The French in the Heart of America Part 8

"Fifteen millions of dollars! they would exclaim. The sale of a wilderness has not usually commanded a price so high. Ferdinand Gorges received but twelve hundred and fifty pounds sterling for the Province of Maine.

William Penn gave for the wilderness that now bears his name but a trifle over five thousand pounds. Fifteen millions of dollars! A breath will suffice to p.r.o.nounce the words. A few strokes of the pen will express the sum on paper. But not one man in a thousand has any conception of the magnitude of the amount. Weigh it and there will be four hundred and thirty-three tons of solid silver. Load it into wagons, and there will be eight hundred and sixty-six of them. Place the wagons in a line, giving two rods to each, and they will cover a distance of five and one-third miles. Hire a laborer to shovel it into the carts, and, though he load sixteen each day, he will not finish the work in two months. Stack it up dollar on dollar, and supposing nine to make an inch, the pile will be more than three miles high. It would load twenty-five sloops; it would pay an army of twenty-five thousand men forty s.h.i.+llings a week each for twenty-five years; it would, divided among the population of the country, give three dollars for each man, woman, and child.... Invest the princ.i.p.al as school fund, and the interest will support, forever, eighteen hundred free schools, all owning fifty scholars, and five hundred dollars to each school." [Footnote: McMaster, "History of the People of the United States," 2:630.]

Napoleon had, indeed, made a good bargain for France, selling a wilderness, which at best he could not well have kept long, for a price which all the specie currency in the poor young republic would not be adequate to meet.

It was of this domain (a part of the claim of La Salle for Louis XIV in 1682, divided between England and Spain in 1763, made one again in 1803 by the will of Napoleon, under the control of the United States, added to by the purchase of Florida from Spain and the acquisition of Texas, filling all the Great Valley)--it was of this valley that, as late as the early fifties, a member of Congress (afterward to become vice-president of the United States, then President), Andrew Johnson, although an earnest advocate of a liberal land policy, predicted that it would take "seven hundred years to dispose of the public lands at the rate we have been disposing of them." [Footnote: Speech on the Homestead bill, April 29, 1852.] Seven hundred years--as long as from the founding of Charlemagne's new empire of the west to the discovery of the coasts of a still newer empire of the west.

But in two hundred years from the day that La Salle so miserably perished on the plains of Texas, in exactly one hundred years from the time when, under the epoch-making "Ordinance of the Northwest" (as it has been called), the parcelling of the land began, and in less than half a century from the year when Andrew Johnson's seven-hundred-year prophecy began to run, practically the entire domain had been surveyed and sold or given by the nation to private or munic.i.p.al or corporate possession. It was the 24th of July, 1687, that La Salle died; it was July 27, 1787, that the first great sale of a fragment of the domain was made; and it was in 1887, approximately, that all the humanly available domain was occupied by at least two persons to a square mile; for in 1890 it was officially declared by the government of the United States that it had no frontier. Not that the land was all sold, but all that was immediately valuable.

As soon as the War of Independence was over, and even during the struggle, the territories of several of the Atlantic States (or colonies) expanded to the Mississippi. There was a quadrilateral, trans-Alleghany Ma.s.sachusetts, as indifferent to natural boundaries as a "state of mind"

(which Ma.s.sachusetts has often been defined to be), respectful only of imaginary lines of lat.i.tude and the Mississippi River, the Spanish border.

Little Connecticut multiplied its lat.i.tude by degrees of longitude till it reached in a thin but rich slice from Pennsylvania also to the Mississippi. Virginia disputed these mountain-to-river claims of her New England sisters, but held unquestioned still larger territories to the north and south--and so on from the sources of the river to Florida, South Carolina even claiming a strip a few miles wide and four hundred long.

There was almost a duplication of the Atlantic front on the Mississippi River. These statements will not interest those who can have no particular acquaintance with the personalities of those several commonwealths, quite as marked as are those of Normandy and Brittany; but even without this knowledge it is possible to appreciate the magnanimity and the wisdom which prompted those States, many with large and rich claims, to surrender all to the central government, the Continental Congress, for the benefit of all the States, landful and landless alike. [Footnote: LANDS CEDED BY THE STATES TO THE UNITED STATES

NORTHWEST OF THE OHIO RIVER SQUARE MILES Ohio......................................................... 39,964 Indiana.......................................................33,809 Illinois..................................................... 55,414 Michigan......................................................56,451 Wisconsin.................................................... 53,924 Minnesota, east of the Mississippi River......................26,000 ------- 265,562 or 169,959,680 acres.

