LAND ACTS

LAND ACTS. United States land policy has favored putting public lands into private hands, spending income from the sale of public lands to pay public debts and finance public transportation enterprises, adjudicating private land claims in areas acquired by treaty, extinguishing American Indian land titles to a great extent, and enabling tribal management of remaining lands in Indian country. Although these policy goals have evolved and been contested frequently, public policy has favored the wide holding of private property and its productive use.

The Treaty of Paris of 1783 ended the American Revolution and put about 270 million acres of public land in the hands of the Confederation government. The Confederation Congress passed the Land Ordinance of 1785, putting government in the land disposal business. The Land Ordinance of 1785 set the pattern for public land distribution. Public land was to be surveyed, sold at a high minimum price at auction, occupied thereafter—military bounty warrant claimants excepted—and one section set aside for schools. Congress tinkered with the system in 1796, 1800, 1820, and 1841, lowering the price and the minimum lot size to stimulate sales. Preemption by actual settlers on surveyed land, giving them the right to purchase that land before others, became fixed in 1841 and extended to unsurveyed lands in the 1850s. The 1862 Homestead Act offered 160 acres of public land for a transaction fee to an occupier-developer who worked the land for five years. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 and Desert Land Act of 1877 put more public land into private hands for small sums.

Congress gave land away to stimulate enterprise. The Mining Law of 1866 and General Mining Law of 1872 gave claimants to mineral lands on the public domain free use of land for mining purposes. Congress funded the construction of the transcontinental and other railroads with public land grants.

Congress in 1872 turned slightly away from disposal to preservation in withdrawing two million acres for Yellowstone Park. In 1879 it created the Public Land Commission to classify lands and bring the first signs of management to the public domain. In 1891, Congress authorized the president to withdraw forest lands from purchase, and the authority to withdraw public lands for preservation expanded dramatically in the twentieth century.

Congress set a policy of adjudicating private land claims with the acquisition of lands from Great Britain, Spain, France, and Mexico. Most of these lands were along the Detroit River in Michigan, at Vincennes on the Wabash in Indiana, at Cahokia in Illinois, and in Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, California, and New Mexico. The system of adjudication included commissioners who investigated the claims, reviewed documents, and reported to Congress regarding the claims. Specific statutes like the California Land Act of 1851 established such a commission system that heard and decided claims. The parties had the right to appeal decisions to the federal courts.

The policy for American Indian tribal lands in the nineteenth century was extinguishment by treaty or war, or both. Tribal lands were constricted as a result and under constant pressure from federal administrative agencies and state governments until the 1940s, when Congress passed the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946. Thereunder the tribes started proceedings to recover money for past treaty injustices, at the expense of waiving future claims to land itself. Few tribes recovered land, with the notable exceptions of the Taos Pueblo recovering Blue Lake and acreage within the Kit Carson National Forest and the Zuni recovery of Kolhu/wala:wa in Arizona. Tribal authority over land was confirmed, in part, by the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. The desire of the tribes for greater autonomy and clear sovereignty continues.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakken, Gordon Morris. Law in the Western United States. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.

Gates, Paul Wallace. Land and Law in California: Essays on Land Policies. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991.

Gordon MorrisBakken

See alsoHomestead Movement ; Indian Claims Commission ; Land Claims ; Land Grants ; Land Policy ; Public Land Commissions .

Land Acts passed over a period of more than half a century transformed landholding from a system of territorial landlordism to one of owner occupancy.

The Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870 (Gladstone's first land act) gave the force of law to customary tenant right where it existed and created similar rights elsewhere in the country, provided for compensation for disturbance of tenants evicted other than for non‐payment of rent, and made provision for compensation for improvements in the case of a departing tenant. Its so‐called ‘Bright clauses’ allowed tenants to purchase their holdings.

The Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881 (Gladstone's second land act) granted the three Fs and instituted the Land Commission, with authority to adjudicate on fair rents and to make loans of up to 75 per cent of the purchase price to tenants purchasing their holdings.

The Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act 1885 (the Ashbourne Act) increased the loan limit to 100 per cent.

The Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act 1891 (the Balfour Act) introduced land bonds as an alternative form of payment of landlords selling land to tenants, thereby extending the scope of sales without an equivalent increase in the burden on the exchequer. It also set up the Congested Districts Board with wide powers to divide and amalgamate holdings with a view to relieving congestion in impoverished areas.

The Irish Land Act 1903 (Wyndham's Act), unique in that its contents were the product of agreement between representatives of landlords and tenants, laid down financial parameters within which an agreement between a landlord and tenant would be automatically approved by the Land Commission. The act appealed to the farmers because it guaranteed annual repayments lower than existing rents, and to the landlords because it gave a 12 per cent government bonus on the sale price of an entire estate, ensured payment in cash, and allowed them to retain demesne farms now mortgaged to the Land Commission on favourable terms.

The Irish Land Act 1909 (the Birrell Act) was designed to limit the cost to the exchequer of the success of the Wyndham Act. The terms were disimproved and payment by land bonds was reintroduced. The pace of transactions subsequently slackened.

