Carlson

Indian Lands, “Squatterism,” and Sectional Alliances: Economic Interests and the Passage of the Indian Removal Act of 18301

Leonard A. Carlson Department of Economics Emory University Atlanta, GA 30322-2240 e-mail: [email protected]

Mark A. Roberts First Draft: January, 2001 Revised: April 2002

Draft: Please do not quote or cite without permission.

1

This paper was first presented at the American Historical Association Meetings in Boston, January 2001. I thank participants in the economics department seminar at Emory University, Claudio Saunt and Peter Coclchanis. Jerry Thursby provided valuable econometric and organizational insights and John Juricek provided very helpful comments on the nature of how the English treated the land rights of Indian tribes.

1

Abstract

In May 1830, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly voted to authorize for the president of the United States to exchange lands Indian lands in the east for land west of the Mississippi River and authorized $500,000 for that purpose. This gave President Andrew Jackson authority to negotiate the removal of Indian tribes from the Southeast. The Georgia legislature acted two weeks after the passage of the law extended state laws over the Cherokees as a way of pressing them to leave Georgia, thus setting in motion the sequence of events which lead to the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia. The Democratic Party lead by Andrew Jackson, favored removal, and the National Republicans (which would serve as the basis of the new Whig Party) opposed removal and Jackson. Three days later the House also passed the First General Preemption Act, giving squatters a right of first refusal to purchase land they had occupied prior to its being open for sale. Federal policies towards Indian lands and land policies developed in parallel with each other after independence from Britain in 1783. Under the U.S. laws, Indian title to land had to first be ceded to the federal government before it could in turn be sold to white settlers. Thus it is likely that interest groups favoring cheap land policies would also have an interest in opening Indian lands for settlement. In a recent paper Kanazawa (1996) concludes that the willingness of settlers to occupy federal lands before they were offered for sale greatly raised the costs of enforcing land policy. This helped influence Congress and made it more likely that federal policy would favor squatters rights over those who wished a more orderly sale at a higher price. Similarly, any policy toward Indian lands in the southeast had to deal with unauthorized settlers moving onto Indian land and a the actions of the State of Georgia, which claimed authority over all Indian land in its borders. We hypothesize that Congressmen who were part of the coalition that favored cheap land would also favor encouraging Indians to move west and open more land in the east for purchase. A logit analysis of the vote on the Removal Act of 1830 shows three statistically significant variables in determining how congressmen voted. Democrats, representatives from slaveholding districts, and representatives who had supported preemption were more likely to vote for removal. Southerners were very likely to favor both bills, which stands in contrast to later southern opposition to cheap land policies, particularly the Homestead Act. One implication is that once the Indian tribes were removed from the southeast it become harder for southern congressmen to align their interests with those of the westerners in favor of easier land policies, such as were adopted in the Homestead Act of 1862.

2

In the last week in May 1830, the U.S. House of Representatives passed two important pieces of legislation that critically shaped the settlement of the West. On May 26, 1830, the house passed the Indian Removal Bill, officially titled “An act to provide for an exchange of lands with Indians residing in any of the States or Territories, and removal West of the river Mississippi.” The bill authorized the president to negotiate with tribes to trade their land in the east for land west of the Mississippi River and appropriated $500,000 for this purpose. It was hotly contested issue and the Removal Act narrowly passed in the House of Representative by a vote of 102 to 97. Robert Remini states that President Andrew Jackson’s opponents hoped to help the Indians remain in the South and hand the president a defeat. The bill had passed the Senate earlier on a vote of 28 to 18. (Registrar of Debates in Congress 1830, pp. 382-1135). 2 Three days later, on May 29, the Preemption Act was passed by a vote of 100 to 58, after surviving a vote to send the bill back to committee. This law granted a right to purchase their claims to settlers who had illegally settled on federal lands. The Act of 1830 had to be renewed each year and this was done until the passage of the General Preemption Act of 1840, which made preemption a permanent part of U.S. land law. In our view, these two bills represent two sides of the same coin: the desire for settlers to acquire land cheaply and the need to extinguish Indian title to that land. It is our belief that these two interests worked together to shape the settlement of the west. The fact that these two bills were passed so close together provides a “natural experiment” to test the

2

Much of the data in this study was originally gathered for Mark A. Roberts, “Terms of Surrender: An Econometric Analysis of the Congressional Vote on Indian Removal,” Honors Thesis, Emory University, 1997.

3

hypotheses that the political coalitions that passed the two bills were overlapping and mutually supportive.3 The Removal Act and the General Preemption Act passed in May 1830 were part of a long history of votes by Congress voting on land and Indian policies. Federal policies toward the public lands and Indian tribes evolved throughout the nineteenth century and Congress was called on to repeatedly legislate on the terms by which land was to be sold to private parties. At the same time Congress regulated trade with tribes and approved treaties in which tribes ceded lands to the federal government, sometimes in exchange for lands in the west. It also appropriated money for Indian affairs and to implement treaties. Both sets of issues recurred throughout the nineteenth century and the same Congressmen voted on both sets of issues. It is hard to imagine that they did not see a natural relationship between the two. Indian Land Claims in Anglo-American Law Under the Laws of the United States land could not be purchased by private parties directly from Indian tribes. This followed the English practices, but the interpretation of English law is “complex and controversial.” According to Juricek, Basically, however, English imperial authorities appear to have interpreted Indian land cessions on the basis of the following assumptions: English territorial claims only depended on what the kings of England had done. They had unilaterally (as acts of conquest) proclaimed territorial sovereignty over most of North America. In the official English view Indian land rights were neither sovereign rights nor civil rights, but were mere “natural” rights. Since all civil rights were supposed to derive from sovereign authority, it followed that all civil title to land in the English colonies had to derive directly or indirectly from the king. Since Indians did not “own” the land in a sense recognized by English law, no Englishman – not
3

Much of the historical discussion about the Removal Act has focused on the motives of Andrew Jackson and his allies in the Democratic Party. Did they truly see removal as the most humane way to deal with Indians, or was this simply a cover for a desire to drive Indians from desirable land? (See Prucha 1984 ch. 7, Satz 1991, and Wallace 1993)

4

even the king – could “buy it from them. An Indian land cession was therefore not a legal conveyance but a surrender of an inconvenient competing title to the king or his representative. Indian rights were not transferred to the English but eliminated – hence the later expression, “extinguishment of Indian title.” Once Indian rights to a tract had been given up, legal titles to the same land based on royal grants could take place. (Juricek, p xxiv) This notion of Indian property rights was not explained clearly to tribes, who would have objected to the notion that they had an inferior claim to the land, nor was it clear to all citizens of the colonies who continued to purchase lands from individual Indians. Indians who wished to leave the tribe and establish a farm among whites had to acquire a legally recognized legal title to the land just as would any other citizen. In so doing he would then be subject to the laws of the state in which he or she lived, rather than tribal law. This happened periodically. As part of the removal process, many Indians were granted “allotments” which gave them title to part of the tribal land, often the land where they had established their farms. Living on an allotment made them citizens of the state and subject to state taxation. Property rights within the Indian nations were also in flux and confusing. For example, among the Cherokees clans held land but families had an individual right to a private garden to grow food. This had evolved by the nineteenth century so that a family that occupied land and marked it by fences and buildings had a recognized property right that could be transferred within the tribe. In negotiating the removal treaties typically individual claims translated into “allotments” which gave them a title that they could sell to individual white settlers. In some cases tribal lands were divided among all members

