To the Editor:
Charles Reznikoff’s “A Gallery of Jewish Colonial Worthies” (December, January) alludes to, but strangely ignores, the major role many of these notables apparently played in one of the most ambitious speculations in land this country has ever witnessed.
A bare outline of the venture is set forth in the reporter’s statement preceding Chief Justice Marshall’s classic opinion in the case of Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. William M’Intosh, 8 Wheat. 543 (1823). According to that report, on July 5, 1773, “William Murray, of the Illinois country, merchant, acting for himself and for Moses Franks and Jacob Franks, of London, in Great Britain, David Franks, John Inglis, Bernard Gratz, Michael Gratz, Alexander Ross, David Sproat and James Milligan, all of Philadelphia, in the province of Pennsylvania; Moses Franks, Andrew Hamilton, William Hamilton and Edward Milne, of the same place; Joseph Simons, otherwise called Joseph Simon, and Levi Andrew Levi, of the town of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania; Thomas Minshall, of York county, in the same province; Robert Callender and William Thompson, of Cumberland County, in the same province; John Campbell, of Pittsburg, in the same province; and George Castles and James Ramsay, of the Illinois country” bought two tracts of land (comprising over ten million acres) east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio River from the Illinois Tribes of Indians for $24,000, or approximately one-quarter of a cent per acre.
Unfortunately for them, these speculators failed to take into account the principle of law, followed in theory then, as now, by all Western nations, that Indian title may be extinguished only by the sovereign, and not by private entrepreneurs. Consequently for decades the proprietors of the Illinois Land Company found it necessary to importune Congress either to recognize the validity of their purchase or to make a “compromise” settlement of their claims. Congress denied each of these petitions in its entirety.
By the Treaties of August 13, 1803 and December 30, 1805 (7 Stat. 78 and 100, respectively), the United States acquired much of the same land from the same Illinois Indian tribes for an equally ludicrous consideration, about one-eighth of a cent per acre, and shortly thereafter began selling small tracts therein to settlers for prices ranging up to $2 per acre. As might be expected, an individual claiming title under the Land Company’s “deed” eventually sued an individual claiming title under a grant from the government for possession of a particular tract. In the opinion referred to above, Chief Justice Marshall finally declared: “After bestowing on this subject a degree of attention which was more required by the magnitude of the interest in litigation, and the able and elaborate arguments of the bar, than by its intrinsic difficulty, the court is decidedly of the opinion that the plaintiffs do not exhibit a title which can be sustained in the courts of the United States.”
A fifty-year-old dream of empire in the West thus was buried for all time.
Arthur Lazarus, Jr.
Washington, D. C.
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