In the Irish Free State, the Land Act of 1923 (the Hogan Act) converted rents into payments to the Land Commission, pending compulsory transfer of ownership of remaining tenanted land, abolished the Congested Districts Board, and gave the Land Commission responsibility for redistribution. The Northern Ireland Land Act (1925) provided for compulsory completion of tenant purchase of land in that jurisdiction.

Richard Vincent Comerford

Land Acts (Ireland) Legislation under the British and Irish governments since 1860 which addressed landlord-tenant relationships and landholding questions. The effective expropriation of Irish Catholics by Protestant landlords of English descent had been one of the central Irish grievances in the nineteenth century. Successive British governments therefore hoped that Irish protests against British rule would subside if the worst inequalities of ownership were remedied. The nineteenth-century Acts (1860, 1870, 1881, 1882, 1885, 1887, 1888, 1891, 1896) largely failed to remove landlord-tenant tension, or redress what many Irish peasants saw as the injustice of the landowning system in Ireland. This was mainly because Parliament in Westminster was careful not to legislate too heavily against the landowning Anglo-Irish elite, which retained considerable influence in the English establishment.

This changed in the early twentieth century when, in response to an increasingly militant Irish nationalism, many English or Anglo-Irish landlords wanted to sell their lands and leave the country. The 1903 Land Act (Wyndham Act) encouraged landlords to sell large sections of their holding by offering them a 12 per cent bonus above the sale price. It was opposed by Irish nationalists such as Michael Davitt and John Dillon, but it transferred more holdings to the tenantry than any previous Land Act had done. The 1907 Evicted Tenants Act reinstated 735 tenants. The 1909 Land Act solidified the financing of the Wyndham Act, and introduced compulsory purchase (requiring the landlord to sell if the majority of the tenants desired it). After independence, the 1923 Land Act (Hogan Act) reduced rents, made compulsory the sale and purchase of all land remaining unsettled, and forgave all arrears up to 1920. The 1927 Land Law Act dealt with arrears after 1920. The 1933 Land Act eliminated all arrears before 1930, empowered the Land Commission to acquire land for those who had none, and abolished fixity of tenure. These measures of state-aided sale and purchase of land eventually abolished the old landlord system and greatly increased occupier ownership. At the same time, it made Irish agriculture extremely inefficient, as in a country that was plagued by relatively poor soil, plots were created of a size that were too small even for subsistence.

Land Acts is a collective term applied to a series of Irish land reforms enacted between the end of the 19th and early 20th cents. This legislation was partly an attempt to defuse the increasingly assertive peasant nationalism which, fuelled by rural grievance, was threatening the stability of British rule in Ireland. Though often very different in detail, the legislation generally had two aspects: first, the immediate improvement of the tenant's contractual position, and, second, the gradual encouragement of a peasant proprietorship. Gladstone's Land Act of 1870 sought to give legal force to the Ulster custom, and to give tenants enhanced security of tenure; his more comprehensive measure of 1881 offered more decisive relief in the same areas, establishing in effect the principle of joint-proprietorship: rents might be fixed by judicial arbitration, and the tenant was given both the right to free sale, and enhanced protection against unjust eviction. Conservative legislation developed these Gladstonian precedents, although the principle of land purchase (a secondary feature of the Act of 1870) was much more prominent: the ‘Ashbourne’ Land Purchase Act (1885) provided £5 million in order to fund sales of property to occupying tenants. This measure, even when boosted by subsequent funding, had a restricted impact, but it provided a precedent for the much more lavishly funded and successful Wyndham Land Act (1903): this built upon an earlier political agreement between landlords and tenants (the land conference of December 1902), and offered a range of inducements to both classes. Although watered down by the Birrell Land Act (1909), Wyndham's measure facilitated a massive transfer of land from the old Anglo-Irish proprietors to their tenants. This legislation, together with its predecessors, effected a social revolution in Ireland long before the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21.

Alvin Jackson

Land Acts is a collective term applied to Irish land reforms enacted between the end of the 19th and early 20th cents. This legislation was an attempt to defuse the increasingly assertive peasant nationalism which was threatening the stability of British rule in Ireland. The legislation generally had two aspects: first, the immediate improvement of the tenant's contractual position, and, second, the gradual encouragement of a peasant proprietorship. Gladstone's Land Act of 1870 sought to give legal force to the Ulster custom, and to give tenants enhanced security of tenure. Conservative legislation developed these Gladstonian precedents, although the principle of land purchase (a secondary feature of the Act of 1870) was much more prominent: the ‘Ashbourne’ Land Purchase Act (1885) provided £5 million in order to fund sales of property to occupying tenants. This measure provided a precedent for the much more lavishly funded and successful Wyndham Land Act (1903). The Acts effected a social revolution in Ireland long before the Anglo‐Irish War of 1919–21.

Carey Land Act sponsored by Sen. Joseph M. Carey and passed by the U.S. Congress in 1894. The act provided for the transfer to Western states of U.S.-owned desert lands on the condition that they be irrigated. Settlers were permitted to buy up to 160 acres (64.7 hectares) of the land at 50¢ per acre plus the cost of water rights. Hopes that the act would hasten reclamation and settlement were disappointed.