5

of the tribe. Most sold their allotments or were defrauded out of their land and moved west, but some stayed behind (see Young, 1961). Given the need to extinguish Indian title before it could be purchased by whites, we believe that those who wished to make land available for settlers under easier terms would also be likely to favor removing tribes west of the Mississippi River. Slavery added an additional dimension to the equation. Southern planters stood to gain more than other eastern landowners from opening federal land in the southwest for two reasons. Opening more land to cotton production would increase the marginal product of slave labor, and hence the price of slaves. Increased settlement in the southwest would also increase the political strength of the South in Congress. In the vote on Preemption Bill in 1830, Kanazawa finds that ceterus paribus southerners were much more likely to support preemption. Yet in the 1850’s southern congressmen overwhelmingly opposed the Homestead Act. By the 1850’s, the Homestead Bill was seen as a way of speeding up the spread of small free farms in the west but offered little benefit to southern slave holders or the South in general. It is our contention that the fact that Indian tribes had already been removed from the South by 1850 helps explains this shift the voting pattern of southern congressmen and the growing split between the South and the (North) West in congress. Background While the language of the bill allowed it to be applied to the removal of any tribe, the Indian Removal Act primarily applied to tribes in southeastern states where slavery was important. By 1830, most tribes north of the Ohio River were no longer a military threat. Many had been defeated in war and signed treaties under the terms of which they

6

had already agreed to either move west of the Mississippi River or settle on reservations in wilderness areas. Tribes in the southeast, the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes,” offered a different problem. A substantial number of the élites in those tribes were of mixed Indian-European heritage and had adopted commercial agriculture, including the use of slaves. They were literate, lobbied for their own interests in congress, and had allies among protestant religious groups in the northeast. The Cherokees, one of these tribes, challenged the state of Georgia by adopting a constitution very similar to that of the state that claimed authority over territory within Georgia. The vote on the Removal Act was a very partisan affair that pitted those who supported President Jackson, the Democratic Party, against factions including the socalled National Republicans that opposed Jackson. Later in the 1830’s anti-Jackson politicians united to form the Whig Party. Democrats should have been more likely to favor removal than their opponents since Jackson was the leader of the party and he was strongly committed to moving Indians to the trans-Mississippi west and had been so for many years. A defeat for Jackson would be a defeat for the whole party. Since all the land was in the South and all southernern slaveholders stood to gain from opening more land to the expansion of slave agriculture, it is likely that southerners of either party would also favor removal. What is most novel in this study is including the effect of voting in favor of preemption on the vote for the Removal Act. There was a division between east and west over land policy. In the early years of the Republic, Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Party favored slower, more efficient settlement, larger federal revenues, and protection of existing land values by selling land in the west at auction. Manufacturers also favored a slower

7

development of the west, since rapid movements out of the east could place upward pressure on wage rates. By the 1830’s this position was favored by those who would come to form the Whig Party. The Whigs, especially in the west also favored an active role for the federal government in promoting internal improvements. Jefferson and the Democrats favored cheap land policies as a way of encouraging the U.S. to develop as a nation of independent small farmers. In the decades which followed, westerners and Democrats continued to favor cheap land policies (they saw themselves as favoring settlers over “speculators”). According to Atack, Bateman, and Parker, however: Such idealism aside, the debate over the transfer of public land into private hands was dominated by self-interested rent-seekers. The property-less stood to gain a saleable asset from Jefferson's policy, while cheap land was a threat to all existing property owners, limiting, if not actually diminishing their property's value. Keeping land prices high benefited existing landowners; setting them low benefited the poor, especially if credit were available, and increased the opportunities for profitable speculation. (Atack, Bateman, and Parker, p. 288)

After 1790 the general trend was for land policy to favor the Jeffersonian position. Historical Issues A tension between the desire for land in the west and the desire to protect the claims of Indians living there is evident literally at the origins of the American Republic and even earlier. A major grievance of the American colonials, especially frontiersmen and small farmers, against the British administration was the Proclamation of 1763 that forbade settlement west of the crest Appalachian Mountains. This was a response to Pontiac’s Rebellion, an uprising of tribes north of the Ohio River angered over white encroachments into their territory. The Proclamation was an attempt by the British crown to keep peace on the frontier and to preserve the valuable fur trade. This was followed by

8

the Quebec Act of 1774, which transferred western lands from the colonies to the control of the British governor in Quebec and created a territory reserved for Indians. (See Walton and Rockoff, pp. 128-130) As already discussed, the British claimed sovereignty over the territory in the Americas by discovery or conquestbut recognized the claimsof Indian tribes to the land that they occupied unless it was ceded by treaty or conquest. British policy sought to secure alliances with Indian tribes against France and Spain and tried to avoid the conflicts between settlers and Indians. British policy of pursuing peaceful relations with Indians in the west by limiting settlement, while perhaps sensible in light of larger imperial concerns, did not sit well with American frontiersmen. Settlers such as Daniel Boone had already moved into forbidden lands in Kentucky. The population of the colonies was doubling every thirty to forty years and there was a continual desire for new land for farms to the west. Indian Policy, 1776-1783 During the American Revolution, many tribes sided with the British government again the colonists. The central tribe in the story of removal, the Cherokee, initially sided with the Americans. Feeling betrayed by the undisciplined colonial forces, however, the Cherokee switched sides and allied themselves with the British. In reprisal, colonial forces burned Cherokee towns and crops and the result was devastating for the Cherokee. U.S. Indian Policy After Independence From British Rule After independence, Indian tribes were at first treated as defeated powers. As the colonists saw it, When England lost the Revolutionary War, the United States won, by right of conquest, England's rights, which included sovereign authority over all the land and people within its domain.

9

Congress extended this logic to its relations with the Indians. Victory in the Revolutionary War gave the new nation the same rights of conquest relative to the tribes. If England had lost its lands in America, England's Indian allies, the enemies of the United States, had lost theirs as well. It made no difference if their lands and villages had not been invaded and destroyed by American armies or if Native American warriors had not been wiped out in battle, they had lost the war along with England and should be dealt with as defeated enemies. (Perdue and Green, 1995, pp. 7-8) This policy lead to continual warfare with the northern tribes, aided by the British who still occupied forts in American territory north of the Ohio River. In the South, Georgia and North Carolina aggressively asserted their claims to Indian territory by virtue of British charters that originally granted these colonies land as far west as the Pacific Ocean. The potential for costly warfare lead to a shift back to the British policy of recognizing the rights of tribes to the lands they held and limiting settlement on Indian land by Europeans. The Commerce Clause of U.S. Constitution adopted in place of the Articles of Confederation in 1787 placed the responsibilities of dealing with Indian tribes with the federal government. The Trade and Intercourse Acts According to Perdue and Green, Henry Knox, the first Secretary of War and the man in charge of Washington’s Indian policy : was convinced that the encroachment of settlers and others onto their (Indian) lands was the primary cause of war on the frontier and that the only way to bring peace to the frontier was to exert legislative controls over aggressive United States citizens. Furthermore, Knox thought that the federal government had a moral obligation to preserve and protect Native Americans from the extinction he believed was otherwise inevitable when "uncivilized" people came into contact with "civilized" ones. Knox also fully concurred with the general American view that as the population of the United States grew, Indians must surrender their lands to accommodate the increased numbers. These views added up to a policy aptly described by one historian as "expansion with honor," the central premise of which was that United States Indian policy should make expansion possible without detriment to the Indians. (Perdue and Green, 1995, p. 10)

10

This policy was enacted into law when Congress in 1790 passed the first Trade and Intercourse Act. The principle was for the federal government to regulate trade and contact with Indian tribes and that it alone should “extinguish” Indian rights to land. In particular the act sought to control the trade in guns and alcohol. Settlers could only buy land from the federal government. Indian tribes could only cede land after concluding a treaty with the federal government that was approved by the Senate. It was hoped that this policy of respecting the rights of tribes would minimize conflict on the frontier. It was still expected, however, that most Indian tribes would cede land to the federal government and move west and thus there would be “expansion with honor.” Indian Wars in the New Republic. After the Revolution periodic Indian wars flared on the frontier. Most Indian tribes in the west depended on hunting and required substantial amounts of relatively untouched land to support the game needed for heavy hunting. The movement of settlers north of the Ohio River threatened Indians living there and Indians and there were a number of battles. Resistance by tribes north of the Ohio River effectively ended with the defeat of the northern tribes allied with Tecumseh in the War of 1812.4 Most of the 20,000 or so Indians in the Old Northwest moved to lands west of the Mississippi River. Some tribes remained on reservations in the northern regions of Michigan or Wisconsin. The wave of settlement that followed would enable the white population of Ohio alone to swell to over two million by 1850 (Barrington, 1999, p. 14).

