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 municipal 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 Massachusetts, as indifferent to natural boundaries as a "state of mind" (which Massachusetts has often been defined to be), respectful only of imaginary lines of latitude and the Mississippi River, the Spanish border. Little Connecticut multiplied its latitude 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. Massachusetts 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 constitution 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 shores, 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 space of a single lifetime the property of a few million human beings, their heirs, and assigns forever. The "men of always" [Footnote: The Iroquois, according to Châteaubriand, 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 ships 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.