Wars, Indigenous Peoples, and Bounty Land Warrants

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Today being Indigenous People’s Day (known to many as Columbus Day), it is fitting to look critically at one of the historic processes in U.S. history that served to transfer Indigenous people’s land to whites. Bounty land warrants constituted a form of “thanks” for service in military campaigns that extended white control over North America. Family historians who can trace their ancestry to the 1700s or early 1800s may be able to document how their ancestors either benefited or lost from this land transfer.

Bounty land warrants entitled soldiers and officers who had served in wars, principally the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War, to public acreage at no cost. The National Archives summarize the nature of these warrants, mentioning their connection with “Indian removal.” These warrants were established by acts of Congress, which specified the tract of land available, and how many acres would go to soldiers and officers of which level of service. For example, following the Revolutionary War, while a private or noncommissioned officer was entitled to 100 acres of bounty land, a major general was entitled to 1,100 acres; these warrants could then be sold on the open market.

As an example of the link between land warrants and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, let’s look at the 4,000 square miles that came to be known of as the U.S. Military District of Ohio, that was given to soldiers and officers of the Revolutionary War. The Shawnee had been the principle tribe expelled in this process, as detailed by Sultzman.

By the time the French and British arrived in the Ohio Valley, the Shawnee were returning to land still controlled by the Iroquois who had driven them out earlier, but who were only using it as a hunting ground. For a time, the British and French welcomed the Shawnee, viewing them as trading partners. As the French and British jockeyed for power, they drew in the Shawnee (as well as other tribes) as allies. In 1754, the Iroquois ceded the Ohio Valley to the British, which had the effect of pitting Shawnee who were living there against the British. I will skip over a lot of detail here about conflicts, raids, and rebellions that took place during the 1750s and 1760s. Of significance to the issue of land transfer, in 1749 Virginia, which laid claim to the Ohio Valley, had chartered the Ohio Company, a land speculation agency many white colonists were investing in. Refusal of the British to open the area to white colonist settlement was one of the sparks setting the Revolutionary War in motion. In all of the negotiating and trading that took place, the people who were not consulted were the Shawnee, who began to experience massacres at the hands of frontiersmen. When the Revolutionary War broke out, the British recruited the Shawnee to help attack Americans. While terms of British surrender did not specify what was to happen to the Shawnee and other Indigenous peoples in the Ohio Valley, the newly-formed U.S. government went ahead and established boundaries it wanted, negotiated with some but not all local tribes, forced white squatters and Indigenous peoples off land, and proceeded to survey it and offer it up for sale as if it were not already someone’s home.

This is a short version of the history of land that became bounty warrants that Congress offered to military veterans after the Revolutionary War. For service in the War of 1812, six million acres in the Territories of Michigan, Illinois and Louisiana were given to military veterans, transferring land of many other tribes to whites at no cost.  (Unlike the earlier land warrants, these could be transferred only through inheritance, not through sale.)

I became aware of this form of land transfer while in the process of researching some of my ancestors in Tennessee. While I have not been able to document land in my family tree acquired in this way, I do have ancestors that would have qualified for it, one of them ironically for his military involvement in helping to remove the Creek Indians from Tennessee during the War of 1812. I suspect the paper trail simply does not exist anymore.

Here are two places where you can find out more information, including whether any of your ancestors might have either gained or lost land (these sources record who gained land, but by identifying land tracts and tracing back who was there first, Indigenous peoples can estimate how their families were impacted):

• The Bureau of Land Management provides access to millions of Federal land title records for Eastern Public Land States, issued between 1820 and 1908, as well as images of Military Land Warrants that were issued to individuals as a reward for their military service.
• Ancestry.com provides some background on bounty land warrants, and has a search tool, if you know the name (and rank) of a veteran, and the state in which he was enlisted.

Racism, Inheritance, and Family Financial Aid

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“I didn’t own slaves, why should I feel guilty?” is a common response of White people to hearing about racism today. This response regards slavery and theft of Indigenous peoples’ land as so ancient that paying attention to them today only invites anger and guilt. But I will show how racial privilege is a living inheritance. As a backdrop, consider data from the 2004 census, when the median net wealth of White non-Hispanic families was $113,822, of Black families just $8,650; and of Hispanic families, $13,375. Might these huge discrepancies have historical roots?

I was born into a White professional class family, daughter of a father who was a physician and a mother who stayed home to raise her children. When I was six, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. My mother’s parents came to our financial rescue: between them and my father’s life insurance, we were able to keep our home, and my mother was able to continue to stay home to raise us. Later my maternal grandparents helped put us through college, and my share of my grandfather’s will helped fund my graduate education. My grandmother established a trust; when my mother died, the share I inherited helped pay for my house. Where did these financial assets come from?

