Federal Lands, Past and Present

How did the federal government end up with title to a quarter of the land in a nation with a long-standing distrust of government power, a corresponding faith in individual enterprise, and democratic institutions designed to make government policies reflect its will? While explanation is not justification, an account of their evolution can help make some sense of current federal land policies. In this chapter, I outline the history of federal lands and the shape of the current management regime, indicating what agencies are responsible for what lands under what statutory charters. Readers familiar with these topics will find nothing new here and may wish to skip to the concluding observations. The federal government got into the real-estate business early on. Through a political compromise between the original states, it acquired the old “western lands” between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. During the colonial period, England had rather imprecisely divided the land it claimed in America among its colonies. Charters granted extensive lands beyond the Appalachians to some colonies, sometimes the same lands to different colonies. Connecticut and Massachusetts, for example, claimed the same 26 million acres in the old Northwest (north of the Ohio River, west of the Appalachians). England revoked some of these grants in 1774, but colonies thereby severed from their western lands regarded the War of Independence as a means to regain what had been theirs. States with no historical claims to press wanted to share in what they considered war booty “wrested from the common enemy by the blood and treasure of the thirteen states.” They proposed that the western lands be surrendered to the federal government “to be disposed of for the common good of the United States.” Maryland feared that otherwise it would have to make good on promises of land in exchange for service in the Revolution that the Continental Congress had made to Maryland troops. For the same reason, the national government, such as it was, promoted state cession of western lands: nobody relished the prospect of angry veterans marching on Congress to demand the land they’d been promised.