US Presidency
1841

The average sales of the public lands for a period of ten years prior to 1834 had not much exceeded $ 2,000,000 per annum. In 1834 they attained in round numbers to the amount of $ 6,000,000; in the succeeding year of 1835 they reached $ 16,000,000, and the next year of 1836 they amounted to the enormous sum of $ 25,000,000, thus crowding into the short space of three years upward of twenty-three years ' purchase of the public domain. So apparent had become the necessity of arresting this course of things that the executive department assumed the highly questionable power of discriminating in the funds to be used in payment by different classes of public debtors a discrimination which was doubtless designed to correct this most ruinous state of things by the exaction of specie in all payments for the public lands, but which could not at once arrest the tide which had so strongly set in.