4

There were further conflicts with tribes north of the Ohio, notably the Black Hawk War of 1831, but at best this was a last ditch effort. Prucha (1984) concludes that it was really a mistake more than a attempt at resistance.

11

The Iroquois in upstate New York and Canada, however, made the transition to settled agriculture by men as well as women that allowed them to produce enough food on a small amount of land. This allowed them to remain and prosper on small reservations in New York. The transformation of these tribes was aided part in part by a religious revival led by Handsome Lake. (See Wallace, 1995, Spicer, 1969). Removal After 1830 The passage of the Indian Removal Act was only the first step in the sequence of events that lead to the forced removal of the Cherokee from Georgia and other tribes from the southeast. Assured of presidential backing, two weeks after the passage of the Removal Act, the state of Georgia passed a law that extended its laws over the Cherokee nation. The federal government also began to negotiate with tribes for the cession of Indian lands in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. Three tribes, the Creeks, the Choctaws, and Chickasaws succumbed to the inevitable and signed treaties to cede their lands in the east in return for land in Oklahoma between 1830 and 1832. These tribes left for Oklahoma peacefully. In most cases Indian property holders were offered title to the land they occupied. This title was called an “allotment” and gave each Indian a title in fee simple equivalent to that of white settlers. Some took such title and remained while others sold the land and moved west. This process is discussed extensively by Young (1961). The Cherokee, however, resisted the efforts by the state of Georgia to pressure them to leave Georgia and North Carolina. The tribe and missionaries who lived among them appealed to the Supreme Court. James Wirt, who had been attorney general in the

12

Monroe and Adams administrations, and other Whig lawyers, advised the Cherokee. In two landmark decisions, the Supreme Court ruled on the appeals of the Cherokee and their allies. In the case of the Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) the court expressed its sympathy for the Cherokee, but ruled that they were a “domestic dependent nation” and that the court did not have jurisdiction. This was followed the next year by a second decision. The Georgia legislature forbade whites to enter Indian territory in Georgia without a license. Two missionaries who were arrested under that law refused to accept a pardon and challenged the law in court. The court ruled on their appeal in Worchester v. Georgia (1832). Chief Justice Marshall wrote for the court and concluded that the Georgia’s extension of its laws over the Cherokee was unconstitutional and it ordered the state of Georgia to reverse its conviction of Worchester and release him. This created a potential constitutional crisis that could have pitted the Supreme Court against the state of Georgia at the same time that the state of South Carolina challenged federal authority in the nullification crisis. According to Prucha, “Jackson’s opponents saw the danger to the Union that arose from South Carolina’s action, and they tempered their criticism of Jackson as he stood firm against nullification. In the end, unionist sentiment proved greater than sympathies for the Cherokee, and the Indians devoted friends in the American Board urged them to sign a removal treaty” (Prucha p. 213). The American Board of Missions backing Worchester and the Governor Lumpkin of Georgia came to a compromise settlement whereby the missionaries were pardoned and allowed to leave Georgia. After the Supreme Court cases, the federal government continued to press the Cherokees for removal. The Cherokee themselves split over the issue of removal. The

13

majority, lead by Chief John Ross opposed removal. An articulate minority lead by Major Ridge, his son John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, the deposed editor of the tribal newspaper the Cherokee Phoenix, concluded that voluntary removal was in the best interests of the tribe and they lead a pro-removal faction in the tribe. Their faction signed the fraudulent Treaty of New Echota in 1835 by which the tribe ceded its claims to land in Georgia in return for land in Oklahoma. The tribal government did not recognize the treaty and it barely passed the Senate by one vote more than the 2/3 majority required. Remini, 2001, p. 265) Members of the treaty party left Georgia voluntarily in 1836. Those who opposed the treaty refused to cooperate and did not begin the journey west until the fall of 1837. While the first group that went west was under direct military control, subsequent groups moved under their own leadership. The delays, however, meant that the journey was completed in the winter and that there was a substantial loss of life. This is known as the “Trail of Tears.” A band of Cherokee were allowed to remain in the Mountains of North Carolina and this group, the Eastern Band of Cherokees, remain there today. Some members of the Choctaw nation in Mississippi also remained on privately owned land. In Florida, some of the Seminole Tribe agreed to move to Oklahoma, while others resorted to armed resistance and guerilla warfare. Most were ultimately defeated after a long and costly war and moved west but a small band of Seminoles who hid in Everglades swamp were never defeated and were ultimately allowed to remain in Florida. Once in Oklahoma, the Cherokees and other tribes were established selfgoverning republics that administered their tribal lands. Even after arriving in Oklahoma the Cherokees remained divided. Fighting and blood shed continued between the

14

different factions for many years and ultimately many key leaders of the Treaty Party were assassinated. Land Policy 1783-1830 Along with deciding how to treat Indian tribes, the new government had to find a way to administer land in the west and reconcile the claims of the original states. A notable success for the government established under the Articles of Confederation was the resolution of these issues. Seven of the original thirteen colonies had claims, often overlapping, to land in the west. The six landlocked states were concerned that if these western lands were settled the states with western lands would grow large and populous and dominate the new nation. The solution was for the states to cede their western lands to the federal government. Beginning with New York in 1780 and followed by Virginia in 1784, all of the original states eventually ceded their claims to western lands. According to Robbins, “These cessions (New York and Virginia’s) made possible the first legal union of the thirteen states and conveyed to the government of these states the title to a body of land known as the public domain. Between 1784 and 1802 the remaining five states also ceded their western lands.” (Robbins, p. 5) These cessions were followed by two of the most important pieces of legislation passed under the Articles of Confederation: the Land Law of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. These two laws set the terms for the sale of land in the new territories and for the method that new states were to be admitted into the union. Land was to be surveyed in a large grid and individual parcels were to be sold in fee simple to private citizens, without feudal obligations to the government. Some land was reserved for public purposes, such as schools and courthouses. Laws for the governance of the new territories was established by the Northwest Ordinance, which authorized the
15

creation of territorial governments and established the rules whereby new states could enter the union equal to the existing states. An important feature of the law for this paper was the provision that slavery was outlawed north of the Ohio River and, by omission, permitted south of the Ohio. Once it was decided how public land in the west was to be surveyed and sold, there remained the question of the price and terms under which land would be offered for sale. In the early years the Federalists supported a policy of selling land at relatively high prices and in relatively large units to generate revenue for the new government, encourage manufacturing and protect the interests of eastern land owners. Democrats tended to favor lower prices and smaller parcels to encourage the purchase of land by relatively poor settlers. At first the sale of public land was one of the few sources of federal revenue. The minimum price for land was $1.00 per acre under the Land Law of 1785 with a minimum purchase of 640 acres. The price was raised to $2.00 per acre in 1796. Thereafter terms of sale were made easier, with smaller minimum purchases, lower prices for land, and at times allowing for credit purchases. (Atack and Passell, pp. 258-9) Selling land at auction was only one way that land was transferred to private ownership. Some land was granted to military veterans, as was done for veterans of the war with Mexico in the 1840s. In the 1860’s the federal government would grant land to railroad construction into undeveloped areas and states had made similar grants earlier. A continuing problem was what to do about squatters, people who settled on public land that they did not own, often before it was surveyed and offered for sale. These people were often relatively poor but influential on the frontier.

