Settler Colonialism or Land Reform that Populated the Breadbasket

 

This map shows Land Districts and Offices in charge of selling Western land--a primary income source for the Federal government which helped keep taxes and tariffs low.  Some land agents, however, were corrupt and scandals common.  Individual speculators and organized stock companies borrowed money to buy vast tracts of land in the hopes of selling at inflated prices to settlers.  But most settlers could not afford the asking prices, the speculators and companies often could not pay their loans.  The result was financial failure and instability on one hand and a huge pent-up demand for cheaper land.  The Land Act of 1820 was meant to address both problems.

The Land Act of 1820 is a nearly forgotten piece of legislation passed by Congress which opened the Old Northwest Territory and Missouri to an avalanche of new settlement.  It was a byproduct of the Missouri Compromise. 

Population growth in the West was stymied by the almost constant bloody Indian warfare in the region from the end of the Revolution through the War of 1812 and by the high land prices and large minimum parcels required by the Land Ordinance of 1785. 

When a financial panic swept the nation in 1819 it became impossible for most would-be settlers to borrow the money needed to legally buy the land.  To escape high land prices mostly Scotch-Irish pioneers often pushed out ahead of land surveyors and squatted on land.  When the government caught up with them they argued that their improvements on the land should be subtracted from the cost.  They were often displaced and pushed further west. 

A deed to land in Indiana sold to James Benton McMurry in 1831 under the terms of the Land Act of 1820.  Note the document is attested to and initialed by President Andrew Jackson (or by a designee in the Executive Mansion under his authority) which was required by law for all sale of Federal land.  An example of the administrative minutia early Presidents were saddled with.

To make settlement more affordable and thus to reduce squatting, the new act reduced the minimum tract from 160 to 80 acres, a manageable family farm in the generally rich soil of the West. 

Buying land exclusively on credit—as was common among land speculators—was eliminated.  The price was reduced from $1.65 (set in 1804) to $1.25 per acre with a relatively affordable $100 down payment.  The very poorest, who probably could not even afford the necessary tools and equipment to bring the land into production, were excluded, but the cost was low enough to be manageable by many. 

Although speculators could still form land companies and buy large blocks of tracts, the recurring financial panics over the next few years drove many to bankruptcy while owner-operated farms could endure hard times on a subsistence basis.  

New Salem in Illinois was first settled in 1828 and was typical of the communities that sprang up across the West with liberalized land sale policies.  Even there not everyone could afford land.  Newcomer Abraham Lincoln from Indiana had to hire out as a wood cutter, river boatman, and store clerk.

In the end most of the farmland in the region sold at, or not much above the Federal price.  The success of the policy was astounding.  Illinois, for instance, had a population of about 55,000 in 1820.  Over the next 40 years the population doubled every ten years to almost 900,000 in 1860.  

Land sales were vigorous enough that even at the reduced price enough revenue was generated to operate the nearly skeletal Federal government. In fact, they provided enough income that they were largely responsible for the Federal Debt being completely paid off and retired—if only briefly—during the administration of Andrew Jackson.

Such a rapid explosion for population also had a dramatic effect on government as new Congressional seats were allotted with every new Census giving the West considerable regional clout.  By the eve of the Civil War the states covered by the act were no longer on the frontier.  They were well settled, prosperous, and with the advantages of easy access to markets via the great river systems and the new railroads, became the breadbasket to the nation. 

Reconsidering Lincoln—Was he a Liberator or Racist? Part 1

                                 The Emancipation monument removed from Boston.

Note—Tomorrow is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.  Inspired in the wake of protests demanding the removal of monuments of Confederate heroes which spread to other historic figures complicit or compliant of slavery  five years ago a memorial to Emancipation featuring a benevolent Abraham Lincoln over a kneeling but liberated figure Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout undertook a detailed reconsideration of the Liberator’s evolving views on slavery, race, and the post-liberation role of Freedmen.  We will share those posts again over the next three days. 

Although buried in Christmas excitement and rising Coronavirus dread in 2021 the removal of an iconic monument to Emancipation was removed from its prominent location in Boston by the city shocked many, offended some, and caused waves of hypocritical hysteria across the racist right wing media echo chamber.  The statue depicting a standing Abraham Lincoln and an unchained former slave was a copy of one by sculptor Thomas Ball erected in Washington, D.C. and paid for by mostly small donations from ex-slaves and Black veterans of the Union Army.  After all, hadn’t Lincoln been rapturously embraced as the Great Emancipator and a benevolent liberator new Freedmen after the Civil War and for the next 150 years by Afro-Americans? 

The removal came in response to a petition originated by artist Tory Bullock which 12,000 people signed and in the wake of nation-wide demonstrations demanding the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials to other historical figures with troubling connections to slavery and oppression including slave holding Founders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  But in Boston those sponsoring the removal campaign were at first reluctant to say that they were targeting Lincoln.  The problem, they said was the depiction of the naked and kneeling former bondsman at his feet.  They felt it was degrading and dehumanizing. 

Sculptor Ball had modeled the figure on Archer Alexander, the last man captured under the Fugitive Slave Act.  Lincoln’s outstretched arm seemed to beckon the man to rise as if he was bestowing a gift.  Although Black Freedmen and Army veterans raised the money with small donations for the Washington statue the process of designing and commissioning the statue was controlled by the Western Sanitary Commission, a division of the White-led Civil War relief agency that raised funds for medical supplies and sponsored nurses for the Union Army.  Comprised of wealthy liberals, many of them Unitarians, the Commission brought its own preconceived notions to the design. 

