price of the lands,[1] but there is nothing to show that anything more than the distribution was in issue in this campaign, and this was of very minor importance.[2] The question before the people was not how to dispose of the land which we already had but how to ac- quire more. Texas and Oregon, not distribution and homesteads, were the issues of the campaign.
But new territories having been acquired, the problem of their settlement at once arose. While the paramount question was whether the settlers could take their slaves with them, yet the plan of offering inducements for Western immigration began to push to the front, although it was not so much for the new territories as for the old ones that the latter question was agitated. The decade 1 840- 50, particularly its latter half, was a period of constantly increas- ing emigration from Europe to the United States. A great share of this new population went into the states and territories of the Northwest, which show an astonishing rate of increase during those ten years.[3] That a still greater increase might be secured, the movement for homesteads was taken up in earnest by the West- ern states.
Yet this new movement for free grants was not to come at first from the land states but from a state which had no public lands. In 1S45 Thomasson, of Kentucky, had introduced a bill making donations of forty acres to actual settlers who were heads of families. He very frankly stated that one of his chief objects was to remove the public-land fund from the national treasury, as he did not wish a revenue from the lands sufficient to give an excuse for breaking down the protective system.[4] The next year two amendments having for their object the securing of homesteads for actual settlers were offered to graduation bills. One of these came from Darragh, of Pennsylvania, and provided for the donation of lands which had been in the market for ten years or more to actual settlers after a three years' occupation,[5] and the other from John- son, of Tennessee, making grants of quarter-sections to destitute heads of families who should occupy them for four years.[6] Both of these plans were limited in their application, the first as regards the lands and the second as regards the settlers, but neither secured the assent of the House.
- ↑ By Bowlin, of Missouri, July 6, 1S46. Globe, 29th Cong., first session, 1061-1062.
- ↑ Vinton, of Ohio, declared that the public lands had never been a party question. Ibid., 1076.
- ↑ Wisconsin increased 866 per cent, during this decade ; Iowa 199 per cent.; Michigan 87 per cent.; Illinois 79 per cent.
- ↑ Globe, 28th Cong., second session, 241.
- ↑ Globe, 29th Cong., first session, 1077.
- ↑ Ibid.