Strong contributors were a long history of inheritance and “family financial aid.” As Shammas, Salmon and Dahlin document in Inheritance in America (Galveston, Frontier Press), “The bulk of household wealth in America, perhaps as much as 80 percent of it, is derived from inheritance, not labor force participation” (p. 3). Lui, Robles, Leondar-Wright, Brewer, and Adamson, in their book The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide (The New Press, 2006) explain that large disparities in family wealth produce disparities in “family financial aid” to offspring, such as contributions to a down payment on a house or help with college tuition. About half of White families can afford this kind of aid, compared with only about one-fifth of Black families.  

Here’s a slice of how these processes worked in my family before I was even born. (For a more complete discussion, see my chapter in Critical (hi)Stories: Crafting Pedagogies of Collaboration, Inclusion, Re(presentation) and Voice edited by Kristen Luschen and Judith Flores Carmona, in press with Peter Lang.)

My maternal grandmother descended from the Appalachian Mountains. Growing up, I had assumed her family to be relatively poor. It turns out that while some were poor, others were not, including the H. and McC. families.  

George H., a land speculator, bought 160 acres from the state of Tennessee in 1827, land that was previously Cherokee. He bought other pieces of land as well, but this was the one he bought right after Indigenous peoples had been pushed off of it. County deeds records show a pattern of him buying and selling land continuously in Tennessee, which during that time that was mainly restricted to White people. In addition, between the 1830s and the Emancipation Proclamation, he owned between 3 and 6 slaves at a time. In the 1860 U.S. Census, his family wealth had grown to $30,000 ($719,152 in 2010 dollars).

He and his first wife had about 14 children. One of their eldest, Ben, from whom I descend, went to Arkansas where he bought a small plantation and six or seven slaves. When Ben and his wife’s three children (one of whom, Dewitt, was my ancestor) were still small, he died from injuries sustained in a duel, leaving behind debts, since apparently he had managed the plantation very badly. The three children were sent to Tennessee to live with their grandfather and his second wife; I am not sure why they did not stay with their mother. When George died, his will divided his estate equally among his children and the offspring of children who had died. Having being raised by a wealthy grandparent, then inheriting a portion of his estate, Dewitt was able to complete his education, buy a small farm, and later become County Clerk.

One of Dewitt’s daughters was my great-grandmother, who married a descendant of the McC family. William McC was a neighbor of George. In 1828, he purchased 67 acres from a trader who had earlier purchased the land apparently from the Cherokee Nation. Like George, he also bought more land, although not as aggressively, and without buying slaves. By 1860, William’s family wealth was $9,000 ($275,746 in 2010 dollars). His will directed that his wife and children each be given $700 ($16,766 in 2010 dollars) plus an equal share of his estate after other bequests had been made.

One of William’s sons was my great-great grandfather John. In 1860, William deeded 132 acres to John for the equivalent of about $40,000 (2010 dollars). At some point, John had a two-story brick house built on the farm. It still stands, pictured below in the process of renovation.

One of John's sons married Dewitt’s daughter; these were my great grandparents. They left Tennessee right after they were married, stopping for a few years in Steamboat Springs, Colorado (from which the Ute had just been expelled) and buying land there. A few years later, they moved the San Francisco area. My great-grandfather drifted from job to job and eventually abandoned the family. But my great-grandmother managed to accumulate money, I suspect with the help of her Tennessee parents. She passed down what she had to her children, one of whom was my grandmother.

My grandparents invested in property in the San Francisco Bay area; these were the grandparents that had helped us when I was younger. Their ability to invest in property needs to be understood in the context of rampant racial discrimination, such as restrictive covenants to prevent people of color from buying into White neighborhoods, and real estate practices that steer buyers of color away from White neighborhoods.The Federal Housing Administration, created by the federal government in 1934 to help lift (White) families out of the Depression by offering loans, was specifically constructed to keep people of color from buying in White neighborhoods. So, my grandparents were able to buy and sell property in a market structured by regulations and processes that explicitly benefited White property buyers like themselves.

I haven’t mentioned my ancestors working. Most of them worked hard, but with resources. Some augmented those resources, others blew them. But the point is that considerable wealth initially came from land from which the Indigenous peoples had been expelled so that Whites could have access to it. Slave labor augmented that wealth. And the wealth was passed down through the family in the forms of inheritance and family financial aid.

One cannot rewrite history, but one can author the present. For example, currently the land base of most Indigenous tribes is inadequate. Within the boundaries of many reservations, the U.S. government sold or transferred control of plots of land to non-Indians, resulting in a checkerboard pattern of land under tribal control, giving rise to economic difficulties for tribes as well as difficulty in building tribal sovereignty. Other tribes lost their land entirely during the Termination period the 1950s, and are trying to reclaim it.