Veteran abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke at the dedication of the original Washington, D.C. version of the Emancipation memorial.

Veteran abolitionist Fredrick Douglass was a principal speaker at the monument’s dedication in 1876.  Although he lauded the celebration and intent, he voiced even then his deep reservations about the depiction of the Black man.  In a letter about the occasion, he wrote: 

Admirable as is the monument by Mr. Ball in Lincoln park, it does not, as it seems to me, tell the whole truth and perhaps no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth of any subject which it might be designed to illustrate. 

After Douglass noting that the monument omitted mention of the role President Ulysses S. Grant played in enfranchising former enslaved people, he said memorials should aspire to portray Black people in a new light: 

The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude. What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man. 

After the Boston copy was removed, a similar campaign was launched to remove the original in the nation’s capital.  But the gaze quickly turned to Lincoln himself who was called a racist based on his own words and for using slaves as mere pawns in a war between White elites.  Demands to remove Lincoln statues spread to several college campuses and monuments were vandalized in some cities. 

A statue of Lincoln was toppled during the on-going Black Lives Matter protests that rocked Portland, Oregon for weeks in 2000.

So, who was the real Lincoln?  Emancipator or just another racist politician?  A bit of both and not totally either.  

“He was a man of his time and place” is the get-out-of-jail-free-card usually laid down by apologists for Thomas Jefferson for his dismal personal performance as a slave master and failing to live up to all the soaring rhetoric in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.  Hell, I used it myself until accumulating evidence could no longer be denied.  Jefferson was at least a philosopher capable of understanding the hypocrisy and contradictions of his lofty ideals and his grubby reliance on chattel slavery to support his lavish lifestyle.  He could not give up his books, fine wine, mountain top vistas, and the sexual comfort of his house slave and dead wife’s half-sister for the life of a yeoman farmer on the frontier walking behind his own plow. 

The excuse might be more apt for Lincoln who was brought up in much more humble circumstances than the Virginian and without any claims or expectations of aristocracy.  No one else ever ascended to the Presidency from such hard scrabble roots.  Lincoln was born into poverty in that famous log cabin in Kentucky and was raised on the Indiana frontier.  His father, Peter, evidentially owned a slave for a while but treated his son as a virtual bondman not only on his own farm but leased out for hard labor to others.  Young Abe bitterly resented it and fled to Illinois as soon as he reached his majority and was no longer obliged to his father. 

In 1831 he settled in a New Salem, a squalid village with dim prospects.  Most of his neighbors were pioneer types with Southern or border state roots.   Illinois was by then a Free State, but there were few Blacks in the neighborhood.  Young Lincoln first earned his living as a hired man and as a casual laborer doing chores like chopping firewood and splitting fence rails.  

Young Lincoln was mortified by the slave auctions in New Orleans when he floated a flat boat down the Mississippi to the city.  It profoundly effected him.

One opportunity he had was joining with a few friends to build a flatboat to take down the Sangamon and Mississippi Rivers with a cargo of local goods including molasses, corn meal, and livestock to sell in New Orleans.  There they would also break up the boat and sell it for lumber.  The trip famously changed his life. He watched the harsh and abusive exploitation of slaves on the docks along the river.  Even more shocking was seeing the slave auctions in the city where families were broken up, young girls and women stripped to show off their sexual charms, and many of both sexes and all ages bore scars from whippings.  Lincoln was shaken to the core.  If he had never given much thought to slavery before, his natural sympathy and instinctive urge to serve the underdog made him a life-long opponent of slavery. 

But it did not then make him an abolitionist, nor did he ever become one.  His reverence for the Constitution prevented him from attacking the peculiar institution where it already existed and was protected.  Instead, opposition to extending slavery into new territories and states became his steady cause.  He held out hope that increasing commerce and farming innovations would gradually lead slave states to voluntarily abandon the system in some distant time. 

A Black abolitionist would later compare this to “having sympathy for a beaten horse.  He might be moved to constrain the abuser but could not imagine attacking the system that encouraged the cruelty.” 

Lincoln built his reputation as an important local leader in his years in the near frontier settlement of New Salem, Illinois.  He rose from casual laborer, to store clerk and owner, to Postmaster, militia officer, county surveyor, and political candidate.  Yet he had little direct contact with Black folks.

Meanwhile, back in New Salem Lincoln went about doing everything he could to punch every ticket to personal advancement.  He opened and operated his own store.  Importantly, he enlisted as a volunteer militia officer during the Black Hawk War.  Although he saw no action, he re-enlisted as a private when his short enlistment expired.  The same year he made his first run for office as a candidate for the state legislature.  He lost that election but made his name known and carried his home New Salem precinct by a whopping 277 of 300 votes.  He served as local Postmaster which put him in direct contact with almost everyone and was later made County Surveyor.  

Relentlessly ambitious, Lincoln saved up to buy books like Blackstone’s Commentaries and Chitty’s Pleadings and read law on his own. He later said of his legal education that “I studied with nobody.” 

Tomorrow—The Illinois years