What may not improperly be styled the whig land policy sprung from the
whig sentiment for large customs duties. Cheap public lands, offering
each poor man a home for the taking, constantly tended to neutralize the
effect of duties, by raising wages in the manufacturing sections, people
needing a goodly bribe to enter mills in the East when an abundant
living was theirs without money and without price on removing west. As a
rule, therefore, though this question did not divide the two parties so
crisply as the others, the Whigs opposed the free sale of government
land, while the Democrats favored that policy. In spite of this,
however, eastern people who moved westward–and they constituted the
West's main population–quite commonly retained their whig politics even
upon the tariff question itself.