Submitted by K.M. Johns

President Abraham Lincoln, after years of slave-owner and industrialist opposition, signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862. The law, which was to take effect on January 1, 1863, permitted adult citizens, and those immigrants who declared their intention to seek naturalization, to apply for grants of one hundred sixty acres of federal land. The many hardships of frontier life, as well as problems associated with implementation of the law, did not prevent the emigration of hopeful pioneers to the expansive plains west of the Mississippi River. Republicans, who envisioned a virgin land of opportunity for free white men in the West, wanted to populate the territories with self-sufficient Northern farmers who would strengthen the U.S. social and economic systems and assist the Union war effort through formation of a bulwark against enlargement of the Confederacy.

Americans had debated the allotment of government lands since independence, but demands for reform of federal land-use policies gained momentum after economic changes in the 1830s and 1840s adversely affected small farmers. Sympathetic legislators modified sections of the Land Ordinance of 1785, which set burdensome requirements for purchase of government land. Congress enacted a reduction in purchase prices and offered bonuses in 1854 to encourage settlement of Oregon Territory, but western homesteading remained a financial impossibility for most interested Americans.

Congressional allies of Northern small farmers had attempted, since the 1850s, to authorize distribution of federal land grants on more favorable terms to potential homesteaders. Powerful interest groups, however, exerted enough pressure to defeat homestead legislation. Northern capitalists perceived such legislation as a government incentive for low-paid workers to abandon factory labor for the economic independence of the farm. Southern slaveholders in general and wealthy planters in particular viewed homestead legislation as a threat to the extension of slavery to the western territories.

President James Buchanan, a Pennsylvania Democrat who sympathized with the economic concerns of the slave-owning class, vetoed the 1860 homestead bill. The secession crisis that exploded during the final year of Buchanan’s presidency, however, enabled the passage of a federal homestead law as the Union broke apart. After the Southern states withdrew their congressional delegations, the antislavery supporters of Western settlement succeeded in sending the Homestead Act to President Lincoln, which he signed into law.

The creation of more economic opportunities for the ambitious and restless was not the only reason the president approved the bill. With the outcome of the Civil War far from decided, antislavery Unionists saw the Homestead Act as an instrument to promote colonization of federal territories by free white settlers. Northern farmers, in this view, would organize pro-Union territorial governments and petition Congress for admission as free states, blocking the expansion of slavery and checking the growth of the Confederate States.

The Homestead Act provided that any citizen or intended citizen who was at least twenty-one years old, who was head of a family, and who had never fought against the U.S. government, could file a claim for one hundred sixty acres of public land. As long as the settler lived on and farmed the allotment for five years, he could request a deed for the land upon payment of a small registration fee. The law also provided a second option, in which the homesteader could earn title to the land after only six month residence if he paid $1.25 per acre. Union military personnel, after the war, could have a portion of their residency requirements forgiven, corresponding to their length of service.

The Homestead Act influenced colonization of the West long after the war’s end. Passage of the Pacific Railway Act in July 1862 allowed the government to grant public land and issue bonds to aid construction of a transcontinental railway, which further opened the wetern half of the country to development. Critics emphasized, over the next few decades, the manipulation of the Homestead Act by land speculators and railroads. Commercial and financial interests tended to profit far more than average farmers due to legal loopholes and lax enforcement of the Homestead Act’s requirements.

Despite all the failures and disappointments associated with homesteading, the federal government processed over 1.6 million applications under the Act by 1934, and in 1936 Congress created Homestead National Monument in Beatrice, Nebraska to commemorate the achievements of the pioneers and their breaking of the plains. The Monument’s museum maintains a collection of historical records and artifacts including documents relating to Daniel Freeman, one of the first homesteaders in Nebraska Territory under the Act. Freeman, a Union Army scout and native of Preble County, Ohio, lived in several states after attending medical school in Cincinnati.
SOURCE:

Homestead National Monument of America. “History and Culture.” National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. http://www.nps.gov/home/historyculture/index.htm

The Library of Congress, Virtual Programs and Services. “Web Guides: Primary Documents in American History: Homestead Act.” http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Homestead.html

The National Archives. “Teaching With Documents: The Homestead Act of 1862.” The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/homestead