Virginia claimed this entire region. New York claimed an indefinite amount. Connecticut claimed about 25,600,000 acres and ceded all but 3,300,000. Ma.s.sachusetts claimed about 34,560,000 acres.

SOUTH OF KENTUCKY South Carolina ceded about 3,136,000 acres. North Carolina ceded (nominally) 29,184,000 acres. Georgia ceded 56,689,920 acres.--Payson J. Treat, "The National Land System, 1785-1820."]

So it was that even before the National Government was organized under a federal const.i.tution in 1789, the land beyond the western boundaries of the several colonies, out as far as the Mississippi, was held for the good of all. And later the same policy followed the expansion to the Rockies and beyond. Can one imagine a greater or more fateful task than confronted this young, inexperienced republic--to have the disposal of a billion acres of timber lands, grazing lands, farm lands, ore lands, oil lands, coal lands, arid lands, and swamp lands for the good not only of the first comers and of those then living in the Atlantic States but also of the millions that should inhabit all that country in future generations as well--for the good of all of all time?

This one-time bed of the Paleozoic sea between Archaean sh.o.r.es, raised in time above the ocean and enriched of the mountains that through millions of years were gradually to be worn down by the natural forces of the valley, and finally, as we have seen, opened by the French as a new- created world to be peopled by the old world, then overflowing its brim, became all of it in the s.p.a.ce of a single lifetime the property of a few million human beings, their heirs, and a.s.signs forever. The "men of always" [Footnote: The Iroquois, according to Chateaubriand, called themselves Ongoueonoue, the "men of always," signifying that they were a race eternal, immortal, not to fade away.--"Travels in America," 2:93.]

had actually come and were to divide and distribute among themselves the stores of millions of years as if reserved for them from the foundation of the world.

When Deucalion and Pyrrha went forth to repeople the world after a flood, they were told by the oracle to cast over their shoulders the bones of their mother. These they rightly interpreted, according to the myth, to be the stones of the earth, and so the valleys of the ancient world became populous. Peopling _per se_ was not, however, the object or the first object of the act under which the government, after the manner of Deucalion, went across this new-world valley, casting in stoneless areas clods of earth and tufts of virgin sod before it and behind it. It was not people that the government wanted. Indeed, it was afraid of people. What it desired, the "common good," was the immediate payment of the debt incurred in the War of Independence, and the only resource was land. The land that the French had discovered, whose nominal transfer to England Choiseul had said he had made to destroy England's power in America, was now to meet a portion at least of the expense of the brave struggle for the winning of independence. France's practically untouched wilderness was now to supplement the succor of French s.h.i.+ps and arms and sympathy in the firm founding of the new nation. The acres that France under other fortunes might have divided among her own descendants, children of the west, she gave to a happier destiny than La Salle could have desired in his wildest dreams as he traversed the streams that watered those first- parcelled fields.

So, incidentally, the French pioneers before the fact and the first settlers of the west after the fact had their part, witting or unwitting, willing or unwilling, written or unwritten, along with George Rogers Clark and his men, who seized the British forts in that territory during the Revolution (and thus gave standing to the claim for its transfer), and along with the men of the Atlantic colonies who sacrificed their fortunes and their lives--these all had their part in the inauguration of this experiment in self-government. There was no higher, more far-reaching "common good" than this to which acres prepared from Paleozoic days and consecrated of unselfish adventure could be devoted.

I cannot find anywhere in our history an appreciation of this particular contribution to the foundation of free inst.i.tutions in America. But it is one that should be recorded and remembered along with the more tangible contributions. Every perilous journey of the French across that territory for which France got not a franc, every purchase which Scotch-Irish or New England or other settlers went out to conquer, was a march or a skirmish in the War of Independence, for all was turned to the confirming of the fruits of victory of the American Revolution.

