All states were not created equal: Control of the public lands in the early American republic and the rise of western sectionalism

In a manner that has gone largely unappreciated, land policy from the late eighteenth century up to the Civil War played a crucial role in shaping America's federal democracy. While the Constitution anticipates the incorporation of new states into the union, the mechanism for entry was actually detailed in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Although the Ordinance declares that new states were to be admitted “on an equal footing with the original states in all respects whatever,” the document, in fact, failed to establish a system for the incorporation of new states which duplicated the intergovernmental relations that the original states enjoyed with the federal government.; The Northwest Ordinance, in conjunction with other land ordinances of the period, created what would become, in effect, a second class of states with a fundamentally different relationship to Washington. The actual legal status of states varied significantly according to whether or not they were classified as “public land states.” The national government had greater legitimacy and capacity to act in public land states.; The problematic that this study addresses is why national land policy came to be applied on a differential basis across groups of states. Two issues drove the research agenda of this study: (1) What were the founders' intentions regarding the disposition of the public domain? and (2) How was the inconsistency in land policy framed and understood by the participants in the debate?; This inconsistency was widely debated in the first half of the nineteenth century and emerged as an unresolved Western grievance which lies at the heart of the rise of Western sectionalism. It is the source of contemporary political phenomena such as the Sagebrush rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s, and the Land Rights Movement of the 1990s.