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Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Foreword -- Preface -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- List of Tables -- I. The South in 1815 -- Wasteful Farm Practices -- Plight of the Tobacco-Growing Areas -- The Westward Trek -- Cotton Planting in the South -- New Lands in the Trans-Appalachian States -- Land Policies in Kentucky and Tennessee -- The Lower South and Sugar -- Farming in the Newer South -- II. Northern Agriculture in 1815 -- The Land of New England -- Land Speculation in New York -- Landlordism and Tenancy -- Farm-Making in Pennsylvania -- Farming in New Jersey -- Growth of Ohio -- Farming in Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri -- III. Public-Land Policies -- Ohio Enabling Act -- Private Land Claims -- Surveying the Public Domain -- Revenue Land Policy -- Speculation in Public Land -- Abandonment of the Credit System -- Bounty Land Acts -- Growth of Tenancy -- IV. The Business in Land: Public-Land Policies, 1835-1861 -- Moneylending to Squatters -- Panic of 1857 -- Steps toward Free Land -- Land Speculation in the Fifties -- Absentee Owners -- Railroad Land Grant Policies -- Farm Mortgages -- Malfunctioning of the Land System -- V. The Border South: Tobacco, Flax, and Hemp -- Tobacco: A Problem Staple -- Changes in Farm Practices -- Principal Tobacco Producing Areas -- Hemp and Flax -- VI. Rice and Sugar -- Rice -- Sugar -- Economics of Sugar Plantations -- Attempts at Economic Self-Sufficiency -- Buying and Selling of Sugar Plantations -- VII. Cotton -- Cotton Planting -- Cotton Picking' -- Farm Management Practices -- Problems of the Cotton Planter -- Attitudes of the Large Cotton Planter -- Cotton Marketing -- The Economics of Slavery -- VIII. Grain Farming -- Wheat Raising -- Transportation Problems -- The Geographic Shift in Wheat Farming -- Corn Growing -- Other Grains -- The Trade through New Orleans -- IX. Prairie Farming

Critical readers of The Public Lands. Studies in the History of the Public Domain, edited by Vernon Carstensen, whatever the merits of its other features, cannot but be struck by the fact that separate charts showing interest in the public lands—as evidenced first by income from sales and second by the total of land entries in acreage—differ so widely. One explanation for some of the difference is that Arthur H. Cole, in compiling the data for the charts showing income from sales, seems to have used the calendar year, whereas the chart showing original land entries is based on the data for the government fiscal year. Another difficulty is that the Cole chart is prepared from manuscript schedules in the old General Land Office and they do not coincide with the published data in the Annual Reports of that office.