66. Land Claims and the Ratification of the Articles of Confederation

Unquestionably the most important political event of the latter years of the war was the final ratification of the Articles of Confederation. Like many other fateful political and economic changes made at the end of the war, this measure, put through as a wartime necessity, became effective only in time of peace. For American radicals, this represented a disastrous cultural lag between the social conditions that had arisen and the institutions that were established for very different times and purposes.

Maryland, under the firm political control of a tightly knit oligarchy of land speculators, blocked the required unanimity for accepting the Articles of Confederation, which had passed Congress in late 1777, by refusing to ratify unless Virginia’s vast claims to the western lands were nationalized and placed under a Continental Congress that the speculators could hope to control. During 1778 and 1779 the Virginia Assembly directly repudiated the huge land claims of the Indiana, Illinois, and Wabash Companies, whose membership included the rulers of Maryland, overriding the Virginia conservatives, headed by Benjamin Harrison, Edmund Pendleton, and Carter Braxton, who had close commercial connections with the land speculators, especially the Philadelphia merchants Robert Morris, the Whartons, and the Gratz brothers.

The liberal forces in Virginia, led by Thomas Jefferson and George Mason, nevertheless faced a difficult struggle; they were, for example, blocked in their efforts to open up a land office for the western lands to throw them open for settlement and to end the speculator threat once and for all. The conservatives opposed this plan not only because of their connections with the land speculators, but also because widespread settlement of the West would draw off population from the East, lowering the value of eastern property. The liberals, however, were aided by pressure from the western settlers led by Col. Arthur Campbell.

The defeat of the speculators seemed assured during 1778 and 1779, and a land-office bill was finally passed in June 1779. Mason’s bill, however, gave firm preemption rights only to existing settlers, and failed to provide them for future settlers, who would naturally form the main body of the population of the West. An all-powerful Virginia commission was therefore able to sell the virgin lands at 40 pounds for 100 acres (in depreciated currency) to anyone who cared to buy. Jefferson’s provision of granting only 50 acres to each settler was thus rejected, and no limitation was placed on the amount that could be purchased by any nonsettlers. The result was that within a few years the precious western lands fell into the hands of individual absentee land speculators, who paid in a still further depreciated currency. Robert Morris, for example, later came to own 1.5 million acres of western lands.

Their claims ended in Virginia by Mason’s 1779 bill, the powerful land companies turned once again to Congress, and argued once more that Congress had plenary sovereignty over western lands, sovereignty which had “devolved” from Great Britain. Congress, they claimed, should keep Virginia from putting its land law into effect. Thus, Congress was asked to assert power over western lands which even the Articles would deny to it! But logic yielded to the aggrandizement of power, and, in early October 1779, Congress voted 6–5 to advance the land companies’ proposals to a committee packed with their supporters. In mid-October, the committee reported a recommendation for Virginia and other states to suspend all sales and grants of their western lands until the end of the war. Congress voted for the resolution, with only Virginia and North Carolina opposed.

Virginia did not passively accede to this aggrandizement of central power, and led by George Mason, it quickly issued a strong remonstrance against the congressional invasion of its sovereignty on behalf of land speculators. New York, however, was scarcely as sturdy, and under the pressure of Congress, in mid-February 1780 it agreed to cede its dubious claims to the lands of the Iroquois, to make them the property of the Continental Congress. Congress agreed to this cession in September, urging other landed states to cede voluntarily their own claims for the sake of confederation, and even Virginia’s delegates approved. Connecticut also ceded its claims to western lands in Congress in October 1780, reserving to itself a tract of three million acres in northern Ohio (the Western Reserve). Thus began the central government’s fateful ownership and sovereignty over virgin lands. In this way, sovereignty, at least over all territories not yet states, was placed solely in the hands of Congress—a vast accretion of central power that for the most part went unchallenged.

Virginia’s turnabout was largely caused by the 1780 invasion of the South, prompting a panicky and irrational urge to ratify the Confederation and thus gain more effective northern support for the war effort—support which never materialized. The liberal administration of Virginia, headed by Jefferson as governor and by George Mason, was more interested in justice for the settlers than in power for Virginia. Hence, they overlooked future questions of central power and ceded the lands north of the Ohio to Congress. There were, however, certain conditions attached to their agreement, the most important being that the Indian land claims to the region (i.e., the claims of the land companies) be voided, and that Virginia be guaranteed the Kentucky lands. Congress refused to void the company land claims, and the land companies put up a furious barrage of propaganda, including subsidized pamphlets by Samuel Wharton, Benjamin Franklin, and Tom Paine, all of Philadelphia. Paine’s hiring out to the Indiana Company to present its case in a pamphlet, Public Good, continued the practice of selling his pen and his principles for hire that he had begun the year before in his dealings with La Luzerne. (After the Deane-Lee affair, the impecunious Paine quietly allowed himself to join the paid ranks of the very French government that he had recently so strenuously opposed.) It goes without saying that the developing pattern of this sellout to the privileged interests dealt a grievous blow to the radical cause in America, for which Paine had been the most eloquent and popular champion.

In October 1780, Congress again agreed to all of Virginia’s conditions except the crucial voiding of speculative land claims. The following January, the Virginia Assembly made the Mason offer official by voting to cede the lands north of the Ohio—the “Old Northwest”—provided that the Mason conditions were met.

In the meantime, Maryland’s intransigence was also being undermined by the threat of British invasion or raids from the Chesapeake. Appealing for naval protection, Maryland was urged by La Luzerne, who was anxious for the war effort, to ratify the Confederation. Bludgeoned by this virtual blackmail, Maryland finally ratified the Confederation on February 2, 1781, after the Maryland Senate was convinced that their claims would still be pressed in Congress. Meanwhile, Virginia clung to control of the lands despite repeated attempts in Congress to dislodge it. Congress finally celebrated the enactment of the Articles of Confederation on March 1, 1781.

The struggle over the western lands raged for three more years within the Confederation. Finally, driven by greed for revenue to be derived from the virgin public domain, Congress tacitly agreed to ignore land-company claims, with only New Jersey and Maryland objecting. Virginia’s northwest lands were finally ceded to the suzerainty and total ownership of the Congress on March 1, 1784.