History
Homestead Act
The Homestead Act was a United States federal law enacted in 1862 that provided 160 acres of public land to settlers willing to improve the land and live on it for five years. This act encouraged westward expansion and the development of agriculture in the western United States. It played a significant role in shaping the demographic and economic landscape of the country.
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6 Key excerpts on "Homestead Act"
- eBook - ePub
- Roy Jones, Alexandre M.A. Diniz(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
However, the expansion of the United States' continental territory in the 1840s and 1850s brought about a marked increase in the imperative to settle the western United States (Krall 2001). Considerable division over how this was to be achieved remained, however, and, in 1851, 1852 and 1854, homesteading legislation was passed in the US House of Representatives, only to be rejected in the Senate (Kent Rasmussen 2009). A further attempt in 1860 saw President Buchanan veto the bill. The secession of the southern states from the Union shifted the political dynamics considerably and, in 1862, the Homestead Act was passed. Under the provisions of the US bill, settlers 21 years of age or older who were, or intended to become, citizens and who acted as heads of households could acquire tracts of 160 acres of surveyed public land free of all but $10 registration payments. Titles to the land went to the settlers after five years of continuous residence. Alternatively, after only six months, the claimants could purchase the land for $1.25 per acre. Over the years, amendments and extensions of the act made it applicable to forest land and grazing land and increased the maximum acreage tract that individual settlers could acquire (Mikesell 1960).Importantly, the Homestead Act was not passed in isolation and, later in 1862, the Pacific Railroad Act was passed in order to improve transport between industrial regions and the nation's newly emerging agricultural areas (Billings 2012). By the 1930s, 285 million acres had been allocated under the Homestead Act. While the overall success of the Act remains open to debate (Billings 2012), it nevertheless played a critical role in the settling of large areas of the western United States. Moreover, as a policy instrument, it has had considerable influence beyond its immediate jurisdiction.To the north, the newly confederated Dominion of Canada expanded rapidly westward through the purchase of a vast area of land held by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1870 (Gerhard 1959). This area today covers northern Quebec and Labrador, northern and western Ontario and much of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nunavut and Alberta. One of the central objectives of the Dominion government was to increase economic development, particularly on the Canadian prairies, through the expansion of agricultural enterprise. In developing these regions, Canada drew heavily on American land settlement ideas (Mackintosh and Joerg 1934). From 1871, the Dominion Lands Survey adopted a modified version of the American square or township and range system, with the newly acquired lands being divided into six-mile-square townships containing 36 sections of 640 acres. Each section was divided into “fourths” comprising 160 acres. For Richtik (1975), the adoption of the American system was partly a matter of convenience, in that it provided a framework that would rapidly and accurately provide the country with an orderly pattern of land settlement. However, he also notes that competition with the United States for settlers was critical given the existence of the 1862 Homestead Act. The prevailing view was that any Canadian system of homesteading needed to at least match the offering south of the border (Richtik 1975). Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, Canada's response, the Dominion Lands Act, bears striking similarities to its American counterpart. 
eBook - ePubThe Laws That Shaped America
Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact
- Dennis W. Johnson(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
To many, the Southern Homestead Act was another insult, of northerners trying to rub the war into their noses and retard growth and economic prosperity. Finally, in 1876, after a long, heated fight, with southern lawmakers unified in their determination, the 1866 law was repealed. Now, the South was open once again to land and timber speculation. But ironically, it was monied interests from the North that swooped down and bought control of the best land, the best cypress and yellow pine acres, and reaped the profits from the southern timber industry. 83 Altogether, over 1.03 billion acres of public land were disposed of, with 285 million going to homesteaders, and the rest to railroads, the states, and other claims. 84 In the eight years following passage of the Homestead Act, a total of 127 million acres were granted to railroads and another 2 million to the building of canals and wagon roads. Another 140 million acres of public lands were given to state governments to produce endowments for state institutions. After 1862, between 100 and 125 million acres of Indian reservation land was also sold off to white settlers. 85 Timeline of Homesteading and Land Policy 1796 Land Act of 1796 established rectangular system of surveys in townships consisting six miles square. Public land sold for $2.00 per acre, with credit extended
eBook - ePubThe Farmer's Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860-97
Agriculture, 1860-97
- Fred A. Shannon(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
15 Persons who tried to accumulate the necessary area had to resort to subterfuges and evasions of the laws. Others, unable to accomplish this feat, overgrazed the land to its ultimate destruction, or plowed it up only to see it blow away.Sweeping and serious as this indictment of the Homestead policy may seem to be, it fails to tell more than a minor fraction of the whole story. Further demonstration of the faults before mentioned is necessary, but it is best first to enumerate the other principal land acts and policies of the federal government in the later years of the nineteenth century, so that the consequences of the system can be considered as a whole rather than piecemeal.Subsequent Land Acts
Of all the land laws passed after 1860 the Timber Culture Act of March 3, 1873, perhaps contributed least to the growth of speculation and monopoly. It too, however, fell rather short of the hopes of its authors. Painfully aware of the frequent shortage of rainfall in the West, and realizing that trees tend to retain moisture in the soil, Senator Phineas W. Hitchcock of Nebraska introduced the measure that was vainly expected to change weather conditions on the Great Plains. The law, applying to the same classes of persons as did the Homestead Act, permitted any of them, even if they already had a homestead and a pre-emption claim of a quarter section each, to take out papers on another 160 acres of relatively treeless land. The original law required the planting of one fourth of the area in trees within ten years. This proving too much, an amendment of June 14, 1878, limited the amount to one sixteenth and reduced the time to eight years. But for every year that the young seedlings or sprouts were destroyed by grasshoppers, drouth, or other calamity, a year’s extension of time was allowed. In not less than eight years, when proof was given that at least 2,700 seeds or slips had been planted for each required acre and that 675 or more trees to the acre were still living and thriving, the settler could get a deed to the tract.16
