Disposition of the Public Domain, 1785-1862: a Comparison of Federal and State Land Sales

D. R. Kiewet, California Institute of Technology

The federal government did not sell land in the public domain in a manner designed to maximize sales revenue, but rather to get it into private hands as quickly as possible. In this paper I compare the federal government sales prices with those obtained by several states in the sale of the section 16 school land that had been granted to them for the support of public schools. For a variety of reasons, the school land sold at higher prices, and sometimes much higher prices, than did the federal land.

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 Presented in Session 247. Land Prices in the Antebellum Mississippi and Missouri Valleys