16

Looking at the history of land policy within the historical tradition inspired by Turner, Robbins (1942) wrote: “The fact is that much of the history of the national land system centers around the struggle between squatterism and speculation, between the poor man and the man of wealth. Ever since the early colonial days the danger of frontier revolt had menaced established society. The opening of vacant lands to the westward always stimulated a frontier spirit – a peculiar democratic leveling influence, likely to be arrogant, dangerous, and even uncontrollable. The frontiersman wanted free access to the soil, but the forces of established order, on the other hand, contended that free land would destroy the economic and political values upon which the government was founded.” (Robbins, p. 9, emphasis added) Squatters created many problems for federal authorities. At times military force was used to evict squatters from federal lands. These efforts were unpopular on the frontier and often ineffective. When land was eventually offered for sale at auction residents would try to ensure that squatters could buy the land that they had settled. Armed groups at the auctions that would sometimes try to intimidate outsiders to prevent them from buying land. Over time the claims of squatters came to be recognized by special legislation. The success of these efforts encouraged still more anticipatory settlement by frontiersmen (Kanazawa ). Like public land, Indian land was subject to entry by illegal settlers and as with preemption Congressmen had to know that any policy allowing Indians to remain would have to be enforced against settlers moving onto Indian lands. Granting property rights on a first-come first-served basis encourages wasteful early settlement.5 Thus from the point of view of economic efficiency, land policy

5

Homesteading, the practice of granting land to actual settlers for free after a period of years of occupancy, in particular has been criticized as wasteful (see Anderson and Hill 1990).

17

moved from policies that were more efficient (and one that was less aggressive towards Indians) to a more wasteful system of encouraging settlers move west “too soon.”6 There are conflicting views in the literature about the evolution of land policy. One view, emphasized by Robbins and echoed by many scholars today stresses the distributional issues and sees the battle between those who favored the poor and the west versus the east, manufacturers, and the wealthy. In this view the preemption law and, later, the Homestead Act were victories for the poor man and his allies. In fact, however, even with low land prices the total cost of setting up a farm in the west required a reasonable amount of wealth for a working family.7 Allen (1991) recently defended the Homestead Act as an efficient policy that encouraged settlement and thereby secured property rights against the incursion of Indian tribes. Kanazawa, however, argues that the passage of the preemption act reflected the effectiveness of a special interest group and enforcement costs rather than a quest for efficiency.8 According to Kanazawa: The ascendancy of preemption may be understood as a process whereby squatter rights were legitimized and integrated into federal land disposal policies. Early congresses made every effort to suppress squatters' rights, even passing a law in 1807 calling for the use of military force to remove squatters from public lands. Over time, however, Congress took an increasingly lenient stance toward squatters, granting preemption rights selectively in individual cases before passing the first general preemption law in 1830. Squatting activity probably influenced this policy evolution in two distinct ways. First, squatters exerted political pressure on Congress for preemption through numerous memorials and petitions, and through western congressmen who represented their interests in Congress. The story is, however, more than simply the emergence of a new interest group with effective political power. Squatters also disrupted the operation of the local land auctions, thus reducing auction revenues and making adoption of preemption
6 7

For a discussion of these issues see Attack and Passell, pp. 260-270. It has been estimated that it was ideal to have roughly $1000 in cash in order to start a 40-acre farm, a considerable sum in those days. Attack and Passel argue that only the top one forth of farmers had this much wealth. Even establishing a tenant farm was out of the reach of roughly one third of the populations. See Atack and Passell pp. 278-9. See also Atack, Bateman, and Parker 2000). 8 The Homestead Act was passed long after preemption and primarily affected settlement west of the Mississippi River, so Kanazawa and Allen are addressing different times and places to some degree.

18

less unacceptable to its (mostly eastern) opponents in Congress. They thus altered the terms of the political debate in their favor, enabling them to gain valuable policy concessions. (Kanazawa, 1996 p. 228) In stressing the role of squatters in shaping policy by their willingness to disrupt local land auctions, Kanazawa is agreeing with earlier historians such as Robbins. Kanazawa tests his model by looking at the vote on the preemption bill of 1830. Our model builds on his work in looking at the vote on the Removal Act in the same week. Land Policy 1830-1860 After 1830, preemption was renewed annually until it became a permanent part of land law with the passage of the General Preemption Bill of 1840. There was a big increase in land purchases during the first half of the 1830s and the primary issue was the the federal government would require that land be purchased with specie. After 1840, the movement towards easier land policies focused on a homestead act — the principle of allowing farmers to acquire 160 acres of unclaimed public land at without charge if they maintained residency for a period of five years. This became a source of sectional conflict with southern congressmen solidly against passage of the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act of 1862 was passed during the Civil War when the South was not represented in Congress. Protecting Indian Land After independence, the federal government, like the British in 1763, faced the problem of keeping white intruders from moving on to Indian lands and causing armed conflict. For example, President Washington and Secretary of War Knox began efforts to establish peaceful relations with southern Indians with the Treaty of Hopewell in 1791. According to Green and Perdue:

19

The failure of the Treaty of Hopewell to end the encroachment of settlers and the resulting warfare between them and the Cherokees was, to Knox, "disgraceful." But the thousands of settlers who had entered the Cherokee Nation in violation of the treaty could hardly be removed. Instead, Knox and Washington believed that the United States should negotiate a new treaty with the Cherokees, buy the land the settlers illegally occupied, survey a new boundary, strictly prohibit any further encroachment, and take the first steps toward "civilizing" the Cherokees. (Perdue and Green, 1995, p. 11) Special Case of Georgia Georgia plays a special role in the removal of the Cherokees and Creeks and other Indians from Georgia and the southeast. Importantly, Georgia was the only one of the original states where Indian tribes controlled most of the state’s territory when the U.S. achieved independence from Britain. This can be seen in Map 2. In 1789, white

settlement in Georgia was limited to a band along the coast and the border with South Carolina, but the territorial claims of Georgia reached as far as the Mississippi River. As discussed earlier, all of the original states ceded their western claims to the federal government, but the last state to do so was Georgia, in 1802. Lands within the original states were not ceded to the federal government so federally owned public lands did not exist in its borders. This meant that any land ceded by Indian tribes in Georgia would be owned by the state, not the federal government. Under the terms of the 1802 agreement with the State of Georgia, the federal government agreed to move Indians from the new boundaries of the state as soon as it could reach such an agreement with the tribes. As interpreted by Georgia politicians, this agreement required the federal government to eventually move all Indians out of Georgia. Indeed throughout the years after 1790, there was a steady expansion of Georgians into land formerly controlled by Indians. This was accomplished either by voluntary cession, war (the Creek Indians were last defeated in

20

1814), or by cession under pressure. A real possibility of war remained as long as Spain controlled Florida, which it did until 1819(Prucha 1984). The question of whether to sell land to the federal government and move west or to remain in their homes in the east, created great internal divisions among southern tribes, especially the Creeks and Cherokee. In 1825, for example, Chief William McIntosh of the Creeks signed the treaty of Indian Springs ceding a large tract of Creek land to the federal government without permission of the tribal council, who then ordered his execution (Prucha 1984, p. 220-1). Another recurrent theme in the history of Georgia was the desire to profit – legally or illegally -- from acquiring public lands. In 1790, Georgia legislators were involved in the notorious Yazoo land sale. In that year the Georgia legislature sold land along the Yazoo River in Mississippi to a private land company for a fraction of its value in return for outrageous bribes. The next year, the people of Georgia elected a new group of legislators who tried to revoke the contract but the Supreme Court ruled in 1795 that the contract was binding. Distrust of the legislature may have contributed to Georgia’s unique way of disposing of public lands. Unlike federal land, public land in Georgia was distributed via a land lottery. In Georgia anyone who had not already acquired public land from the state could participate in the land lottery. Land won through the lottery was often quickly sold, allowing large planters to acquire the best cotton lands quickly (Weiman, 1991). While Alabama and Mississippi were also states with substantial Indian populations; Georgia was exceptionally aggressive in pursuing the removal of Indians from its territory in the 1820s. (See Schoenleber).

