ive cents per acre; that eighty-acre homestead
claims be given to such persons as would cultivate and occupy them for
five years; and that lands unsold at twenty-five cents per acre be ceded
to the states in which they lay, upon payment of the cost of survey and
twenty-five cents per acre. At this time, there was in Illinois 1,403,482
acres surveyed and sold; 19,684,186 acres surveyed and unsold, of the
39,000,000 acres estimated to be in the State.(345) Still another memorial
from the legislature was sent to Congress in 1829. It pointed out, in
strong terms, the inconvenience arising from the high price at which
public land was offered for sale. Unsold public land could neither be
taxed nor legally settled. It was stated that of the forty millions of
acres in Illinois, little over one and one-half millions had been sold at
public sales. A granting of the right of preemption, which implies the
presence in the state of squatters, is suggested.(346)

The implication of the presence of squatters was well founded. When Peter
Cartwright, in 1823, visited a settlement in the Sangamon country, he
found it a community of squatters, on land which had been surveyed, but
was not yet offered for sale. Money was hoarded up to enter land when
Congress should order sales. Cartwright paid a squatter two hundred
dollars for his improvement and his claim, bought some stock, and rented
out the place, to which he was to remove from Kentucky the following
year.(347) This squatting on surveyed land, and even on unsurveyed land,
was a regular procedure. It added much to the difficulty of governing the
state--hence the memorials to Congress, and hence the great significance to
Illinois of an act of May 29, 1830, which gave to all settlers who had
cultivated land in 1829 the right to preempt not more than one hundred and
sixty acres.(348) This law was of general application. Even now the
Illinois legislature sent another petition concerning preemption to
Congress, because one of the provisions of the act of May, 1830, was that
the plat of survey should have been filed in the land-office, and this
provision debarred about one thousand Illinois squatters from the benefit
of the act. A modification in their favor was desired.(349)

The land claims of the ancient settlers, as they are called in government
documents, continued to occupy the attention of Congress, in a desultory
way, throughout the period, but their influence upon settlement had
prac