Mr. Clay, of Alabama, (rising at the same time with Mr. Clay of Kentucky,) said he had a few words for this distinguished commissioner of the public lands.
(Mr. Clay, of Kentucky. A bad, a very bad commissioner.)
Mr. Clay, of Alabama, had understood this commissioner to say, that there had been a loss of three millions of dollars, occasioned by preëmption laws, which prevented the sale of the public lands. But he wished to call the attention of the senate to some documentary facts, in regard to the assumption that government suffered a loss by allowing preëmption, and that the land would sell for more under other circumstances. The requisite documents were on the table, (Mr. Clay said,) by which it would appear, that in 1822, there was an average excess of three cents above the minimum price, in 1823 only of five, and in 1824 no more than of two cents. At that time no general preëmption law had been enacted. Afterwards there was a still further falling off, and in 1828 the excess was only one cent; in 1829 the same. These facts would put down the assumption, that government had lost any thing by preëmption laws. The document to which Mr. Clay referred had been obtained only within the last ten days, and it appeared from that, that up to the present time, the excess had been little more than two cents per acre.
Mr. Clay argued, that the preëmption laws were calculated to put down fraud instead of encouraging it. The only fraud was that of speculators, and the charge of it against the settlers was utterly groundless. To oppose this system, and to continue that of public auction, was to minister to the cupidity of speculators; and the most effectual remedy against fraud was to be found in preëmption laws.]
Mr. Clay, of Kentucky, said he knew how unequal this contest was. A number of senators from the new states were ever ready to spring up and eulogize the preëmption laws; but, unequal as it was, while he had a place here, he would contend for those interests of the whole people, which he was endeavoring to protect.
He would repel the imputation of the senator from Mississippi against the old states. It was not the old states, but some of the new, that were grasping at the public domain. If there was such a spirit anywhere, it was not in the old states, but somewhere else.
The subject of the public lands had been forced upon him by the political party of the senator from Mississippi several years ago. The land bill for distributing the proceeds of them was the consequence; but was there anything of grasping, even in that? It did not propose to touch the land system, to alter or affect the price or the mode of sale. The old, the tried system was admirable. Under the auspices of such men as Jeremiah Morrow, nothing human could have been more perfect or just. But what did that measure propose? To distribute the whole net proceeds of the lands among all the states, old and new, allowing to the new an extra bounty of fifteen per cent. What kind of grasping by the old states was this? And how was the equitable measure received by some of the new states? The senator was mistaken; it was not the old states to whom his imputation would apply; the hand that made the grip was thrust from some other quarter.
He had no part in the charge against the senator in relation to lands in Mississippi; but how had he made out in his vindication of the officers of the government? The commissioner of the land office was not to be believed, because he differed from him; a commissioner appointed by the immortal Jackson, governor of Ohio, and well worthy to be sent on a foreign mission, was not to be believed, because his views did not agree with those of the senator from Mississippi. But could the senator say that the two or three millions of acres taken up by preëmptions might not have produced, at public sales, three millions of dollars, which the commissioner had estimated to have been lost? Had not the senator himself stated, at a former session, that many of these lands were worth fifty dollars per acre?
Mr. Clay, after a few remarks on certain frauds in Louisiana, and on the alleged frauds in Mississippi, recurred to the case of the valuable land in Indiana, for which there is a contest between individuals and the legislature. He hoped, if either party should get the land, it would be the whole state. But the legislature was now in session, and what did they seem themselves to think of individual preëmption rights, when not the whole union, but that state alone was concerned? They gave thirty-nine votes against individual preëmption rights, and only five votes in favor. He would read a short account of the debate on this point.
[Here Mr. Clay read parts of several speeches in the Indiana legislature, denouncing the preëmption system, and showing that attempts were made by speculators, under the garb of poor settlers, to appropriate the land which had been recently acquired from the Miami Indians.]