21

The Cherokee Response Defeat at the hands of American troops during the American Revolution had brought the destruction of fifty Cherokee towns and associated fields. Many Cherokee died in the famine that followed. The Cherokees responded by making significant changes in their society. New England Missionaries were invited to set up schools to teach basic literacy in return for allowing these sects to preach the Christian gospel. The relationship created allies for the Cherokee among the missionary groups in New England as well as allowing for an importation of American knowledge. Like the other southeastern tribes, but unlike the northwestern tribes, the Cherokee were matrilineal, which meant that the children of white fathers and Indian women were fully members of the tribe. In a number of cases, Scottish traders among the Indians married Indian women and arranged for their children to receive a European education. These mixed-blooded individuals were the people who established large plantations, including slaves, on the American model and played an important role in tribal affairs. Another change was brought about by Sequoia, a full-blooded Cherokee who developed a phonetic syllabary for the Cherokee language that allowed many Cherokee to become literate in their own language. A tribal newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, was published in both English and Cherokee. Thus the Cherokee and other southeastern tribes made notable changes after the American Revolution. But results were hardly uniformly positive. According to Wallace,

22

But away from the agencies and the schools, and off the main roads lined with cotton plantations and comfortable inns, lived thousands of Native Americans who did not share in this prosperity and who were all too likely to turn to alcohol to dull the pain of poverty and loss. In the South, it would appear something like an Indian class system existed, perhaps a relic from pre- Colombian times, when differences in rank and privilege were the norm. .... Most tribes were split into at least two factions, a pro-assimilation "progressive" faction and an anti-assimilation "conservative" faction. They debated fiercely and sometimes came to blows over acceptance or rejection of various white practices, from the Christian religion to English education to metal tools …(Wallace, 1993, p. 61) Like the Iroquois, the Cherokee made a transition from a division of labor where women farmed and men hunted, to a system where men were more actively involved in farming. One result of this is that more food could be produced the remaining Cherokee lands. According to detailed calculations preformed by David Wishart (1995), at time of the 1835 Census, the Cherokee generated a food surplus sufficient for the tribe to be selfsupporting. The success of some mixed blooded Cherokee leaders in learning the ways of American politics and in making allies among missionaries allowed them to influence the U.S. Congress. Thus both the Cherokees, and missionaries with ties to their New England denominations lobbied on behalf of the southern tribes. The Cherokee nation in fact challenged the state of Georgia by adopting a constitution in 1827 that was very similar to Georgia’s which included a definition of its boundaries. This outraged Georgia politicians and the Georgia legislature asserted its claims to Cherokee lands and its right to claim them by force, but did not actually use force to assert its assertion.

23

The Movement to Removal. After 1802, residents of Georgia waited impatiently for the opening of more Indian land for the growing cotton economy. As shown in the maps in Figures 2-4, there was a steady cession of Indian land in the old southwest, but large tracts of Indian land remained in the hands of the Creeks and Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw and Seminole, the so called “Five Civilized Tribes.” This was still the case after the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814, in which the chiefs of the lower Creek towns signed an agreement ceding much of the territory of both the Upper Creeks in Alabama and their own territory in Georgia. The Cherokees had allied themselves with the United States in the War of 1812 with Great Britain and did not lose additional territory. Even after the treaty of Fort Jackson, Andrew Jackson was able to persuade the Chickasaws, Creeks, Cherokees to cede additional vast tracts in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. After 1820, Schoenleber finds that the agitation for moving more Indians out of the South became less intense in Alabama and Mississippi, but remained high in Georgia. This movement of settlers onto Indian land, with attempts by federal authorities to prevent settlement, parallels the problem faced by federal authorities in trying to limit settlement on public lands. As in other parts of the West, there was an impatience to move on to new land and a local disregard for the decisions made in Washington. President John Quincy Adams, who narrowly defeated Jackson (who had a plurality of the vote) in the election of 1824 was sympathetic to southern claims to open Indian land to settlement but was reluctant to break treaties with Indian tribes. Jackson ran against Adams again in 1828 and that time Jackson won. Jackson represented the

24

western wing of the Democratic Party and brought a more aggressive style to national politics and tended to favor the westerners, the poor, and the newly wealthy over older established interests in the east. The Removal Act of 1830 A crucial step in the process that led to the forced removal of Indians from the southeast and the “Trail of Tears” was the passage of the Removal Act of 1830. This act authorized the president to exchange lands in the west for Indian lands in the east and appropriated $500,00 to assist in the transfer of Indians west. The passage of this bill vote allowed Jackson and the state of Georgia to proceed to put more pressure on the Cherokee and other southern tribes to accept removal. Before the passage of the bill there were inducements for southern tribes to voluntarily move west to avoid conflicts with settlers and some did so. Even after the passage of the removal act, it was expected that Indians would voluntarily move west.9 The Act called for voluntary agreements between tribes and the federal government. The removal bill was not voted on in a vacuum. Everyone involved in the debate knew that if Indian tribes remained in the Southeast it would take federal troops to keep settlers off Indian lands. The discovery of Gold in northeastern Georgia in 1829 brought a wave of illegal settlers into Cherokee land. Even without the lure of gold, squatters moved on to unoccupied Indian lands just as they moved on to other unoccupied federal land. In the view of westerners land was to be tilled and a poor man had the right to claim unused land.

9

Young (1961) studies the efforts to induce Indians to secure the agreement to tribes to move west after the passage of the removal bill.

25

A literary example may serve to humanize a process that may seem simply driven by greed. The Ingalls family in the autobiographical Little House on the Prairie was one such squatter family. In the second book in the series, the Ingalls move from Wisconsin to the Indian Territory. The Ingalls’ do not see themselves as interlopers, do not have ill will towards the Indians and are outraged that the army forces them leave. They were poor people looking to better their lives. Such settlement in the long run may have been harmful to Indians, but this was not apparent to the Ingalls nor do they feel guilty. They are decent people who do not believe they are doing harm (Wilder 1953, first published 1935). The House Vote on the Removal Act The roll call vote on this bill allows us to test hypotheses about the nature of important coalitions in Congress around Indian policy and land policy. Andrew Jackson’s biographer, Charles Remini, sees the vote as a serious attempt to defeat Jackson and to protect Indians from unfair treatment. Francis Prucha, the leading historian of Indian policy, acknowledges that the vote attracted widespread attention, but concludes that the opposition to removal was largely the result of agitation by Jeremiah Evarts, a prominent reformer and clergyman who aroused support for the Cherokee cause in the Northeast. Regardless of Evarts role, however, the vote was seen at the time a challenge to Jackson. The key vote was in the House of Representatives. According to Remini, The opposition never really expected to kill the measure in the Senate where the Democrats were outnumbered and outmaneuvered them. What they hoped to do in the upper house was arouse public sympathy for the plight of the Indian and the terrible wrong removal involved. But in the House, the National Republicans, looked for a triumph. The Democrats in the House were not as well disciplined as

26

those in the Senate, and many of them feared reprisals from certain religious groups like the Quakers if they voted for the bill. Removal might remove them from office (Remini, 1981, p. 261) (emphasis in original). The Debate: The debate over the Removal Bill is described by Remini as a “verbal brawl” (2001, p. 268). The opposition to the Removal Act was lead by Charles Frelinghuysen from New York, a leader of the anti-Jackson National Republicans. Frelinghuysen argued that federal government was obliged to protect Indian rights against the claims of all, including the states (Remini 1981 p. 261). He also argued that Jackson had not properly consulted with Congress and was improperly asserting his authority. As part of a long speech he also asked: . . .how can we ever dispute the sovereign right of the Cherokees to remain east of the Mississippi, when it is in relation to that very location that we promised our patronage, aid, and good neighborhood? Sir, is this high-handed encroachment of Georgia to be the commentary on the pledge given. . .” (Reprinted in Prucha 1990, p. 51) Others in Congress seconded his arguments, emphasizing the promises made to Indian tribes. Some also were concerned about the potential cost of the removal, suggesting it might run to millions. Some of the defenders of removal replied that it was a humanitarian gesture. For example, Wilson Lumpkin of Georgia described removal as "their only hope of salvation." . . . And assured the house that "No man entertains kinder feelings toward the Indians than Andrew Jackson." (Quoted in Remini 1981, p. 260) The proponents of removal also made less altruistic arguments. John Forsyth of Georgia denounced Frelinghuysen’s speech by saying "The Indians in New York, New England, Virginia etc etc are to be left to the tender mercies of those States, while the arm