Those who have written of the land policy which prescribed the conditions of sale have divided its history roughly into two periods: the first, from 1783 to 1840, in which the fiscal considerations of the general government were dominant; and the second, from 1840 to the present time, when the social conditions, either within the territory itself or in the nation at large, were given first consideration.

The statistical story of the first period, under that accurate cla.s.sification, would be about as interesting as a bulletin of real-estate transactions in Chicago would be to a professor of paleontology in the Sorbonne. It is only when those sales are considered teleologically (as the philosophers would say) that they can seem absorbingly vital to others than economists or to the fortunate heirs of some of the purchasers. I am aware (let me say parenthetically) that customs duties might have a somewhat like interpretation under a higher imaginative power; but this possibility does not lessen to me the singularly spiritual character of this series of transactions-of land sales, or trans.m.u.tations of lands, on the one hand, into the maintenance of the fabric of a government by the people, and, on the other, into the ruggedest, hardiest species of men and women the world has known in its new hemisphere.

Land-offices, as I have seen them described in the newspapers of the early part of the nineteenth century, gave no outward suggestion of being places of miracles--sacred places. They were noisy, dirty, ephemeral tabernacles of canvas or of boards in the wilderness, carried westward till the day of permanent temples should come. But like the Ark of the Covenant in the history of Israel, they blessed those in whose fields they rested on the way, even as the field and household of Obed-edom the Gitt.i.te were blessed by the presence of the ark on its way up to Jerusalem in the days of David.

The initial policy of the government was to sell in as great tracts as possible (the very reverse of the present conserving, anti-monopolistic policy, as we shall see). The first sale (1787) was of nearly a million acres, for which an average of two-thirds of a dollar per acre in securities worth nine or ten cents was received. This sale, whatever may be said for it as a part of a fiscal policy, was significant not only in opening up a great tract (one thousand three hundred square miles) but in the fact that the purchase and holding were conditioned by certain provisions of a precious ordinance--the last of importance of the old Continental Congress-only less important than the Const.i.tution, which it preceded by two years--the "basis of law and politics" in the northwest.

It, moreover, gave precedent for a policy of territorial control by the central government that has been effective even to the present time.

Daniel Webster said of it: "I doubt whether any single law of any lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting character." [Footnote: First Speech on Foot's Resolution in "Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster," national edition, 5:263.] It forbade slavery and had in this provision an important influence on the history of the valley. But there was another far-reaching and a positive provision which must be of special interest to the people of France even to-day. Its preamble lies in this memorable pa.s.sage: "Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." As to the specific means of encouraging religion, morality, and knowledge, and so, ultimately, of promoting good government and the happiness of mankind, it was proposed by the representative of the Ohio Company, which stood ready to purchase a million acres, that the government should give support both to education and religion, as was done in New England, and as follows: one lot in each towns.h.i.+p (that is, a section one mile square in every tract six miles square) to be reserved for the common schools, another for the support of the ministry, and four whole towns.h.i.+ps, in the whole tract, for the maintenance of a university.

Congress thought this too liberal, but finally, under the stress of need of revenue which the high-minded, reverend lobbyist, Reverend Mena.s.seh Cutler, was prepared through his company to furnish, acceded, with a reduction only of the proposed appropriation to the university. The provision specifically was: "Lot number sixteen to be given perpetually by Congress to the maintenance of schools, and lot number twenty-nine to the purpose of religion in the said towns.h.i.+ps; two towns.h.i.+ps near the center and of good land to be also given by Congress for the support of a literary inst.i.tution, to be applied to the intended object by the legislature of the State."

A second great tract was sold the same year under similar conditions. This was the last occasion on which provision for the support of religion was made by the national Congress, and what came of this particular grant I have not followed beyond the statement below. [Footnote: In 1828 Ohio pet.i.tioned for permission to sell the lands reserved for religious purposes, and in 1833 this was granted. The proceeds of the sales were to be invested and used for the support of religion, under the direction of the legislature within the towns.h.i.+ps in which the reserves were located.-- Payson J. Treat, "The National Land System, 1785-1820."]

