Presidential
Land Grants: Were They Actually Signed by the Presidents?
The short
answer is that some were and some were not.
The longer
answer: As land in federally-owned western territories was divided up
for settlement, the new owner of each tract would receive a document
- a land grant - that gave him title to the property and that usually
specified the acreage and its location. In the beginning, these land
grants were actually signed by the President of the U.S., and the earliest
ones were also countersigned by the Secretary of State.
Every
President from George Washington through Andrew Jackson signed land
grants, but Jackson was the last one to do so. During his administration,
there simply got to be too many of them; one account I have read claims
that a backlog of 20,000 unsigned land grants had built up. So in 1833,
Jackson stopped signing land grants and turned the task over to a secretary.
Every President after him did the same.
These
secretarially-signed land grants have a tell-tale characteristic. In
the lower right corner of the document, just below what appears to be
the President's signature, there is a line that reads, "By
______ Secretary." On that blank line, the name of the secretary
is written in. This line is there to indicate that it was the secretary
who signed the President's name for him. At the bottom of this page
are photographs of a secretarially-signed land grant from Lincoln’s
administration; note especially the close-up of the signature area.
Some secretaries
tried to mimic the President’s signature, and a quick glance at
the Presidential “signature” on such land grants can be
misleading. I have seen, for example, secretarial imitations of James
Buchanan’s and Chester Arthur’s signatures that are fairly
good approximations of the real thing. But if that secretarial line
below the Presidential signature is there and it is filled in, then
the President’s name was penned by an artful secretary, not by
the President himself.
Unfortunately,
most of these secretarially-signed land grants have virtually no value.
The one exception I have encountered are the land grants signed by Lincoln’s
secretaries. Collectors of all-things-Lincoln will sometimes pay a bit
for them in order to have the autographs of his secretaries. Other than
that, these secretarially-signed land grants are not saleable in the
autograph market.
On rare
occasions, a land grant does turn up that is genuinely signed by one
of the Presidents after Jackson. Almost always, these are very specialized
land grants, not the routine ones given out for most federal land. I
have had two, for example, genuinely signed by President John Tyler.
One was a grant of land based on an individual’s Revolutionary
War military service, a type of land grant that was common in the earliest
Presidential administrations but was rare by the 1840's. The other concerned
some land involved in a treaty with the Creek tribe, and evidently,
a special grant signed by the President was required to transfer the
title to this land.
Note,
underneath "Abraham Lincoln," the line reading, "By
W. O. Stoddard, Sec'y." This indicates that William O. Stoddard
penned Lincoln's name here, not Lincoln himself.
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