th a new area for national legislation and the occasion of the
downfall of the policy of strict construction. But the purchase of
Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and demands. As frontier
States accrued to the Union the national power grew. In a speech on the
dedication of the Calhoun monument Mr. Lamar explained: "In 1789 the
States were the creators of the Federal Government; in 1861 the Federal
Government was the creator of a large majority of the States."

When we consider the public domain from the point of view of the sale
and disposal of the public lands we are again brought face to face with
the frontier. The policy of the United States in dealing with its lands
is in sharp contrast with the European system of scientific
administration. Efforts to make this domain a source of revenue, and to
withhold it from emigrants in order that settlement might be compact,
were in vain. The jealousy and the fears of the East were powerless in
the face of the demands of the frontiersmen. John Quincy Adams was
obliged to confess: "My own system of administration, which was to make
the national domain the inexhaustible fund for progressive and unceasing
internal improvement, has failed." The reason is obvious; a system of
administration was not what the West demanded; it wanted land. Adams
states the situation as follows: "The slaveholders of the South have
bought the cooperation of the western country by the bribe of the
western lands, abandoning to the new Western States their own proportion
of the public property and aiding them in the design of grasping all the
lands into their own hands." Thomas H. Benton was the author of this
system, which he brought forward as a substitute for the American system
of Mr. Clay, and to supplant him as the leading statesman of the West.
Mr. Clay, by his tariff compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own
American system. At the same time he brought forward a plan for
distributing among all the States of the Union the proceeds of the sales
of the public lands. His bill for that purpose passed both Houses of
Congress, but was vetoed by President Jackson, who, in his annual
message of December, 1832, formally recommended that all public lands
should be gratuitously given away to individual adventurers and to the
States in which the lands are situated.[26:1]

"No subject," said Henry Clay, "which has presented itself to the
present, or perhaps any preceding, Congress, is of greater