But the "section-sixteen" allotment for the aid of public schools continued as a feature of all future grants within the Northwest Territory, and also in all the new States of the southwestern and trans- Mississippi territory erected prior to 1850, from which time forward two sections in each towns.h.i.+p (sixteen and thirty-six) were granted for school purposes, besides specific grants for higher education amounting to over a million acres.

A recent student [Footnote: Joseph Shafer, "The Origin of the System of Land Grants for Education." Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No.

63. History Series, Vol. i, No. i, August, 1902.] of this subject has traced this policy of public aid to education back through New England, where colonies, in grants to companies or towns.h.i.+ps, made specific stipulations and reservations for the support of schools and the ministry and where towns.h.i.+ps voluntarily often made like disposition of surplus wild lands; and through New England to England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where, the monasteries and other religious foundations being destroyed and the schools depending upon them peris.h.i.+ng, schools were endowed by the kings, sometimes out of sequestered church lands, or were established by towns and counties, in addition to those chartered under private patronage, so strong was the new educational movement of the time.

In the Mississippi Valley, then, or the greater part of it--whatever the historical origin of the provisions may be-from one-thirty-sixth to one- eighteenth of the public land has been set apart to the education of generation after generation till the end of the republic--or as Americans would be disposed to put it in synonymous phrase, "till the end of time."

Acres vary in size, one of our eminent horticulturists has reminded us, measured in terms of productivity. And the gifts to the various towns.h.i.+ps have been by no means of the same size, measured in terms of revenue for school purposes. "Number sixteen" may sometimes have fallen in shallow soil or on stony ground and "thirty-six" in swamp or alkali land. The lottery of nature is as hard-hearted as the lotteries of human devising; but the general provision has put an obligation upon the other thirty-five or thirty-four sections in every towns.h.i.+p that I suppose is seldom evaded.

The child's acres are practically never, I suspect, less valuable than the richest and largest of those in the towns.h.i.+p about it, for the reason that the difference is made good by the local taxpayer. The child's acre is, as a rule, then, as large as the largest, the most productive acre. And roughly there are fifty thousand of those little plots in that domain-- fifty thousand sections a mile square, thirty-two million acres reserved from the beginning of time, theoretically at least, to the end of time. As a matter of fact, they are not to be distinguished objectively from other acres now; they are to be distinguished only subjectively, that is, as one thinks of what is grown year by year in the schools, to which their proceeds, if not their products, are given.

I quoted above an estimate made in 1803 of what might have been done with the fifteen million dollars, paid to the French for Louisiana. One alternative suggested was the permanent endowment of eighteen hundred free schools, allowing five hundred dollars a year per school and accommodating ninety thousand pupils. The public-school allotment for that part of the valley alone is fifteen million acres. Even at two dollars an acre (a very low estimate), the endowment is twice the total amount paid for Louisiana --and I am estimating this school acreage at but one thirty-sixth instead of one-eighteenth of the total acreage. Therefore, France may, in a sense, be said to have given these acres to the support of the "children of always"--since these plots alone have probably yielded many times the purchase price of the entire territory.

To be sure, these white plots, as I would have them marked on a map of the valley, have in many States been sold and occupied as the other plots, with only this distinction, that the proceeds are inviolably set apart to this sacred use, as certain parts of animals were, under Mosaic law, reserved for public sacrifice. In one trans-Mississippi State, Iowa, for example, of a total grant of 1,013,614.21 acres [Footnote: Iowa, 1,013,614.21 acres from section 16 and 535,473.76 acres by congressional grant in 1841.] (less what the boundary rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri, had carried away in their voracious encroachments, and plus what other natural agents had added), only 200 acres remained unsold in 1911.

As we view the policy from the year 1903 and from the midst of a populous valley, in which land values have risen from one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre to a hundred or two hundred dollars in most fertile farm tracts, and to thousands in urban centres, we can but regret that these lands themselves had not been held inviolate, and can but wish that only their rentals had been devoted to the high uses to which the nation and State had consecrated these lands. This policy would have put in the heart of every towns.h.i.+p a common field whose rental would have grown with the development of the country. It would have furnished fruitful data for comparison between two systems of land tenure. And it would have kept ever visibly, tangibly before the people their heritage and their obligation.

