – by every friend to the harmony and stability of the Union – by all who detested sectional legislation – by every enemy to the mischievous combination of partisan politics with national legislation. And this was the feeling with the mass of the democratic members who voted for the tariff of 1828, and who were determined to act upon that feeling upon the overthrow of the political party which advocated the protective system; and which overthrow they believed to be certain at the ensuing presidential election.

      CHAPTER XXXV.

      THE PUBLIC LANDS – THEIR PROPER DISPOSITION – GRADUATED PRICES – PRE-EMPTION RIGHTS – DONATIONS TO SETTLERS

      About the year 1785 the celebrated Edmund Burke brought a bill into the British House of Commons for the sale of the crown lands, in which he laid down principles in political economy, in relation to such property, profoundly sagacious in themselves, applicable to all sovereign landed possessions, whether of kings or republics – applicable in all countries – and nowhere more applicable and less known or observed, than in the United States. In the course of the speech in support of his bill he said:

      "Lands sell at the current rate, and nothing can sell for more. But be the price what it may; a great object is always answered, whenever any property is transferred from hands which are not fit for that property, to those that are. The buyer and the seller must mutually profit by such a bargain; and, what rarely happens in matters of revenue, the relief of the subject will go hand in hand with the profit of the Exchequer. * * * 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 population of the kingdom; events infinitely more advantageous to the revenues of the crown than the rents of the best landed estate which it can hold. * * * It is thus 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."

      I do not know how old, or rather, how young I was, when I first took up the notion that sales of land by a government to its own citizens, and to the highest bidder, was false policy; and that gratuitous grants to actual settlers was the true policy, and their labor the true way of extracting national wealth and strength from the soil. It might have been in childhood, when reading the Bible, and seeing the division of the promised land among the children of Israel: it might have been later, and in learning the operation of the feudal system in giving lands to those who would defend them: it might have been in early life in Tennessee, in seeing the fortunes and respectability of many families derived from the 640 acre head-rights which the State of North Carolina had bestowed upon the first settlers. It was certainly before I had read the speech of Burke from which the extract above is taken; for I did not see that speech until 1826; and seventeen years before that time, when a very young member of the General Assembly of Tennessee, I was fully imbued with the doctrine of donations to settlers, and acted upon the principle that was in me, as far as the case admitted, in advocating the pre-emption claims of the settlers on Big and Little Pigeon, French Broad, and Nolichucky. And when I came to the then Territory of Missouri in 1815, and saw land exposed to sale to the highest bidder, and lead mines and salt springs reserved from sale, and rented out for the profit of the federal treasury, I felt repugnance to the whole system, and determined to make war upon it whenever I should have the power. The time came round with my election to the Senate of the United States in 1820: and the years 1824, '26, and '28, found me doing battle for an ameliorated system of disposing of our public lands; and with some success. The pre-emption system was established, though at first the pre-emption claimant was stigmatized as a trespasser, and repulsed as a criminal; the reserved lead mines and salt springs, in the State of Missouri, were brought into market, like other lands; iron ore lands, intended to have been withheld from sale, were rescued from that fate, and brought into market. Still the two repulsive features of the federal land system – sales to the highest bidder, and donations to no one – with an arbitrary minimum price which placed the cost of all lands, good and bad, at the same uniform rate (after the auctions were over), at one dollar twenty-five cents per acre. I resolved to move against the whole system, and especially in favor of graduated prices, and donations to actual and destitute settlers. I did so in a bill, renewed annually for a long time; and in speeches which had more effect upon the public mind than upon the federal legislation – counteracted as my plan was by schemes of dividing the public lands, or the money arising from their sale, among the States. It was in support of one of these bills that I produced the authority of Burke in the extract quoted; and no one took its spirit and letter more promptly and entirely than President Jackson. He adopted the principle fully, and in one of his annual messages to Congress recommended that, as soon as the public (revolutionary) debt should be discharged (to the payment of which the lands ceded by the States were pledged), that they should CEASE TO BE A SUBJECT OF REVENUE, AND BE DISPOSED OF CHIEFLY WITH A VIEW TO SETTLEMENT AND CULTIVATION. His terms of service expired soon after the extinction of the debt, so that he had not an opportunity to carry out his wise and beneficent design.

      Mr. Burke considered the revenue derived from the sale of crown lands as a trifle, and of no account, compared to the amount of revenue derivable from the same lands through their settlement and cultivation. He was profoundly right! and provably so, both upon reason and experience. The sale of the land is a single operation. Some money is received, and the cultivation is disabled to that extent from its improvement and cultivation. The cultivation is perennial, and the improved condition of the farmer enables him to pay taxes, and consume dutiable goods, and to sell the products which command the imports which pay duties to the government, and this is the "well-regulated revenue" which comes through the course of circulation, and through the "political secretions" of the State, and which Mr. Burke commends above all revenue derived from the sale of lands. Does any one know the comparative amount of revenue derived respectively from the sales and from the cultivation of lands in any one of our new States where the federal government was the proprietor, and the auctioneer, of the lands? and can he tell which mode of raising money has been most productive? Take Alabama, for example. How much has the treasury received for lands sold within her limits? and how much in duties paid on imports purchased with the exports derived from her soil? Perfect exactitude cannot be attained in the answer, but exact enough to know that the latter already exceeds СКАЧАТЬ