Swamp Lands Acts Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Swamp Lands Acts Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

The Three Swamp Lands Acts were passed in 1849, 1850, and 1860 to facilitate the development of “swamp and overflowed lands”-known today as wetlands-by transferring their title to 15 individual states. “An Act to aid the State of Louisiana in draining the Swamp Lands therein” was passed by the U.S. Congress on March 2, 1849, and required that the state appoint a surveyor to define “all the swamp lands therein which are subject to overflow and unfit for cultivation,” that would pass from federal to state ownership. The condition of transfer was that the proceeds from state land sales should be used to aid development of the land by funding public drainage works and levees. The following year, an act was passed extending this program to Arkansas and “each of the other States of the Union in which such swamp and overflowed lands … may be situated,” though responsibility for identifying such lands was transferred to the Secretary of the Interior, perhaps in an attempt to avoid states being over-generous to themselves in their surveys. The 1860 act applied the same program to the new states of Minnesota and Oregon.

The first act was stimulated by Louisiana’s financial inability to recover from the devastating Mississippi floods of 1849, and the need to build flood control structures. But together, the acts had the larger aim of funding the large-scale drainage and development of wetland landscapes such as the Mississippi Delta, Indiana’s Kankakee Marsh, and the Florida Everglades. The program of disbursing federal land to individual settlers through the General Land Office had failed to populate such landscapes because individual settlers lacked the resources to build the massive works necessary to effectively drain them. Under the Swamp Lands Acts, it was hoped that states would charge settlers rates low enough to make settlement appealing, with the added promise that states would use the funds to assist in the drainage of the land. Prices had to be high enough to adequately fund state reclamation activities, and a minimum of $1.25 an acre was set. The acts were, in fact, an integral part of the larger project of colonization, nation building, and citizen making, through the removal of geographic barriers.

In total, 64,895,415 acres (26,262,243 hectares) of land was ceded by the federal government to the states of Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, and Wisconsin (these were the states in existence by 1860 that were not originally crown colonies, and were thus composed largely of federally-owned land). Because the act contained no guidelines concerning how “swamp and overflowed lands” were to be identified, it was open to rampant abuse as local surveyors used their own notions of what the federal government should cede to the states. It offered only the utilitarian criteria of “unfit for cultivation”; federal guidance on defining wetlands would not come until nearly a century later, using duck habitat as the primary criterion. Even though it is known that unscrupulous surveyors included many non-wetland areas in their surveys, claiming fertile uplands as state land, the amount ceded still represents up to 30 percent of the estimated 220 million acres (89 million hectares) of wetlands present in the United States at the time of American independence.

The states disposed of the land in various ways. In Iowa, land was given to the counties, who bartered it for public works construction, or offered it as enticement for settlement. The Florida experience is illustrative of the problems faced by states in developing wetlands acquired through the act. Florida received 20.3 million acres (8.2 million hectares), nearly a third of the total land transferred through the acts. Land sales were dominated by giveaways to politically favored development consortia, and the general fund established to finance drainage works was thus perennially broke. The developers marketed Everglades land throughout the United States and Europe, repeating the solemn promise of the State of Florida to drain the land. Since the funds for drainage did not exist, settlers arrived to find their land uninhabitable, and the developers pocketed the money. More than a century later, “land in Florida” is still a byword for such swindles and scams.

Although the acts caused much of the wetlands of the United States to pass into private hands, they did not immediately accomplish much drainage. The technology required for effective drainage (steam dredges and tile systems) would not mature until around World War I, and required the concerted action of large corporate interests and collective organizations such as drainage districts. The federal government, largely acting through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, has been forced to spend enormous amounts of money on protection from floods that have been exacerbated by wetland drainage, and on the reacquisition of some of the original ceded wetlands for conservation purposes.

Bibliography:

Hugh Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes (University of Chicago Press, 1997);
Ann Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands (Island Press, 1997).