CHAPTER X

THE NATIONAL ESTATE

AFTER a period of twenty-four years in opposition, the Democratic Party returned to only partial control of the Government in 1885. Its President was a Northern Democrat, selected because of his ability to widen the schism in the Republican Party. The House of Representatives was under the control of Southern Democrats, who reëlected John G. Carlisle as Speaker when Congress reassembled in December. The Senate remained Republican throughout the administration, making it impossible for party legislation to be enacted, but favoring somewhat the passage of non-partisan laws that had to do with the management of the national estate.

Cabinet

The Cabinet of Cleveland had at its head Thomas F. Bayard, of Delaware, a Senator since 1869, who had been Cleveland's a candidate for the presidential nomination in 1880 and 1884. His father had preceded him in the Senate, and his family had been famous in the State and National administrations since independence. Under his direction the United States withdrew from the aggressive attitude assumed by Blaine with respect to the isthmian canal, and accepted the status of joint interest as agreed upon in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. The remaining members of the Cabinet were untested leaders, necessarily so, since their party had been so long in opposition. Daniel Manning, Secretary of the Treasury, was a New York journalist. William C. Whitney, Secretary of the Navy, was a New York anti-Tammany lawyer and son-in-law of Senator Payne, a Standard Oil magnate from Ohio. Lamar, the Secretary of the Interior, and Garland, the Attorney-General, had been Confederate officers. William F. Vilas, of Wisconsin, whose oration at a reunion of the Army of the Tennessee had made him a leading mem

ber of his party, was made Postmaster-General. There was nothing in the personnel of the Cabinet to give a clue as to what its policies would be.

The Republican campaign charges of disloyalty in the Democratic Party had included repeated assertions that the Democratic Party proposed to vote national Civil War pensions for Confederate veterans who had tried pensions to break the Union. The votes of former Union soldiers were asked to prevent such treason, and to make possible continued generous treatment of the loyal veterans. The attitude of the Cleveland Administration with reference to pensions was watched for signs of hostility to the men who saved the Union. Cleveland's record as a candidate had been seriously attacked because he had not enlisted in the Civil War, although of military age, but this attack had been weakened by the fact that Blaine of similar age was equally without a military record. The Grand Army of the Republic, which was formed in April, 1866, at Springfield, Illinois, now became the official representative of the veterans of the Civil War. Its growth had been slow for a decade, until after Congress passed an arrears of pensions bill in 1879.

The military pension system of the United States was founded upon the principle that disability incurred in the service entitled the veteran to a pension from the Government. The number of pensioners after the Civil War reached a total of 242,755 by 1879. In this year Hayes against his better judgment signed a law providing that every pensioner was entitled to receive his annuity not from the date of the award, but from the date of mustering out. Every pensioner on the rolls thus became entitled to receive arrears of pension to cover the interval between his discharge and the beginning of regular payment, running to a total of hundreds or even thousands of dollars in individual cases. The financial effect of this law had not even been estimated at the date of its passage. In addition to the back payments entailed, new pensioners appeared upon the rolls in large numbers, tempted by the heavy and in

creasing bonus of arrears. Pension attorneys, who secured the affidavits and prepared the papers, charged extortionate fees against the arrears, and were incited to hunt out possible pensioners and induce them to file their claims. Some of the firms of attorneys published private newspapers for propaganda work among the soldiers, and all of them encouraged the expansion and development of the Grand Army of the Republic, which was not for them a patriotic order, but a machine for detecting the presence of new pensioners and for bringing political pressure in favor of even greater liberality. For its members the Grand Army was a patriotic and devotional society; the claims attorneys used it to increase their profits. The membership of the Grand Army grew rapidly after 1879. Corporal James Tanner became its commander in 1882, and a campaign was started for the passage of a new general law for the payment of pensions based not upon disability in the service, but upon subsequent disability or upon service alone. A dependents' pension bill vetoed by Cleveland in 1887 brought him under the displeasure of the promoters of such legislation.

The private pension bill was a greater abuse than the general legislation because in hundreds of cases individuals not entitled to pension by any general rule obtained the friendly intervention of their Congressmen to secure the favor by direct special legislation. The private bills included cases of deserters with the effrontery to seek aid from the country they had betrayed; and trumped-up cases, where the evidence frequently showed reasons why the pension should not be granted. Many of them covered cases that had been disallowed by the Commissioner of Pensions for cause. Cleveland was the first President to examine the private pension bills critically and to veto those that were unworthy. Toward the end of his Administration he vetoed them by the score, arousing professed indignation among Republicans, who claimed that the vetoes revealed lack of interest in the soldier. The Republican Party pledged itself to more generous treatment, and redeemed

the promise, after Harrison had made Corporal Tanner Commissioner of Pensions, by passing a dependents' pension law in 1890.

frauds

The willingness of Cleveland to perform ungracious acts of public honesty led him to undertake a reform of the administration of the General Land Office, which Public land had been wide open since the passage of the Homestead Law, and which had been administered "to the advantage of speculation and monopoly, private and corporate, rather than in the public interest." "I am satisfied," said Sparks, the Commissioner of the Land Office, "that thousands of claims without foundation in law or equity, involving millions of acres of public land, had been annually passed to patent upon the single proposition that nobody but the Government had any adverse interests." "Cleveland seems determined that the rich shall obey the laws as well as the poor," said the Idaho Avalanche.

The national estate of the United States came into existence when the original States ceded their surplus lands to Congress to be used for the benefit of the Union and for the creation of additional States. Subsequent purchases added to the area of the public domain thus created. With the exception of the thirteen original States and the first three to be admitted, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and West Virginia and Texas, making eighteen in all, the United States itself provided the land upon which its commonwealths were erected. In disposing of the land to individual owners, two general policies prevailed; the earlier, a tidewater policy, framed under the dominance of the original States, offered lands for sale and assumed that there would be profits accruing from the process to be used for national advantage.

In 1841 the West itself became the controlling element in land distribution, marking its arrival by the passage of a general preëmption law that recognized that the settler who made a farm out of virgin land was a public benefactor entitled to a reward. Squatters who were found in residence when any tract of public land was placed on the market

were allowed to buy their land at a minimum price in advance of the public auction sale. The West continued to ask for still more liberal treatment of the settler, and in 1862 Congress accepted the principle of the Homestead Act, whereby the citizen who made his farm and lived upon it for a term of years was given title to it free of charge.

The Homestead Law drew the attention of all the world to the free lands of the West, while the continental railroads, constructed after the Civil War, made them easily accessible. The rush of population swamped the General Land Office, as it did the Post-Office, and both broke down, partly through fraud and partly through the lack of an intelligent civil service. Abuses in the land system were noted in the three administrations preceding Cleveland's, and became more imposing as the area of free land dwindled around 1885.

The principal abuses that needed to be corrected included frauds in the homestead system, fraudulent preemption, theft of public land by illegal enclosures, theft of the natural resources, timber or mineral, and the fraudulent attempts of railroads to secure their land grants without complying with the terms of the award.

The theory of the land laws was that the lands were to be disposed of in small tracts for immediate occupancy and cultivation. Everything was done to make it difficult to acquire land for speculative purposes or to build up large holdings. The system worked well in farming regions in the Mississippi Valley, but on the Western plains, where large areas were without sufficient rainfall, it made no provision for the only way in which the lands could be used. Here the lands were needed in large tracts for grazing and timber purposes and could not well be used in section tracts or less.

The Homestead and Preëmption Laws were repeatedly violated in the interest of persons who were building up large estates on the public domain. Sparks, the new Commissioner of the General Land Office, took office toward the end of March, 1885, and a few days later began his attack