27

of the General Government is to be extended to protect the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and especially the Cherokees from the anticipated oppressions of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. What the north and east have already gotten away with is not to be denied the south.” (Quoted in Remini 1981 p. 260) There were also constitutional issues. Robert Adams of Mississippi “insisted that everyone living within the boundaries of a particular state is subject to the laws of that state. Otherwise chaos reigns. Or has a new set of rights been discovered? In addition to federal and state rights we will now have "Indian rights." What folly!” (Quoted in Remini 1981, p. 260) The Vote The Indian Removal Act was voted on in the House on May 26, 1830. Three days later the House also passed the first General Preemption Bill. Mark Kanazawa has persuasively argued that the passage of the Preemption bill was a victory for the growing power of a coalition that favored granting squatters the right of preemption. The success of earlier special preemption bills created the expectation that future squatters would be granted similar rights. This encouraged additional settlement on federal lands. Removal and Preemption The hypothesis tested in what follows is that the West and South had a common interest in favoring both liberal land policies and Indian removal. In the northwest, the defeat of Indian tribes in the War of 1812 largely ended effective resistance to white settlement. But in the South, Indian tribes continued to function as cohesive political and military units. The existence of the Cherokee nation and the refusal of the Cherokee to move west limited the expansion of the cotton growers into new lands in Georgia and

28

Alabama. As a result, constituents in all southern congressional districts stood to benefit from the removal of southern Indians. Opening new land to slavery increased the value of slaves by making available more land for slave agriculture which increased the marginal product of slaves and hence the price of slaves everywhere (since their prices reflected the capitalized value of the revenue they produced and there was an active interregional slave market). Opening Indian lands in the South would also increase the long run political representation of slave states in Congress as the region grew in population. Finally, some people had a direct interest in acquiring Indian land. Only Georgia used a lottery system, which made it possible for many to potentially in acquire wealth by literally winning the lottery. But even in other southern states there was the chance of moving into newly opened Indian lands. A belief in the right of settlers to push into new lands, of course, united supporters of removal with supporters of preemption. There was a similar rational for supporting expansion into Indian lands and for supporting unauthorized settlement on federal land. In Robbins phrase, both southerners and westerners believed in “squatterism” in the 1830’s Econometric Analysis of the Vote This section examines the role-call voting for the Removal Act of 1830 for evidence that specific economic characteristics of the congressional districts influenced the economic interests of the their constituents and votes of congressmen. The vote on the passage of the Removal Act of 1830 is recorded in the Journal of the House, 21st Congress, first session. The Removal Act passed the House by a vote of 102 to 97. In order to account for specific factors, which may have influenced the

29

congressional voting behavior we use a logit regression model. We assume that each congressman had a continuous range of attitudes towards Indian removal that was measured by the characteristics of his districts, his party and an error term that accounts for individual beliefs and omitted factors. Following the standard model we assume that these preferences are continuous with a normally distributed error term. In our model, if congressman had a strong preference for opening Indian land to settlement he voted yes. If he did not, he voted no or did not vote. The dependent variable is VOTE. If a congressman voted in favor of removal, a value of 1 is assigned to his vote. If he voted no or did not vote his vote=0. Thus Vote = 1 if ßo + ßiXi +εi > 0 And Vote = 0 if ßo + ßiXi +εi < 0 Where Xi is a vector of the independent variables representing the characteristics of the district or the congressman himself and ßi is a vector of coefficients and εi is a normally distributed error term. We include the following independent variables. PARTY is a dummy variable that equals one if a congressman was a Democrat and zero if not. Jackson and the Democratic Party strongly favored removal. The main rival of the Jackson Democrats in 1830 was the National Republican Party, but there were also other factions in congress. These were the forerunners of the Whig Party formed a few years later Party affiliation is taken from Parsons (1978). The coefficient of PARTY is predicted to be positive. The economic and political interests of slaveholders’ districts on the Removal Act, the are measured by the variable SLAVE. As discussed earlier, all of the land covered by the Removal Act was in the South and open to slavery. Thus slaveholders

30

stood to gain from an increase in the price of slaves and from the increased representation of slaveholders in Congress. The SLAVE variable is defined as slaves as a percentage of total population in the congressional district. The Census of 1820 served as the data source in accounting for calculating all variables pertaining to the characteristics of the districts. While there were some slaves outside the South in 1820, this coefficient basically measures southern support for removal. The coefficient of SLAVE is predicted to be positive. 10 In order to account for general agriculture interests, the variable FARM was created. FARM is defined as the number of persons employed in agriculture as a percentage of total population in each district. The effect of this variable is more uncertain, since farmers stood to gain from opening more land if they or their children planned to move west, while the opening of more land could also reduce the value of existing farm land in the east. FARM allows us to see more specifically the coalitions that formed on the issue of removal and to test the robustness of the other coefficients. To capture western congressional support for removal, the dummy variable WEST was created. WEST equals 1 if the congressman was from a state west of the Proclamation Line of 1763 and 0 otherwise. Congressmen residing in these districts often supported public land policy favorable to settlers. The coefficient of WEST is predicted to be positive. States east of this line contained no federal lands covered by the preemption bill.

10

Most districts with slaves were in the southern US, although slavery was had not yet eliminated from New York and some other northern states in 1820. As an alternative, we replace the variable SLAVE with a dummy for SOUTH in the appendix. The results are similar.

31

Finally, to test more specifically for a possible connection between liberal land policy and the Removal Act 1830, the variable PREEMP was created. PREEMP equals 1 if a congressman voted in favor of the 1830 Preemption Act and O otherwise. Including PREEMP allows us to capture the attitudes of congressmen toward squatters. The sign of PREEMP is predicted to be positive, since removing Indians opened more land for squatters. There are two issues regarding the inclusion of the variable preemption in the estimates. We are assuming that Congressmen already knew how they would vote three days later and that this did not change as a result of the vote on Removal. We argue that this is reasonable since the votes were part of an on going series of votes on both sets of issues and Congressmen had stable preferences on these issues. The second issue concerns the fact that roughly 20% fewer Congressmen voted on removal. This might simply have reflected the fact the vote on removal was not close and that some simply did not show up. But there could have been some sort of strategic behavior that led some Congressmen not to show up for the vote. We group these non-voters with the congressmen who voted no, since they did not choose to go on record as supporting removal. We test for selection bias using the Heckman two-stage procedure and we also estimate the basic equation using only the 157 congressmen who voted on both bills. The vote on Removal was hotly contested and almost every Congressman voted on the bill. In all, 199 congressmen voted on the Removal Act of 1830. Three days later 158 congressmen voted on the Preemption Act of 1830, which passed comfortably 100 to 58.

