THE LAND LAWS AGAINST THE POOR
From the very beginning of the government, the land laws were arranged to discriminate against the poor settler. Instead of laws providing simple and inexpensive ways for the poor to get land, the laws were distorted into a highly effective mechanism by which companies of capitalists, and individual capitalists, secured vast tracts for trivial sums. These capitalists then either held the land, or forced settlers to pay exorbitant prices for comparatively small plots. No laws were in existence compelling the purchaser to be a bona fide settler. Absentee landlordism was the rule. The capitalist companies were largely composed of Northern, Eastern and Southern traders and bankers. The evidence shows that they employed bribery and corruption on a great scale, either in getting favorable laws passed, or in evading such laws as were on the statute books by means of the systematic purchase of the connivance of Land Office officials.
By act of Congress, passed on April 21, 1792, the Ohio Land Company, for example, received 100,000 acres, and in the same year it bought 892,900 acres for $642,856.66. But this sum was not paid in money. The bankers and traders composing the company had purchased, at a heavy discount, certificates of public debt and army land warrants, and were allowed to tender these as payment. [Footnote: U. S. Senate Executive Documents, Second Session, Nineteenth Congress, Doc. No. 63.] The company then leisurely disposed of its land to settlers at an enormous profit. Nearly all of the land companies had banking adjuncts. The poor settler, in order to settle on land that a short time previously had been national property, was first compelled to pay the land company an extortionate price, and then was forced to borrow the money from the banking adjuncts, and give a heavy mortgage, bearing heavy interest, on the land. [Footnote: U. S. Senate Documents, First Session, Twenty-fourth Congress, 1835-36, Doc. No. 216: 16.] The land companies always took care to select the very best lands. The Government documents of the time are full of remonstrances from legislatures and individuals complaining of these seizures, under form of law, of the most valuable areas. The tracts thus appropriated comprised timber and mineral, as well as agricultural, land.