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The Equity Effects of Public Land Speculation in Iowa: Large versus Small Speculators

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Robert P. Swierenga
Robert P. Swierenga
Affiliation:
Kent State University
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Extract

The economic impact of American public land policies in the nineteenth century can be assessed either in terms of their efficiency or equity effects, that is, their impact on national growth rates or on income distribution. Robert W. Fogel and Jack Rutner recently explored the growth question and discovered that federal land policy had a positive but minimal effect on economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century. This suggests that the equity question is perhaps more important than the efficiency issue, a point made several years earlier by Douglass C. North.

Type
Note
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , December 1974 , pp. 1008 - 1020
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1974

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References

For assistance in preparing this study, I wish to thank Stanley L. Engerman of the University of Rochester, Allan G. Bogue of the University of Wisconsin, Eileen Rickard of the Kent State University Computer Center, and Harry Kamens of the Kent State University Libraries.

1 Fogel, Robert W. and Rutner, Jack, “The Efficiency Effects of Federal Land Policy, 1850–1900: A Report of Some Provisional Findings,” in Aydelotte, William O., Bogue, Allan G., and Fogel, Robert William (eds.), Dimensions of Quantitative Research in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 390–418.Google Scholar

2 North, Douglass C., Growth and Welfare in the American Past: A New Economic History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), pp. 135–136Google Scholar; (Second Edition, 1974), pp. 128–129. The neglect of equity problems on the part of economic historians is noted by Fishlow, Albert and Fogel, Robert W., “Quantitative Economic History: An Interim Evaluation, Past Trends and Present Tendencies,” The Journal of Economic History, XXXI (March 1971), 31.Google Scholar

3 Swierenga, Robert P., “Land Speculator ‘Profits’ Reconsidered: Central Iowa as a Test Case,” XXVI (March 1966), 1–28Google Scholar, reprinted in Swierenga, (ed.), Quantification in American History: Theory and Research (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 317–340.Google Scholar

4 Swierenga, Robert P., “The Iowa Land Records Collection: Periscope to the Past,” Books at Iowa, XIII (November 1970), 25–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 A complete equity analysis, of course, must include the relative earnings on land purchases of the settler-speculators who acquired from 161 to 600 acres of government land, but the analytical problems are exceedingly complex due to the factor of improvements. This aspect of the equity question awaits further research.

6 The only exception is Marion County where the large speculator group entered about ten percent more land proportionally than elsewhere, but this is due to the fact that a Dutch immigrant leader and his friend entered some 18,000 acres in their own names for immediate distribution to the colonists.

7 William Dohar assisted in the search of federal manuscript censuses.

8 This procedure, it should be noted, does not compute an internal rate of return discounted to the terminal year; rather, it calculates for each tract an internal rate of return for each of the various costs in the several years, compounded from the date of each expenditure to the sale (terminal) date, and then it averages these costs togther to provide a composite return figure. This type of aggregating simply weights by dollars in the year of purchase and the year of each tax-payment and other expenses, whereas the discounting procedure implicitly weights transactions in the early years more heavily than in the latter. All current dollars were converted to constant dollars, based on Wholesale Price Indexes (Berry), for Cincinnati, 1816–1861, all commodities, weighted 1824–46 = 100. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1960), p. 121.Google Scholar

9 The Iowa Land Records Collection, unfortunately, does not contain post-1860 deed register data. In the 1966 study, all tracts entered by the ten largest original entrants in the nine counties were traced in the deed registers beyond 1860, with the final sale taking place in 1889. This procedure, which requires intensive searching in the various courthouse records, was not considered essential to this comparative study.

10 , Swierenga, Pioneers and Profits: Land Speculation on the Iowa Frontier (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1968), p. 145.Google Scholar Table 6.1 lists monthly dealers' advertised selling prices of 160-Acre Military bounty land warrants in New York and Washington for the years 1848–1860. Natalie Disbrow obtained the price data from the Riggs and Corcoran Collections, Library of Congress, and graciously shared it with me.

11 Swierenga, Robert P., “The Western Land Business’: The Story of Easley and Willingham, Speculators,” Business History Review, XLI (Spring 1967), 3–7Google Scholar, and Swierenga, Pioneers and Profits, pp. 160–62, 168–70.

12 Deletion of tracts selling at $1.25 per acre or less (in current dollars) resulted in overall earnings of 86.2 percent by the large speculators and 86.1 percent by the small speculators.

13 I charted each of these 308 “forties” on a township plat map to determine their exact location relative to rail lines, roads, towns, timber stands, etc. The deed records were also traced.

14 These sales to Johnson and Tousey may not have been bonafide. A recorded sale price of $10 per acre in 1855 for raw land is excessive. One has the suspicion that these men may have merely exchanged their land for railroad stock at the equivalent value. If this is true, there is especially good reason to delete the high-priced sales.

15 Deletion of tracts selling at $10.00 per acre and above (in current dollars) resulted in overall earnings of 58.5 percent by the large speculators and 70.2 percent by the small speculators.