To address these problems, several Indian-controlled organizations seek financial donations; anyone today can help out. Examples include:

• The Indian Land Tenure Foundation , which works with various organizations to address loss of land in Indian Country.
• White Earth Land Recovery Project, that works to help recover the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota.
• The Lakota Lands Recovery Project, a grassroots organization working to consolidate tribal control over the land and resources of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

If you are curious as to how inheritance and family financial aid played out historically in your own family, in contexts that enabled White families to accumulate resources on the backs of people of color, property records and wills are a good place to start.

Wills and Inherited Wealth

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Did you know that as much as 80% of family wealth in the United States comes from inheritance? That is the conclusion Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon and Michael Dahlin (1997) reached in their book Inheritance in America, published by Rutgers University Press. Family wealth can be passed on either before or after parents’ or grandparents’ deaths. Barbara Robles, Betsy Leondar-Wright, Rose Brewer, Rebecca Adamson, and Meizhu Lui (2006) elaborate on what they refer to as “family financial aid” in their book The Color of Wealth, published by the New Press. Family financial aid consists of help offered to younger generations in major expenses such as college tuition or buying a house.

In my own family, while I knew my grandparents had helped to pay for my college education, for a long time I hadn’t thought about transfer of wealth from one generation to the next, or what that transfer might mean for perpetuating race and class stratification. I grew up hearing that my ancestors had pulled themselves up from poverty – or least very modest circumstances – by their own hard work. Without discounting their work, however, I began to look into who inherited wealth from whom. In the blog on Property Records, I offer guidance in tracing property. Here, I focus on tracing what happens to that property when a person dies.

It turns out that locating wills is much easier than I had thought it would be because wills that have been filed for probate are public records. Generally in the U.S., a will is filed in the courthouse of the county where the person was living at the time of death, although it may be filed in another county where the person owned property. To see a will, the easiest thing to do is simply to go to the county courthouse and ask to see a copy of it. You don’t have to explain who you are or why you are asking, since wills in probate are public records. You may be escorted to a “Will and Probate Room,” or you may be taken to a room of microfiche. The documents you view may be hand written, typed, or transcribed into a database. I’ve personally encountered them in all of these forms. Below is an example of a typed will from 1902.

You can also write to the appropriate county courthouse for a copy of a will. You’ll need to pay a copying fee; I recommend visiting the county courthouse website or calling for information first. You may be able to locate the name of an ancestor online through the county courthouse, although you’ll still need to write, call, fax, or email to get a copy of the will. You may also be able to find information on a family history website such as ancestry.com, although it’s well to be aware than not all wills that exist have been entered into online databases.

Wills that were written but not filed for probate are not public records; only named beneficiaries can see such documents.

One thing wills will clue you into rather quickly is the status of women in the time period and location where the family lived. Some of my ancestors, for example, divided their assets equally among their children (and in some cases their grandchildren), while others transferred to the bulk of their assets to male heirs. You can follow up on what you find by looking into women and property rights. 

Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory (CRT) offer perspectives for analyzing the relationship between inherited wealth and the perpetuation of disparities of race and class. CRT, for example, examines how, through the commodification of land and people for profit, Whites established the basis for Whiteness as property, which maintains White economic supremacy through inheritance. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2004, the median net wealth of White non-Hispanic families was $113,822, of Black families just $8,650; of Hispanic families, $13,375; and of Asian families, $107,690 (data on Asian families lump together widely varying ethnic groups that include very wealthy immigrants). Note that the median White family’s wealth was 13 times that of the median Black family, and 8.5 times that of the median Hispanic family. How much of that disparity is maintained by inheritance?

You don’t have to come from a wealthy family to make use of wills as a tool to examine how wealth stays within families across the generations. To reiterate, wills are public information. To see a will that has gone through probate, all you need is a deceased person’s name, and the name of the county where the person was living at the time of death.

Women and Property Rights

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I was puzzled by serial marriages of a woman ancestor who lived in Arkansas during the 1800s. She married three times, her second marriage being to my direct ancestor. The second and third marriages immediately followed the deaths of her first, then second husband. Each marriage produced children. What puzzled me was why she seemed to jump into marriage right after the death of a husband, without time for grieving.

With some research, I discovered that my notions of marriage as being connected to love and/or desire led me to impose interpretations that probably were not accurate. When I looked into the legal status of a white woman in Arkansas, I got a more accurate perspective. Using the university library, I located an article by M. R. Dougan, published in 1987, entitled “The Arkansas Married Women’s Property Law” (in The Arkansas Historical Quarterly). There, I learned that, prior to 1839, how much legal claim a white widow had to the estate of her husband was murky. Some fell into desperate poverty when their husbands died, especially if they died owing money. At the same time, due to a shortage of single white women in Arkansas, widows usually received marriage proposals right away. In 1835 the state legislature passed a law specifying that women could keep property they had received before or during marriage, and in 1939, extended that law to protect her property from being used to pay debts of her husband. But to benefit from this law, women had to record property that was to be protected in the courthouse. So, my ancestor probably had no property on the death of her husbands, and to keep herself and the children clothed and fed, had to remarry quickly.

