Published May 20, 2012
By Reg Ankrom
Early settlement in Quincy
and Western Illinois was closely tied to land bounties the U.S. Congress
awarded to volunteer soldiers in the War of 1812. It was a method of
compensation that avoided menacing questions over the role and size of
government.
Until President Lincoln’s time, the nation’s statesmen
predominantly regarded a standing army as a threat to liberty. It was no small
question for those who nursed the nation after its birth through infancy. Even
ignoring concerns that a standing army would mean higher taxes and bigger
government, how would an army function? The Constitution made the president the
commander in chief. But could he control an army? And could he be controlled?
The founders simplified the matter by continuing the practice
of British governors of the American colonies. When soldiers were needed, the
executive called for volunteers — mostly militiamen. As an incentive to service
and loyalty, the founders also continued the practice of awarding bounty land
to the volunteers.
So it was in 1811 when a second war with Great Britain
appeared imminent. Congress awarded each veteran (or his heirs) of the War of
1812 three months pay and a quarter section (160 acres) of land. These parcels
of land totaling 5.36 million acres were situated in a wedge between the
Illinois and Mississippi Rivers and extending to the northern border of today’s
Mercer County.
Among the treasures of the Historical Society are 15 original
“land patent titles,” or “patents” to the War of 1812 bounty lands in this huge
Illinois Military Tract. Each patent carries the official seal of the U.S.
General Land Office.
The patents do not indicate whether the men who held them
were soldiers during the War of 1812. Veterans who received the bounty land
grants were given warrants for them. A veteran could exercise his warrant and
receive a patent, or title, for the land, or he could sell it. Since most
veterans had established homesteads and families in the east or south, they had
little interest in moving to a primitive west. Many sold or exchanged their
grants and patents were issued to someone other than the veteran.
Quincy founder John Wood, for example, was the fifth owner of
the 160 acres he bought between the Mississippi River and what roughly are 24th
Street and Kentucky and Madison streets in today’s Quincy. Wood bought his
parcel on November 19, 1822, from Peter Flinn. Flinn was not happy with the
fire sale price of $60 Wood paid for it, but he needed to raise money to bring
his family from Ireland. The land grant for the property Wood acquired was
owned originally by one Mark McGowan, a veteran of the War of 1812, who sold it
in late 1817 to a Francis Koran. Koran sold it to Flinn on April 3, 1819.
Many veterans lost their land inadvertently, unaware that the
law admitting Illinois into the Union in 1818 allowed the state to tax bounty
land three years after the patent was issued. Theodore Carlson in his
book, The Illinois Military Tract, wrote that there was an
“erroneous impression … in the Eastern states that the military lands, similar
to other public lands, were exempt from taxes for five years from date
of patent.”
Speculators could buy properties for the amount of
tax owed. With the tax at one-half of one percent of the land’s
value, the tax on 160 acres was as little as $10. The owner had
a year to redeem his property
at the price the speculator paid, plus a penalty of 100 percent, or lose his
land.
Wood and Quincy co-founder Willard Keyes attended the first
tax sale at the state capital in Vandalia in December 1823 and bought several
lots near Quincy. In his comprehensive “History of the City of Quincy,
Illinois” Col. John Tillson wrote that Wood hoped to obtain “the other title if
their tax purchase was not redeemed.”
Keyes at the Vandalia sale bought 80 acres of land for taxes
and costs of $11. Little more than a year later, with no redemption, Keyes
became the owner of everything north of Broadway and west of 12th Street in
today’s Quincy.
Chance in early 1820 had brought Wood and Keyes together in
the federal land office in Edwardsville. Each had spent two years at their
previous residences, Wood, a New Yorker, trying his hand at farming in the Ohio
Valley and Keyes, who was from Vermont, teaching French and Indian children at
Prairie du Chien, Wis.
They teamed up as small-scale speculators and made their way to
Pike County where they squatted (resided on land they did not own), farmed and
corresponded with “owners of soldiers’ patents in various parts of the country
… to hunt up quarter sections for different owners, at the very moderate
price of one dollar per day,” according to Keyes. That’s how Wood met Flinn,
who thought his land was “too far off from civilization.”
Acting originally as an agent for Dr. Benjamin Shurtleff of
Boston, John Tillson, a Halifax, Massachusetts, native — and father of the
historian by the same name, began buying land in 1819 and surveying, perfecting
titles and paying taxes for absentee owners. Speculating himself, Tillson built
one of the state’s largest land companies. In 1835 alone he bought 695 parcels
totaling 111,200 acres at an average price of $1.21 per acre and sold only 12
at $1.52 per acre. He became the second largest landholder in Illinois, owning
more than 420,000 acres. In 1836 the federal land office at Quincy recorded
sales of 569,376 acres, the highest of the 10 land offices in Illinois.
Tillson moved to locations close to properties in which he was dealing, which brought him in 1843
to Quincy, where he diversifi ed his business interests, investing $100,000 in
the Quincy House Hotel on the southeast corner of Fourth and Maine streets.
In his book Carlson estimated that by the time
speculators paid for land purchases and taxes, profits were small. That was not
true for all speculators. Land speculation built a fortune for Wood and
Tillson, who would lose them, and for Keyes. It enriched Stephen B. Munn of New
York. In one month in 1835, Munn bought 1,992 acres in 21 parcels of Adams
County land for $1.25 per acre and sold them the next year for $2.13. The
Historical Society owns one of Munn’s patents.
Reg Ankrom is executive director of the Historical
Society. He is a member of several history-related organizations, the author of
a history of Stephen A. Douglas and a frequent speaker on pre-Civil War
history.
Sources
Carlson, Theodore L. The
Illinois Military Tract. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1951.
Davis, James E. Frontier
Illinois. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Illinois State Archives.
“Illinois Public Domain Land Tract Sales Database.”
http://www.ilsos.gov/isa/landSalesSearch.do
“Land Grant Patent,
David Paul; Deed, David Paul to Benjamin Shurtleff,” Map Case 1, D45,
Historical Society.
“Land Grant Patent,
Stephen B. Munn,” Map Case 1, D76, Historical Society of Quincy and Adams
County.
Park, Siyoung.
“Land Speculation in Western Illinois: Pike County, 1821-1835.”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.” Summer 1984.
Strange, A.T. “John
Tillson.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 17, 1925.
Tillson, Colonel John.
“History of the City of Quincy.” In William H. Collins and Cicero F.
Perry. Past and Present of the City of Quincy and Adams County, Illinois.
Chicago: S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1905.
