Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Central New York's Military Tract townships. Map from the original by Simeon De Witt. The Military Tract of Central New York, also called the New Military Tract, [1] consisted of nearly two million acres (8,100 km 2) of bounty land set aside in Central New York to compensate New York's soldiers after their participation in the Revolutionary War.
In return for ceding its claims in 1784, Virginia was granted this area to provide military bounty land grants. The Ohio district was a surplus reserve, in that military land grants were first made in an area southeast of the Ohio River, in what is now Kentucky. The Ohio land was to be used only after the land southeast of the river was exhausted.
The Congress had little money to pay the soldiers who fought for independence. They made promises of land to induce army enlistment. By resolutions of September 16 and 18, 1776, and August 12, September 22, and October 3, 1780, they proposed to give each officer or private continuously to serve in the United States army until the close of the war, or until discharged, or to the representatives ...
An Act to provide for designating, surveying and granting the Military Bounty Lands, Act of the 12th United States Congress, Session I, Chapter 77, May 6, 1812; An Act to authorize the survey of two million acres (8,000 km²) of the public lands, in lieu of that quantity heretofore authorized to be surveyed, in the territory of Michigan, as military bounty lands, Act of the 14th United States ...
Beginning in 1796, the Congress provided 2.6 million acres (10,500 km²) of land to Army soldiers and officers, mainly within the Northwest Territory. The decision to offer federal lands to Revolutionary War veterans helped to establish a precedent that would be repeated throughout the 19th century in which, wherever feasible, land would be ...
Starting with the American Revolutionary War, veterans often received land grants instead of backpay or other remuneration. [9] Bounty-land warrants, often for 160 acres, were issued to veterans from 1775 to 1855, thus including veterans of the American Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Mexican–American War , as well as various ...
By the early 1800s, promised bounty land claims were finally fulfilled. [17] In the 19th century, other bounty land and homestead laws were enacted to dispose of federal land. [10] [17] These included, among others, the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Desert Lands Entry Act of 1877. [6] Several different types of patents existed. [18]
A number of means facilitated the legal settlement of the territories in the Midwest: land speculation, federal public land auctions, bounty land grants in lieu of pay to military veterans, and, later, preemption rights for squatters. Ultimately, as they shed the image of being outside the law and fashioned themselves into pioneers, squatters ...