Posted on 01/18/2013 10:34:11 PM PST by nickcarraway
I wholeheartedly agree.
It was all the gub'mnt could do to get people to buy any of it. Eventually, by the time Lincoln was President, they started giving it away!
Obviously linking voting to land ownership in the early 19th century was ridiculous and a concept readily abandoned.
I'd suggest you re-read some of the speeches where property is mentioned because THEY DON'T MEAN LAND ~ they mean SLAVES!
The Islamic theory of leadership is clearly derived from the Roman Empire’s theory of leadership ~ tribalism is far more democratic, so that’s not the source.
The property requirement was pretty broad, and included livestock (which slaves essentially were under the law at the time). Benjamin Franklin opposed the property requirement, and made the famous observation:
Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election, the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers-but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or the jackass?
No state other than the original thirteen ever had a property requirement because, as you point out, all those states were on the frontier and property ownership was laughably easy to come by. The only effect of property requirements on the frontier would be to punish shop owners and town doctors and pastors and anyone else who might rent space in growing towns -- essentially discouraging any form of commerce other than farming.
I am talking in regards to voting in the states you are talking about territories.
Yes land in the territories was cheap because improving the land to the point that it could be farmed was a long and laborious process that killed many of the men that tried.
Land in the 13 original states was not cheap and no one was giving it away. Also remember that who could vote and even who could own land was in the hands of the states.
Conditions in Virginia or places once part of Virginia are controlling in this argument until well into the 1840s.
Charles Lee and others could tell you all about what happened to land prices ~ he went bankrupt selling land to pioneers for less than he paid for it
Clark and others made a few bucks because they assembled Revolutionary War land patents from veterans or their relatives ~ plus, he had his own land grants.
New England was a minor portion of the country important more for the number of Senators they picked up than the value of their farm land at that time.
Earlier in the immediate post Revolutionary War period a number of my ancestors actually relocated from what is now Central New York to Vermont ~ they imagined that area could be reduced to agricultural and forestry products ~ instead sheep farmers moved in and drove them out with the stench.
From there they moved to the Ohio Valley ~ one of them became a land agent and sold most of the land in what is now the state of Indiana. I've read through his journals.
Once the Louisiana Territory was subjected to prelimary surveying, the price of land throughout the now Midwest crashed ~
America became a nation of landowners ~ all you had to do was move West. New states were forming right and left in the North and the South, and just as rapidly the franchise was expanded.
The ownership of slaves was no longer the sole criteria for voting.
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