If you are trying to situate women ancestors within a context of legal property rights, where do you look? This gets to be a little complicated. For one thing, women’s rights have been defined at the state level much more than at the federal level, so you’ll need to look into laws governing the state where a given ancestor lived. For another, race trumped gender, meaning that the property (and other) rights of women of color were defined mainly by laws governing race. An additional general consideration is that women’s rights were very often tied to their marriage status, and the legal rights husbands had to a wife's property.

So here are some useful places to start.

The Law Library of Congress includes a large collection on American women, including property law. It offers a helpful overview of women and property law in the U.S., married women’s property law, and property law related to slavery (where Black women generally occupied the legal status of property). There is also a link to state suffrage laws, which gives a helpful overview of how states differed from each other.

To find out about specific states, you need to search for that state, either using a general search engine like Google, or the academic library. Generally search terms like: women, property rights, history, and the name of the state will get you where you want to go.

A very interesting source about Black women is the blog radio interview, Property Rights and African Americans, in which Judy G. Russell discusses African Americans treated as property, then Freedmen having their property stolen through the courts.

A discussion of Mexican American women’s property rights and status is provided by the Texas State Historical Association. This helpful overview might offer leads to follow up on.

Finally, the National Women’s History Museum provides a timeline of the struggle for women’s suffrage between 1840 and 1920, including some milestones related to women’s property rights. This website is a very helpful resource for teachers, by the way.

Property Records: Getting Started

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What property did your ancestors own? Who (or what entity, such as a state) did they acquire it from? Where was it?  If land, how many acres was it and how did they acquire it? These are fascinating questions to pursue, especially if you are interested in tracing how land has been distributed, and who has or has not had access to buying land. By tracing land purchases, for example, then tracing inheritance records, I have been able to draw links between dispossession of American Indians and wealth passed down to my generation.

Some census records include information about the value of a family’s real estate and other property. But you can track down a good deal more information, although it may require ingenuity and persistence. This blog entry will help beginners get started; later entries will take on more complex issues.

You may be able to find some property records online. Resources that give a useful state-by-state overview of what is available include the Free Public Records Search Directory and Courthouse Direct. 

Deeds of sale of property are kept in county courthouses, often going back to the early 1800s. You can walk into a county courthouse and ask to see deeds (it helps to be prepared with years and names of potential deed-holders). When I first did this, I thought I would be questioned about my interest in records of specific people, but instead, I was shown to a room full of dusty old books, some of which were beginning to fall apart.

The records were all hand-written, of course. They included information such as who sold what to whom on what date, and an exact description of what was sold. The image to the right is a photo I took of a deed recorded in Monroe County Tennessee, in 1812.

Small county courthouses have original records. Larger county courthouses are more likely to have records available on microfiche. And there is always the possibility that records are no longer available. For example, when I went into the San Francisco County Courthouse, a clerk reminded me that the earthquake and subsequent fires of 1906 had destroyed much of the city's records.

Property includes more than land. In Tennessee, I was shocked when I saw records of the buying and selling of slaves, although I shouldn't have been surprised. It's one thing to read about this, another thing to see it. Property records may also reveal interesting things about people. For example, I found a record in which one of my ancestors had bought a horse and two cows from a neighbor. The animals stayed with the neighbor for care, and the neighbor promised by buy them back by the end of the year. It appeared that my ancestor was loaning his neighbor a sum of money, but the neighbor wanted to offer his animals as collateral.

Old newspapers often contained information about the buying and selling of property. When I have discovered digitized newspapers in counties where my ancestors lived, and have entered their names into searches, I have uncovered records of land buying and selling, complete with the price and occasionally a story to go with it.

The more you get into land records, especially records going back to the 1700s and 1800s, the more you’ll find yourself getting into a history of how land ownership has been organized, including how the U.S. government claimed ownership over land that was already inhabited by other people, and how the government distributed this land mainly to white people, once it had been appropriated and surveyed. 

The Bureau of Land Management provides access to millions of Federal land title records for Eastern Public Land States, issued between 1820 and 1908, as well as notes about the process of surveying, developing plat maps, and issuing land warrants. Township plat maps, for example, are based on surveyors' maps, drawn to scale. They may show individual lots, with names of lot owners. I have found plat maps in both family history centers and county courthouses.

The plat map to the left is one of my more interesting finds, because it contains names of owners of plots of land in Blue Mound Township, Illinois in 1874, along with the number of acres of each plot, and other features such as churches, schools, rivers, and the railroad. This is an unusually useful plat map. Others I have seen show whole counties, but without the detail of this township map and without names of property owners shown.

These tools should get you started. More later!