A History of the American People

Why did the immigrants come? One reason was increasingly cheap seapassages. Another was
food shortages, sometimes widening into famines. The bad weather of 1816, and the appalling
winters of 1825-6, 1826-7, and 1829-30, the last one of the coldest ever recorded, produced real
hunger. The demographic-catastrophe theories of Thomas Malthus filtered downwards to the
masses, in horrifyingly distorted form, and men wanted to get their families out of Europe before
the day of wrath came. Then there was the tax burden. At the end of the Bonapartist Wars, all
Europe groaned under oppressive taxation. A parliamentary revolt in 1816 abolished income tax
in Britain, and in the 1820s duties were gradually reduced too. But in Europe it was the same old
story of the state piling the fiscal burdens on the backs of poor peasants and tradespeople. This
was compounded, on the Continent, by tens of thousands of internal customs barriers, imposing
duties on virtually everything which crossed them.
By comparison, America was a paradise. Its army was one-fiftieth the size of Prussia's. The
expense of government per capita was 10 percent of that in Britain, itself a country with a small
state by Continental standards. There were no tithes because there was no state church. Nor were
there poor rates-there were virtually no poor. An American farm with eight horses paid only $12
a year in tax. Europeans could scarcely believe their ears when told of such figures. Not only
were American wage-rates high, but you kept your earnings to spend on your family. Then there
were other blessings. No conscription. No political police. No censorship. No legalized class
distinctions. Most employers ate at the same table as their hands. No one (except slaves) called
anyone Master.' Letters home from immigrants who had already established themselves were read aloud before entire villages and acted as recruitment-propaganda for the transatlantic ships. So, interestingly enough, did the President's annual messages to Congress, which were reprinted in many Continental newspapers until the censors suppressed them. As the Dublin Morning Post put it:We read this document as if it related purely to our concerns.’
But the most powerful inducement was cheap land. Immigrants from Europe were getting
cheap land from all the old hunting grounds of the world's primitive peoples-in Australia and
Argentina especially-but it was in the United States where the magic was most potent because
there the government went to enormous trouble to devise a system whereby the poor could
acquire it. In the entire history of the United States, the land-purchase system was the single most
benevolent act of government. The basis of the system was the Act of 1796 pricing land at $2 an
acre. It allowed a year's credit for half the total paid. An Act of 1800 created federal land offices
as Cincinnati, Chillicothe, Marietta, and Steubenville, Ohio, that is, right on the frontier. The
minimum purchase was lowered from 640 acres, or a square mile, to 320 acres, and the buyer
paid only 25 percent down, the rest over four years. So a man could get a big farm-indeed, by
Continental standards, an enormous one-for only about $160 cash. Four years later, Congress
halved the minimum again. This put a viable family farm well within the reach of millions of
prudent, saving European peasants and skilled workmen. During the first eleven years of the 19th
century, nearly 3 ,400,000 acres were sold to individual farmers in what was then the Northwest,
plus another 250,000 in Ohio. These land transfers increased after 1815, with half a million acres
of Illinois, for instance, passing into the hands of small- and medium-scale farmers every year. It
was the same in the South. In Alabama, government land sales rose to 600,000 acres in 1816 and
to 2,280,000 in 1819. In western Georgia the state gave 200-acre plots free to lottery-ticket
holders with lucky numbers. In the years after 1815, more people acquired freehold land at
bargain prices in the United States than at any other time in the history of the world.
Individual success-stories abounded. Daniel Brush and a small group of Vermonters settled in
Greene County, Illinois, in spring 1820. A prairie of the richest soil,' Brush wrote,stretched out