Swamp Lands Acts

The Three Swamp Lands Acts were passed in 1849, 1850, and 1860 to facilitate the development of “swamp and overflowed lands”—known today as wetlands—by transferring their title to 15 individual states. “An Act to aid the State of Louisiana in draining the Swamp Lands therein” was passed by the U.S. Congress on March 2, 1849, and required that the state appoint a surveyor to define “all the swamp lands therein which are subject to overflow and unfit for cultivation,” that would pass from federal to state ownership. The condition of transfer was that the proceeds from state land sales should be used to aid development of the land by funding public drainage works and levees. The following year, an act was passed extending this program to Arkansas and “each of the other States of the Union in which such swamp and overflowed [Page 1690]lands … may be situated,” though responsibility for identifying such lands was transferred to the Secretary of the Interior, perhaps in an attempt to avoid states being over-generous to themselves in their surveys. The 1860 act applied the same program to the new states of Minnesota and Oregon.

The U.S. government is still paying the price for having given away 64,895,415 acres of wetlands in the 1800s.

The first act was stimulated by Louisiana's financial inability to recover from the devastating Mississippi floods of 1849, and the need to build flood control structures. But together, the acts had the larger aim of funding the large-scale drainage and development of wetland landscapes such as the Mississippi Delta, Indiana's Kankakee Marsh, and the Florida Everglades. The program of disbursing federal land to individual settlers through the General Land Office had failed to populate such landscapes because individual settlers lacked the resources to build the massive works necessary to effectively drain them. Under the Swamp Lands Acts, it was hoped that states would charge settlers rates low enough to make settlement appealing, with the added promise that states would use the funds to assist in the drainage of the land. Prices had to be high enough to adequately fund state reclamation activities, and a minimum of $1.25 an acre was set. The acts were, in fact, an integral part of the larger project of colonization, nation building, and citizen making, through the removal of geographic barriers.

In total, 64,895,415 acres (26,262,243 hectares) of land was ceded by the federal government to the states of Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, and Wisconsin (these were the states in existence by 1860 that were not originally crown colonies, and were thus composed largely of federally-owned land). Because the act contained no guidelines concerning how “swamp and overflowed lands” were to be identified, it was open to rampant abuse as local surveyors used their own notions of what the federal government should cede to the states. It offered only the utilitarian criteria of “unfit for cultivation”; federal guidance on defining wetlands would not come until nearly a century later, using duck habitat as the primary criterion. Even though it is known that unscrupulous surveyors included many non-wetland areas in their surveys, claiming fertile uplands as state land, the amount ceded still represents up to 30 percent of the estimated 220 million acres (89 million hectares) of wetlands present in the United States at the time of American independence.

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