32

But what about the relationship between support for preemption and support for removal? Out of the 158 congressmen who voted on the preemption bill, 157 had also voted on the removal bill three days earlier. In Table 1, equation 1 shows the result of a logit regressions to estimate the probability that a congressman would vote in favor of removal using the entire sample. Statistically, party and slave are statistically significant at the 1-% level. The other two variables, WEST and FARMER are positive but are not statistically significant. Equation 2 adds the variable PREEMP. PREEMP is defined as one if a Congressman also voted for Preemption bill three days later and zero if he voted against it or did not vote. In our model PREEMP is a measure of factors not captured by the other independent variables. It can be thought of as a measure of a congressman’s attitudes toward the rights of squatters not measured by the other independent variables. Thus a congressman who voted for preemption was more sympathetic to the spirit of “squatterism” than did another congressmen from the same party whose district had identical observable characteristics who did not vote for the preemption bill. The coefficients on Slave and PARTY remain positive and significant and the variable PREEMP is also statistically significant. The variable on west is negative, but again not significant. Once party, slave and vote on preemption are included, westerners were not more likely to favor removal than eastern representatives. Equation 3 shows the results of a logit regression using only the three statistically significant variables SLAVE, PARTY and PREEMP. Again, all three are significantly different from zero. Equation four shows the result of doing the same experiment using the Heckman twostage sample selection model. The same variables are statistically significant in most

33

specifications. Since there is no evidence of sample selection bias, in what follows we use the results from the entire sample. Table 2 uses the estimates in equation 2, to calculate the probability of a Congressman voting yes on the removal bill. Two of the variables are dichotomous (zero or one). A congressman was either a Democrat or not. Similarly, congressmen in this sample either voted for or against the General Preemption Bill. The value of SLAVE, however, takes on different values for each district (or for the state, for states which elected their congressmen at large). Thus we report the values for three levels of the variable SLAVE. These are zero (the minimum value of this variable and the modal value for congressmen outside the South), .32 (the mean value for southern congressmen) and .82 (the maximum value for any congressmen). A set of 12 probabilities is calculated. A Congressman was either a Democrat or not, would vote for preemption or vote no (or not vote). With respect to slavery, we calculate the estimated probability of how a Congressman from a district with no slaves (the typical for non-southern state); the mean number of slaves in a southern state; and the highest proportion of slaves of any district in the South. 11 These can be interpreted as follows. A southern Democrat from a district with the mean ratio of slaves to total population has an estimated probability of .81 of voting for removal if he voted against preemption, but a .92 probability of voting for removal if he voted for preemption. A National Republican in the typical southern district had an

11

As an alternative, we also estimated the same equations using a dummy variable for southern rather than slave. For the whole sample the results are roughly similar to what we get using the mean number of slaves. These results are reported in the appendix.

34

estimated probability of .30 of voting for removal if he opposed preemption, but a .54 probability of voting for removal if he had also supported preemption. The estimates are very different in districts without slaves. A Democratic congressman from a district with no slaves is estimated to have a .43 probability of voting for removal. If he voted for preemption, the probability rises to .68. The probability that a National Republican from a district with no slaves who voted against preemption would vote for removal was only .07. This increased to .17 if he voted for preemption. Finally, for a district with the maximum proportion of slaves, the estimated probability of voting for removal ranged from .87 to .95 for non-Democrats and from .985 to .995 for Democrats. Is this a large number? The effect of a vote for preemption increased the chance of a typical congressman voting for removal by 10 to 25%. This is roughly a third the size of the effect of party on voting behavior. Looking at the voting state by state reveals interesting detail behind these statistical results. Our argument is that all slaveholders would have a reason for favoring removal and preemption, even if there was no Indian or federal land in the state. In South Carolina the state with the highest proportion of slaves to total population, and no federal land or tribal land, all nine representatives voted in favor of removal and six voted in favor of preemption, with only one representative voting no and two not voting. All seven of Georgia’s representatives voted for both bills, even though there was no federal land in Georgia. In Tennessee, a western state, eight representatives voted for removal and one, David Crockett (who is best known for his later role in the Texas war for independence against Mexico), voted against the removal bill. All nine favored

35

preemption. In Ohio, only two Congressmen voted for removal and these were both Democrats who also favored preemption. In Virginia, fourteen of twenty-five Congressmen voted for removal and nine in favor of preemption. Conclusion What does these results tell us? Congressmen who supported preemption were more likely to support removal, even when party and section are controlled for. The idea that settlers had rights to land extended to Indian land as well as public land. Some settlers clearly viewed Indians in unfavorable, racist terms, but some did not. But the overall ethic, the “recklessness” that Robbins describes, favored expansion on to unused land as a right. The willingness of settlers to push into Indian country made it very costly to protect the rights of Indian tribes, both in terms of actual cash outlays, possible loss of life, and political cost. Such problems made the protection of minority Indian rights difficult to achieve in a democratic society. These results also help explain the shift in the political stance of southern congressmen toward land policies. Southern congressmen in the 1850’s were virtually all opposed to making it easier to acquire land more cheaply. Indeed, according to Roger Ransom,

Settlement of western lands had always been a major bone of contention for slave and free-labor farms. The manner in which the federal government distributed land to people could have a major impact on the nature of farming in a region. Northerners wanted to encourage the settlement of farms, which would depend primarily on family labor by offering cheap land in small parcels. Southerners feared that such a policy would make it more difficult to keep areas open for settlement by slaveholders who wanted to establish large plantations. This all came to a head with the "Homestead Act" of 1860 that would provide 160 acres of free land for anyone who wanted to settle and farm the land. Northern and western congressmen strongly favored the bill in the House of Representatives but

36

the measure received only a single vote from slave states' representatives. The bill passed, but President Buchanan vetoed it. (Ransom, 2001]

Indeed, the Homestead Act was not passed until 1862 when the South was not represented in Congress. Yet in the 1820s, southern congressmen strongly favored cheap land policies and played a major role in the passage of the Preemption Act of 1830. More broadly, the South and West seemed to have been good candidates to be political allies against the manufacturing oriented northeast. Both regions, for example, favored lower tariffs. But after 1840, the South and West split on the issue of a liberal land policy. Why did the southern and northwestern congressmen split on the land question? Kanazawa leaves it to “Future research [to]. . . examine and characterize the shifting coalitions on public lands policies that occurred between the 1820s and the 1850’s in order to understand how and why southern support for cheap land eroded over time.”(p.248) A reason southern support “eroded” may have been that southern congressmen no longer had an interest in making it easy to acquire public land as apart of a broader program of opening Indian land to settlement. In our view, in the 1820s and 1830s southern congressmen found common cause with northwestern congressmen in favoring a liberal land policy as part of an overall policy favoring expansion and Indian removal. After 1840, however, the South came to oppose a liberal land policy since making easy to establish family farmers favored the growth of the influence of the free states. Further, there was no longer a quid pro quo for the South: southern congressmen could no longer favor a liberal land policy in return for opening Indian tribal lands for slavery. After

37

1840 there were not any longer major Indian nations in the path of the expansion of the cotton/slave economy. A cheap land policy favored an increase in the number of family farmers in the Northwest and this increased the influence of the non-slaveholding states.

