The report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, which will
be laid before you by the Secretary of the Treasury, will show how the
affairs of that office have been conducted for the past year. The
disposition of the public lands is one of the most important trusts
confided to Congress. The practicability of retaining the title and
control of such extensive domains in the General Government, and at the
same time admitting the Territories embracing them into the Federal
Union as coequals with the original States, was seriously doubted by
many of our wisest statesmen. All feared that they would become a source
of discord, and many carried their apprehensions so far as to see in
them the seeds of a future dissolution of the Confederacy. But happily
our experience has already been sufficient to quiet in a great degree
all such apprehensions. The position at one time assumed, that the
admission of new States into the Union on the same footing with the
original States was incompatible with a right of soil in the United
States and operated as a surrender thereof, notwithstanding the terms of
the compacts by which their admission was designed to be regulated, has
been wisely abandoned.
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