epresentatives elected by the
citizens of Indiana to prepare petitions to Congress, near the close of
1802, illustrate the needs of the time. It was desired that the Indian
title to land lying in Southern Illinois and Southwestern Indiana might be
extinguished and the land sold in smaller tracts and at a lower
price;(164) that a preemption act might be passed; that a grant of
seminary and school lands might be made; that land for taverns, twenty
miles or less apart, might be granted along certain specified routes; that
donation-lands might be chosen in separate tracts, instead of in three
specified areas, in order to avoid "absolutely useless" prairies, and also
lands claimed by ancient grants; and that the qualification of a freehold
of fifty acres of land, prescribed for the electors of representatives to
the territorial legislature, might be changed to manhood suffrage, because
the freehold qualification was said to tend "to throw too great a weight
in the scale of wealth." The petition was considered in committees, but it
led to no legislation.(165)

None of the above complaints was better founded than that concerning the
restriction of the suffrage, and it is well to note subsequent proceedings
in regard to it. No qualification less suitable to the time and place
could well have been devised, and this is especially true of the Illinois
portion of the territory, because there unsettled French claims were to
delay the sales of public lands until 1814, and thus early settlers could
neither buy land nor vote unless they owned it, unless indeed they
purchased land claims from the needy and unbusiness-like French. An
interesting petition of 1807 from the settlement on Richland Creek,(166)
for the right of preemption, throws light upon conditions then obtaining.
The petitioner inclosed a map of the settlement, with the following
explanation: "Those persons whose names are enclosed in said plot, within
surveyed lines, have confirmed and located rights, amounting to 3,775
acres; ... the residue of the said settlers, occupying about 6,000 acres
of land, have, without any right, settled upon the public land." The map
shows that there were eleven owners and twenty-two squatters.(167) As the
law then stood, the twenty-two squatters, occupying more than three-fifths
of the land, could not vote. The eleven land-owners must have secured
their land either under the acts of 1788 or that of 1791, or by the
purchase of French claims, a