As it is, one has to use the greatest imagination in translating the figures in a State treasurer's or county supervisor's report, back into the little plots that gathered into the soil of their acres the n.o.blest purposes that ever animated a nation--these spots where one generation made its unselfish prayer and sacrifice for the next.

That the purpose still exists, despite the pa.s.sing of the tangible symbol, and that the prayer is still made in every towns.h.i.+p of that territory, where even a few children live, is evidenced by the fact that every two miles north and south, east and west of settled region there stands a schoolhouse. I shall speak later of this wide-spread provision, not only for universal elementary education but also for secondary and higher education, ordained of the people and for the people, to be paid for by the people out of their common treasury. But attention must here be called, in pa.s.sing, to the fact that the parcelling of the domain of Louis XIV in the new world fixed irrevocably the public school in the national consciousness and purpose and made it the foundation of a purely democratic social system and the nourisher of a more highly efficient democratic political system.

On the Atlantic side of the mountains there was bitter controversy between those who held that education was necessary for the preservation of free inst.i.tutions and those who held that free education increased taxation unduly; between those who desired and those who regretted the breaking down of social barriers which both claimed would ensue as a result of such education; between those who regarded education as a natural right and those who considered taxation for such a purpose a violation of the rights of the individual; between those who saw in it a panacea for poverty and distress and those who urged that it would not benefit the ma.s.ses; and, finally, between those of one sect and race and those of another. But in the trans-Alleghany country north of the Ohio, and in all the territory west of the Mississippi (practically coterminous, let me again remind you, with that region where the French were pioneers within the present bounds of the United States) there was practically no dissension, though the provision was meagre at the start. The public school had no more of the atmosphere or character of a charity, a "pauper" school than the highway provided for out of the same grant, where rich and poor met in absolute equality of right and opportunity. It became the pride of a people, the expression of the people's ideal, the corner-stone of the people's hope. I suppose that three-fourths of the children of the territory whose ranges have been surveyed by the magic chains forged of this first great parcelling ordinance have had the tuition of the public schools--future Presidents of the United States, justices, railroad and university presidents, farmers, artisans, artists, and poets alike.

So while it was desire for revenue that prompted the early sales of the public domain in the Mississippi Valley, the nation got in return not only means to help pay its Revolution debt, but, incidentally, settlements of highly individualistic, self-dependent, and interdependent pioneers, gathered about one highly paternalistic or maternalistic inst.i.tution--the public school. The credit for this has gone to New England and New York, but the "white acres" came of the territory and the riches of Nouvelle France.

You will not wish to follow in detail the ministrations of the priests of the land-offices and the surveys of the men of the magic chains, for it is a long and tedious story that would fill thousands of pages, and in the end only obscure the real significance of the movement. Here is a summary of allotments made up to 1904 of all the public domain, that of the Mississippi Valley being somewhat more than half. [Footnote: See Report of the Public Lands Commission, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1905.]

_Private land claims_, donations etc. (the first of the latter being made to the early French settlers).............................................(ACRES) 33,400,000

_Wagon-road, ca.n.a.l, and river_ improvement grants (provision for the narrow strips of common that intersect each other at every mile of the settled parts of the valley).................................. 9,700,000

_Railroad grants_ for the subsidizing of the private building of railways chiefly up and down and across the valley.............................. 117,600,000

_Swamp-land grants_ (being tracts of wet or overflowed lands given to the various States for reclamation)............................................. 65,700,000

_School grants to States_ (those which we have been considering)....................................... 69,000,000

_Other grants to States_ (largely for educational purposes)........................................ 20,600,000

_Military and naval land warrants_........................... 61,000,000

_Scrip_ issued for various purposes (chiefly in view of service to the government)......................... 9,300,000

_Allotment to individual Indians_............................ 15,100,000

_Mineral lands_ (under special entries)....................... 1,700,000

_Homestead entries_ (that is, by settlers taking claims under homestead acts of which I shall speak later)........................................... 96,500,000

_Timber-culture entries_ (final).............................. 9,700,000

_Timber and stone entries_.................................... 7,600,000

_Cash entries_, including entries under the preemption and other acts................................... 276,600,000

_Reservoir rights of way_....................................... 300,000