38

Bibliography Allen, Douglas W. (1991), "Homesteading and Property Rights. or, 'How the West was Really Won'." Journal of Law and Economics 34, 1-23. Anderson, William L. ed., (1991), Cherokee Removal: Before and After, Athens, University of Georgia Press. Anderson, Terry L., and Hill, Peter J. (1990), "The Race for Property Rights." Journal of Law and Economics, v33, n1 (April 1990): 177-97 Atack, Jeremy, and Peter Passell. (1994) A New Economic View of American History. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1994. Atack, Jeremy, Bateman, Fred, and Parker, William, “Northern Agriculture and the Westward Movement,” in Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman, editors, The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Volume II, New York, and Cambridge U.K. The Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 285-324. Barrington, Linda, (1999) “Native Americans and Economic History,” in L. Barrington (ed.) The Other Side of the Frontier, Boulder Colo., Westview Press, 1999. Carlson, Leonard A., (1985)“What Was it Worth? Economic and Historical Aspects of Determining Awards in Indian Land Claims Cases,” in Imre Sutton (ed.), Irredeemable America: The Indians Estate and Land Claims, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1985. Juricek, John T. (Ed), (1989) Georgia Treaties, 1733-1763, Washington, University Press of America, 1989, vol. 11 of Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607-1789., Alden T. Vaughn, general editor. Kanazawa, Mark T. (1996) "Possession is Nine Points of the Law: The Political Economy of Early Public Land Disposal." Explorations in Economic History 33 (1996): 227-49. Martis, Kenneth C. (1982) The Historical Atlas of the United States 1789-1983. London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1982 Parsons, Stanley, et. al. (1978) United States Congressional Districts 1788-1841. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978 Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green, eds., (1995)The Cherokee Removal. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995. Prucha, Francis P. (1984) The Great Father. Vol. I. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 1984. _________"Andrew Jackson's Indian Policy: A Reassessment." Journal of American History 26. (1969). 527-39. _________ (ed.), (1990), Documents of American Indian Policy, Second Edition, Expanded, Lincoln, The University of Nebraska Press, 1990. __________ (1990), Atlas of American Indian Affairs, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

39

Ransom, Roger L. "The Economics of the Civil War." EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples, August 25 2001 URL http://www.eh.net/encyclopedia/contents/ransom.civil.war.us.php Remini, Robert V. (1981), Andrew Jackson: Volume Two, The Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1981 Remini, Robert V. (2001), Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, New York, Viking Books, 2001. Robbins, Roy M. (1942, 1962), Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776-1936. Lincoln Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1962, originally published, 1942. Roberts, Mark A. (1997), “Terms of Surrender: An Econometric Analysis of the Congressional Vote on Removal,” Honors Thesis, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 1997. Schoenleber, Charles H. (1986) "The Rise of the New West." Diss. University of Wisconsin, 1986. Spicer, Edward H., (1969) A Short History of the Indians of the United States, New York, D. Van Nostrand, 1969. Statz, Ronald N. (1991), “Rhetoric Versus Reality: The Indian Policy of Andrew Jackson,” in William L. Anderson (ed.), Cherokee Removal: Before and After, Athens, the University of Georgia Press 1991. United States Census Office (1821) Census for 1820. Washington D. C. Journal of the House of House of Representatives of the United Sates 21st Congress, First Session, Washington, GPO. Wallace, Anthony F.C., (1993) The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians, New York, Hill and Wang, 1993. Walton, Gary and Rockoff, Hugh, History of the American Economy, Eighth Edition, Fort Worth, the Dryden Press, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1998. Weiman, David, (1991), “Peopling the Land by Lottery? The Market in Public Lands and the Regional Differentiation of Territory on the Georgia Frontier,” Journal of Economic History, v51, no. 4 (December 1991): 835-60 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, Little House on the Prairie, New York, Scholastic Press, 1953, first published 1935. Wishart, David M. (1995) "Evidence of Surplus Production in the Cherokee Nation Prior to Removal." The Journal of Economic History 55(1995): 120-38. Young, Mary, Red Skins, Ruffle Shirts, and Red Necks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830-1860, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1961.

40

Table 1 Logit Regression Results For the Vote on the Removal Act of 1830 Using The Proportion of Slaves as an Independent Variable
Variable/ Standard Error _cons Party Slave Eq. 1 -2.493 *** (-0.60) 2.317 *** (0.40) 5.243 *** (1.36) 1.870 (2.64) 0.170 (0.44) Eq 2 | -2.974 *** (0.63) 2.37 *** (0.41) 4.90 *** (1.41) 2.09 (2.64) -0.274 (0.47) 1.09 *** (0.40) Eq 3 -2.60 *** (0.423) 2.326 *** (0.403) 5.440 *** (1.211) Eq 4 -3.39 *** (.871) 2.268 *** (0.41) 5.885 *** (1.30) Eq 5 -2.59 *** (0.48) 2.212 *** (0.44) 4.654 *** (1.31)* ** *** *** 1.171 *** (0.43)

Farmer West Preemption Inverse Mills Ratio Number of obs = Log likelihood = Pseudo R2 =

1.0179 *** (.371)

199 -94.760 0.313

199 -90. 836 0.341

199 --91.262 0.338

1.138 *** (0.39) 1.944 (1.84) 157 -91.262 0.338

157
-72.854

*** significant at .01 * significant at .10

Definitions of Variables VOTE: 0-1 variable. 1 if vote for Removal Act, 0 otherwise. PARTY: 0-1 variable; 1 if Democrat, 0 otherwise. SLAVE: Number of slaves divided by total population. FARM: Per capita farmers; number of farmers divided by total population INDIAN: 0-1 variable; 1 if district was located in State containing Indian 1" WEST: 0-1 variable; 1 if the district was located west of the Proclamation Line of 1763; 0 otherwise. PREEMP: 0-1 variable; I if congressman voted in favor of 1830 Preemption Act; 0 otherwise. Sources: Parsons, et. al., United States Congressional Districts; Martis, The Historical Atlas of the United States Congressional Districts; Census for 1820; Journal of the House, 21st Congress, first session.

41

Table 2

Estimated Probability of a Yes Vote on the Removal Act of 1830 Using the Proportion of Slaves as an independent variable
Democrat Preemp = no Slave/capita Slaves = zero Mean for South Maximum
0.432 0.813 0.985

Non Democrat Preemp=yes Preemp = no Preemp = yes
0.678 0.923 0.995 0.069 0.298 0.865 0.170 0.540 0.947

42

Appendix Table 1 Logit Regression Results For the Vote on the Removal Act of 1830 Using South as a Dummy Variable
Variable/ Stand Error _constant Party Eq 1 Eq 2b Eq 3b Eq 4b -2.793 *** -3.251 *** -2.702 *** -4.486 *** (.60) (0.63) (0.43) (1.07) 2.434 *** 2.497 *** 2.394 *** 2.328 *** (.40) 1.736 *** (.437) 3.135 (2.54) -.216 (.45) (0.42) 1.654 *** (0.45) 3.003 (2.53) -0.683 (0.49) 1.372 *** (0.47) (0.40) 1.805. *** (0.39) (0.41) 2.074 *** (0.43) Eq 5b -2.730 *** (-0.50) 2.332 *** (.434) 1.575 *** (0.43)

South Farmer West Preemption Inverse Mills Ratio Number of obs = Log likelihood = Pseudo R2 =

1.000 *** (0.37)

199 -90.365 0.3446

199 -91.997 0.333

1.1670 *** (0.40) 4.397 * (2.33) 157 -90.14230 0.3462

1.165 *** (0.43) * 157 -72.854 0.329

*** significant at .01 * significant at .10 Definitions of Variables VOTE: 0-1 variable. 1 if vote for Removal Act, 0 otherwise. PARTY: 0-1 variable; 1 if Democrat, 0 otherwise. FARM: Per capita farmers; number of farmers divided by total population INDIAN: 0-1 variable; 1 if district was located in State containing Indian 1" WEST: 0-1 variable; 1 if the district was located west of the Proclamation Line of 1763; 0 otherwise. PREEMP: 0-1 variable; I if congressman voted in favor of 1830 Preemption Act; 0 otherwise. SOUTH: 0-1 variable, 1 if a district in a southern state, 0 otherwise.

Sources: Parsons, et. al., United States Congressional Districts; Martis, The Historical Atlas of the United States Congressional Districts; Census for 1820; Journal of the House, 21st Congress, first session.

43

Appendix Table 2

Estimated Probability of a Yes Vote on the Removal Act of 1830 Using the South Dummy Variable
Democrat Preemp = no Non-South South
0.424 0.8170

Non Democrat Preemp=yes Preemp = no Preemp = yes
0.666701 0.924915 0.0630 0.290 0.154 0.526

44

Map 2

Source: Prucha, Atlas of American Indian Affairs, p. 22

45

Map 3

Prucha, Atlas of American Indian Affairs, p. 23.

46

Map 4

Source: Prucha, Atlas of American Indian Affairs, p. 25

47

48