Abstract
During the 1830s, Congress passed a series of laws reforming U.S. policy on acquiring public lands. These laws established a federal land policy of preemption, under which squatters on public land obtained legal title to it in exchange for payment of a minimum (and low) price per acre. Preemption significantly liberalized the terms of land ownership in the U.S. We analyze roll call voting on the preemption acts in Congress from a distributive politics perspective. The key finding is that a member’s region of the country consistently adds explanatory power on top of that provided by ideology or party: members of Congress from the original thirteen states were less supportive of preemption on Western lands, all else constant. Moreover, this effect is much stronger in the House of Representatives than in the Senate. This is inconsistent with explanations of a West-South coalition vs. the North often found in the historical literature, but is consistent with a distributive politics perspective based on rent seeking by Western landholders.
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Notes
For another example of distributive politics and congressional voting during the antebellum era—on the issue of military service pensions—see Finocchiaro and Jenkins (2016).
Contemporary policymakers recognized that effect; e.g., Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri made the point in Senate floor speeches in 1829 (Feller 1984).
Not only were Army troops often sympathetic to squatters, but officers leading campaigns to burn the squatters out often were tried in local courts even more sympathetic to the Army’s victims.
Around the same time, beginning in the 1840 s, there was regional conflict and competition at the subnational legislative level on a related issue – that of granting formal legal and economic rights to married women. Such rights included being able to own property, enter into contracts without their husband’s permission, and stand in court as independent persons. For a detailed analysis, see Lemke (2016).
4 Stat. 420 (May 29, 1830).
4 Stat. 503 (April 15, 1832).
4 Stat. 678 (June 19, 1834).
At the same time, advocates of preemption sought another federal law. Those efforts were led in Congress by Sen. Robert Walker (Democrat-Mississippi) and opposed by Sen. Henry Clay (Whig-Kentucky). Walker’s preemption bill gained no traction in 1836. A revised version of the bill was tried again in 1837 (during the lame-duck session of the 24th Congress), and while it passed 27-23 in the Senate it failed in the House (see Van Atta 2014, pp. 214-216).
5 Stat. 251 (June 22, 1838).
For an extended discussion of the politics behind the Preemption Act of 1838, see Van Atta (2008).
5 Stat. 382 (June 1, 1840).
Clay would manage this bill in the Whig-controlled 27th Congress, but the permanent prospective preemption idea was first introduced in 1840 by Robert Walker and Thomas Hart Benton in their “Log Cabin Bill.” Walker and Benton managed to get the bill through the Senate in the lame-duck session (on a 31 to 19 vote), but it died in the House. See Hibbard (1924, p. 347).
5 Stat. 453 (September 4, 1841).
See also Feller (1984, pp, 187-188).
Prior to the adoption of the 17th Amendment in 1913, US senators were elected indirectly: citizens elected state legislators, and those state legislators elected senators. As a result, the electoral connection for senators in the pre-17th Amendment era tended to be relatively weak (Gailmard and Jenkins 2009).
While the electoral connection in the antebellum Congress was not as fully developed as in the contemporary era, research suggests that it was indeed in operation. See Bianco, Spence and Wilkerson (1996), Carson and Engstrom (2005), and Jenkins and Finocchiaro (2016). For a general examination of the electoral connection in Congress across time, see Carson and Jenkins (2011).
Note that, for simplicity, we focus on two party labels—Democrats and Whigs—throughout our analysis. These labels assume antecedents (Jacksonians become Democrats and Adamsites/Anti-Jacksonians become Whigs) and combine third parties into their most natural party category (Anti-Masons into Whigs and Conservatives/Nullifiers into Democrats). We believe that the latter combination does little damage, as a check of individual third-party member backgrounds (in the Congressional Biographical Directory and Martis 1989) confirms perfectly the eventual movement into the assumed major party.
Estimation of linear probability models by OLS and model comparisons by F-tests reveals substantively similar results to those we outline below. Those results are available from the authors on request.
Population density data for House districts and states (essentially, population per square mile) was obtained from Parsons, Beech and Herman (1978).
Given the limited coverage of the 1830 census and other data sources, more direct measures of manufacturing-commercial intensiveness are not available at the congressional district level.
Based on exp(-ΔAICc/2), where ΔAICc is the difference in AICc between the minimum AICc and AICc from alternative model, a difference of 7 indicates that the alternative model is roughly 3% as likely to provide the best fit; a difference of 2 indicates that the alternative is roughly 36% as likely (Burnham and Anderson 2002).
In both the Senate and House models, replacing 1st and 2nd DW NOMINATE scores with party never results in the best fitting model in the sense of AICc. And in only one of the ten roll calls (in the Senate of the 27th Congress) does a party-based distributive model outperform an ideology-based distributive model.
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Appendix: Logit results for House votes
Appendix: Logit results for House votes
Congress | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Variable | 21 | 22 | 23 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
Intercept | 2.32 (0.66) | 3.65 (0.86) | 2.31 (0.5) | 6.53 (1.39) | 4.3 (0.83) | 2.84 (1.91) |
DWNOM1 | − 3.72 (0.81) | − 3.24 (0.76) | − 3.65 (0.79) | − 10.72 (3.05) | − 8.36 (1.79) | 22.84 (5.42) |
DWNOM2 | 2.81 (1.29) | 1.72 (1.36) | − 2.03 (1.47) | − 12.52 (3.89) | − 6.65 (2.69) | − 9.73 (6.61) |
ln(Pop. Density) | − 0.16 (0.17) | − 0.11 (0.21) | − 0.26 (0.16) | − 0.48 (0.36) | 0.08(0.28) | − 0.67 (0.74) |
New England | 0.31 (0.81) | − 2.66 (0.97) | − 3.24 (0.83) | − 5.56 (1.82) | − 5.38 (1.62) | − 2.45 (4.51) |
Mid Atlantic | − 1.06 (0.72) | − 2.03 (0.9) | − 0.07 (0.69) | − 3.2 (1.35) | − 3.42 (1.44) | − 1.71 (2.38) |
South Atlantic | − 3.31 (0.87) | − 3.47 (1.07) | − 1.67 (0.76) | − 7.89 (1.97) | − 5.92 (1.18) | − 3.36 (1.29) |
N | 158 | 162 | 177 | 160 | 184 | 225 |
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Gailmard, S., Jenkins, J.A. Distributive politics and congressional voting: public lands reform in the Jacksonian era. Public Choice 175, 259–275 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-0518-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-0518-4