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

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      "The ordinance reported by the committee, contained the plan of surveying the public lands, which has since been followed. It adopted the scientific principle of ranges of townships, which has been continued ever since, and found so beneficial in a variety of ways to the country. The ranges began on the Pennsylvania line, and proceeded west to the Mississippi; and since the acquisition of Louisiana, they have proceeded west of that river; the townships began upon the Ohio River, and proceeded north to the Lakes. The townships were divided into sections of a mile square, six hundred and forty acres each; and the minimum price was fixed at one dollar per acre, and not less than a section to be sold together. This is the outline of the present plan of sales and surveys; and, with the modifications it has received, and may receive, in graduating the price of the land to the quality, the plan is excellent. But a principle was incorporated in the ordinance of the most fatal character. It was, that each township should be sold out complete before any land could offered in the next one! This was tantamount to a law that the lands should not be sold; that the country should not be settled: for it is certain that every township, or almost every one, would contain land unfit for cultivation, and for which no person would give six hundred and forty dollars for six hundred and forty acres. The effect of such a provision may be judged by the fact that above one hundred thousand acres remain to this day unsold in the first land district; the district of Steubenville, in Ohio, which included the first range and first township. If that provision had remained in the ordinance, the settlements would not yet have got out of sight of the Pennsylvania line. It was an unjust and preposterous provision. It required the people to take the country clean before them; buy all as they went; mountains, hills, and swamps; rocks, glens, and prairies. They were to make clean work, as the giant Polyphemus did when he ate up the companions of Ulysses:

      Nothing could be more iniquitous than such a provision. It was like requiring your guest to eat all the bones on his plate before he should have more meat. To say that township No. 1 should be sold out complete before township No. 2 should be offered for sale, was like requiring the bones of the first turkey to be eat up before the breast of the second one should be touched. Yet such was the provision contained in the first ordinance for the sale of the public lands, reported by a committee of twelve, of which eight were from the north and four from the south side of the Potomac. How invincible must have been the determination of some politicians to prevent the settlement of the West, when they would thus counteract the sales of the lands which had just been obtained after years of importunity, for the payment of the public debt!

      "When this ordinance was put upon its passage in Congress, two Virginians, whose names, for that act alone, would deserve the lasting gratitude of the West, levelled their blows against the obnoxious provision. Mr. Grayson moved to strike it out, and Mr. Monroe seconded him; and, after an animated and arduous contest, they succeeded. The whole South supported them; not one recreant arm from the South; many scattering members from the North also voted with the South, and in favor of the infant West; proving then, as now, and as it always has been, that the West has true supporters of her rights and interests – unhappily not enough of them – in that quarter of the Union from which the measures have originated that several times threatened to be fatal to her."

      "The payment of 'a penny,' or a 'pepper corn,' was the stipulated price which our fathers along the whole Atlantic coast, now composing the old thirteen States, paid for their lands; and even when conditions, seemingly more substantial, were annexed to the grants; such for instance as 'settlement and cultivation;' these were considered as substantially complied with, by the cutting down a few trees and erecting a log cabin – the work of only a few days. Even these conditions very soon came to be considered as merely nominal, and were never required to be pursued, in order to vest in the grantee the fee simple of the soil. Such was the system under which this country was originally settled, and under which the thirteen colonies flourished and grew up to that early and vigorous manhood, which enabled them in a few years to achieve their independence; and I beg gentlemen to recollect, and note the fact, that, while they paid substantially nothing to the mother country, the whole profits of their industry were suffered to remain in their own hands. Now, what, let us inquire, was the reason which has induced all nations to adopt this system in the settlement of new countries? Can it be any other than this; that it affords the only certain means of building up in a wilderness, great and prosperous communities? Was not that policy founded on the universal belief, that the conquest of a new country, the driving out "the savage beasts and still more savage men," cutting down and subduing the forest, and encountering all the hardships and privations necessarily incident to the conversion of the wilderness into cultivated fields, was worth the fee simple of the soil? And was it not believed that the mother country found ample remuneration for the value of the land so granted, in the additions to her power and the new sources of commerce and of wealth, furnished by prosperous and populous States? Now, sir, I submit to the candid consideration of gentlemen, whether the policy so diametrically opposite to this, which has been invariably pursued by the United States towards the new States in the West has been quite so just and liberal, as we have been accustomed to believe. Certain it is, that the British colonies to the north of us, and the Spanish and French to the south and west, have been fostered and reared up under a very different system. Lands, which had been for fifty or a hundred years open to every settler, without any charge beyond the expense of the survey, were, the moment they fell into the hands of the United States, held up for sale at the highest price that a public auction, at the most favorable seasons, and not unfrequently a spirit of the wildest competition, could produce; with a limitation that they should never be sold below a certain minimum price; thus making it, as it would seem, the cardinal point of our policy, not to settle the country, and facilitate the formation of new States, but to fill our coffers by coining our lands into gold."