Pre-civil war land policy and the growth of manufacturing

Abstract

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the federal government of the United States owned most of the nation’s land west of the Appalachians. The manner in which these lands were distributed to private individuals and found their way into agricultural production was a central political issue in the first decades of the Republic. Indeed, the rate of economic growth as well as the distribution of income and wealth hinged critically upon who got the land and when. The importance of public land policy was further heightened by the fact that it acted as a focus for sectional rivalry until the Civil War. The debates on public land alienation were ostensibly concerned with issues of political philosophy and constitutional law, but perceived differences in economic interest among the industrial Northeast, the cotton South, and the frontier certainly accounted for much of the division.’ Sectional economic interests governed the formation of land policy and in turn helped to determine the pattern of economic growth in the United States. While these perceived interests may serve to explain sectional motives in the struggle over land policy and related issues, the real economic interests of the North, South, and West may have been quite different. This paper will examine the interests of the manufacturing Northeast by use of a two-sector general equilibrium model of the nineteenth century national economy. The goal of the model building will be to provide insights into the rationality of the perceived sectional conflicts and into the influence of the resulting land policy on sectional growth.