That success, like the building of almost all the transcontinental railways, depended on various frauds, some more egregious than others, and a kind of “wisdom of crowds” that involved tweaking the rules so that an intending farmer could, by selling successive relinquishments and pre-emptions or even proved-up claims, finally amass enough capital to establish a successful farm. Those with less aptitude or taste for farming could similarly prepare themselves to set up a store in a nearby town or more distant city, secure an education, or do anything else capital allowed. As Senator Robert Stanfield of Oregon asked ruefully in 1926, the tag end of the homestead era in the lower forty-eight, “It is a matter of historical record, is it not, that it has taken about three migrations everywhere in the western movement to bring about permanent settlement?” 3 But it did not take until 1926 for people to recognize that the Homestead Act had not turned “free land” into farms overnight. Opponents and even some proponents of American homestead laws had recognized as early as the 1840s that “free land” would be a great boon for speculators. Canada had no real choice but to authorize the Dominion Lands Act in 1872 to match the American offer and even to raise it by requiring only three rather than five years on a homestead before the intending settler could obtain it in fee simple, which tended to limit debate on the drawbacks of the act. Discussion about the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887, a bizarrely reverse Homestead Act that divided American Indian reservations into individual or family plots and confiscated any remaining non-allotted lands for the benefit of non-Native people, was clearly debated and passed in the context of turning common lands into capital and individual Indians into aspiring capitalists. 4 Our understanding of the various Homestead, Dominion Lands, and Allotment Acts shifts if we change our focus from the formation of homes to the formation of capital
- Jason Edward Black(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- University Press of Mississippi(Publisher)
Western expansion in the late nineteenth century predictably led to a connection between citizenship and territory, as was the case in the Jacksonian era. White settlers were guaranteed lands for reasonable prices if they could demonstrate their productive intentions. Jefferson’s old call for a yeoman spirit did not fall on deaf ears all those years later.A number of acts were passed to open up western lands for production and citizenship purposes to the detriment of Native land—constituting an extension of the colonizing doctrine of discovery. In 1862, for example, the Homestead Act was implemented to secure land to settlers in the public domain. Settlers who were “citizens of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States” were granted cheap acreage.19 Speaking of the act, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano argued that homesteading would dually open land for white settlers and wreak havoc on American Indian sovereignty: “An extension . . . will rapidly break up tribal organizations and Indian communities; it will bring Indians into subjugation to our laws, civil and criminal.”20 Similarly, the Oklahoma Organic Act of 1890 gave “settlers . . . the rights and privileges of American citizens” and placed them under the protection of law if they promised to use the land for the national good.21 These acts permitted US citizens to carry out the republican mission to populate and produce for the nation.As American Indians were removed to reservations the US government “civilized” many of them into the ways of American culture. American Indians had been a threat to the US government since its inception. If the government could “civilize” them and offer citizenship, then perhaps future dangers would be quelled through Natives’ colonial subjugation. At this point, American Indians were not a hazard, but rather an opportunity for US identity building. Assimilating Natives also spoke to the power of territory as it intersected with citizenship. Whereas African Americans had typically not owned land, and therefore did not possess a connection to US soil, Native nations had historically linked their identities to territory. While there was a difference of opinion between American Indian nations and the US government regarding how to treat the land, political leaders sensed that Natives might be better suited to engage in citizenship because they cherished and honored territory.22
eBook - ePubBuilding an American Empire
The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion
- Paul Frymer(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
st Session, Misc. No. 38 (February 17, 1854), 5–8. See too, I. I. Stevens (Gov. and Sup’t Indian Affairs for Washington Territory to George W. Manypenny (December 26, 1853), in “Letters Addressed to the Committee on Indian Affairs,” 12.87 Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (November 6, 1858), 354.88 Report of the Public Lands Commission, 58th Cong., 3d Session, Document No. 189, at 175, Table XIII “Final Homesteads” (1905). For criticisms of the Act’s inability to meet expectations and be often riddled by political inefficiencies and corruption, see Paul Wallace Gates, “The Homestead Law in an Incongruous Land System,” 652–81; Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 145.89 Ibid.90 See, for example, Paul W. Gates, “Indian Allotments Preceding the Dawes Act,” in Gates, ed., The Rape of Indian Lands (New York: Arno Press, 1973); John Hudson, “Two Dakota Homestead Frontiers,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 63:4 (1973), 442–62; Gustive O. Larson, “Land Contest in Early Utah,” in Paul W. Gates, ed., Public Land Policies: Management and Disposal (New York: Arno Press, 1979); Lars Ljungmark, For Sale—Minnesota: Organized Promotion of Scandinavian Immigration 1866–1873 (Chicago: Swedish Pioneer Society, 1971); John G. Rice, “The Effect of Land Alienation on Settlement,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68:1 (1978), 61–72; “Minnesota Indian Lands to Be Opened to Homestead Entry,” Chicago Tribune (March 1, 1891).91 Jason Pierce, Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2015), 15292 See “Annual Report of Commissioner of General Land Office, 1890,” 2840 H. exdoc. 1/13 (September 13, 1890), 121–26. The statute provided for the disposal of all new public lands “to actual settlers under the homestead laws only” (123). See too, Heather Cox Richardson, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre
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