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To: muawiyah
Obviously linking voting to land ownership in the early 19th century was ridiculous and a concept readily abandoned.

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.

25 posted on 01/19/2013 6:58:13 PM PST by Pontiac (The welfare state must fail because it is contrary to human nature and diminishes the human spirit.)
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To: Pontiac
Virginia was the most populated state at the time of the Revolution. Today it's territory includes much of Minnesota, all of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia AND, lo and behold, hunks of New York and Pennsylvania.

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.

26 posted on 01/19/2013 7:20:45 PM PST by muawiyah
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