34 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



there is to be free land in the West, the workers will leave the 

 East and settle in the West. Everyone knows that scarce labor 

 means high wages and high wages will, ruin the factories. 



On the other side were men from the West, men who had 

 gone out and settled these new regions. At first their voices 

 were too weak to be heard in Congress, but it was not long 

 until the West became strong enough to send Andrew Jackson 

 to the White House. And it was Thomas Benton, "Old Bui' 

 lion" Benton, Senator from Missouri, who became their most 

 vigorous spokesman. One western Congressman stormed, "The 

 old states want the land in the new to bring the highest pos' 

 sible price, that they may have annually more money packed 

 over the mountains, to be spent among them on their wharves, 

 lighthouses, buoys, and breakwaters, and the Lord knows what; 

 not satisfied in placing on our shoulders a protective tariff on 

 the necessaries of life for their benefit, we must also be saddled 

 with a high land tariff, a sort of English corn law, that they 

 may thrive and fatten at our expense, and most generous souls! 

 when they were kind enough to modify the tariff in 1832, to 

 save the Union, a reduction at that time of the land revenue 

 never entered into their imaginations; no, never." 1 



Westerners agreed that the important thing was to settle 

 the West as quickly as possible. They believed the best way 

 to do this was to sell land as cheaply as possible. "Vote yourself 

 a farm" that was the best solution. Southerners were the 

 allies of the West. They too wanted cheap land, but for a 

 different reason. Planters wished to buy large tracts of west' 

 ern land so they could move their plantations west from the 

 coastal region as the soil was exhausted. 



In 1785 the first federal land disposal act offered the public 

 tracts of 640 acres for $1 an acre. The law required that half 



18 Congressional Globe, Twentysixth Congress, Second Session, App., p. 65, 

 quoted from Hibbard, op. cit., pp. 297-298. 



