#homesteadact

Homestead Act: Settling the American West

The Homestead Act was a policy enacted by the United States government on 20 May 1862 to encourage westward expansion. Passed during the American Civil War (1861-1865), the act offered 160 acres (65 ha) of public domain land to any citizen who had never taken up arms against the federal government. Though the land did not cost any money, it was not completely free. Prospective farmers were required to live on and 'improve' the land for five years before the property would legally become theirs. Though a large percentage of farms would fail, the Homestead Act encouraged hundreds of thousands of American families to move out West. Before it was discontinued in 1976, the act led 270 million acres of land to be claimed and settled by US citizens.

Background: Westward Expansion

Even before the inception of the United States as a nation, Americans had dreamed of the West. In 1763, King George III of Great Britain had to pass a royal proclamation barring American colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains to prevent future conflicts with Native Americans already living there. This restriction of westward movement enraged the colonists and was one of the first grievances that led to the American Revolution (1775-1783).

In the years after the United States had gained its independence, the Founders laid out the first groundwork for westward expansion in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This ordinance turned out to be of monumental importance. It not only created the first organized territory of the US – the Northwest Territory – but laid the legal precedent for the settlement of the West and established how new states could be added to the Union. Of course, the Northwest Ordinance also led to bloody fighting between the Euro-American settlers and the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions.

The precedent set by the Northwest Ordinance – both in terms of settlement and violence against Native Americans – informed the next several decades, as US settlers streamed Westward to seek their fortunes and fulfill the promise of Manifest Destiny. The Mexican-American War (1845-1848), overseen by the expansionist administration of President James K. Polk, added 525,000 square miles of territory to the US, and the subsequent discovery of gold in California helped incentivize thousands more settlers to move West.

But as the West became more heavily populated, the nation was forced to grapple with the question of slavery – would it be allowed to expand into these new lands? The slave-holding aristocracy of the Antebellum South strongly supported the expansion of slavery. Not only would the creation of new 'slave states' increase their political power, but many of the newly acquired Western lands were ripe for cotton plantations. By forcing enslaved people to shed their blood and sweat toiling over the virgin soil of the West, the slave-holding elite would increase their fortunes, and the rich would get richer.

The expansion of slavery was opposed not only by abolitionists but also by 'free soil' Northerners who believed in the value of wage labor performed by free workers. Many of these free soilers supported the ideal of the virtuous yeoman farmer, which they defined as a hardworking American man who owned his own farm, tilled his own soil, and reaped the rewards of his labor for himself and his family. This idealized vision of the West, populated by a myriad of small farms, was fundamentally at odds with the slaveholders' vision of a West filled with sprawling slave plantations.

During the Presidential Election of 1860, the new anti-slavery Republican Party added a conceptual version of the 'Homestead Act' to its platform. The goal was to offer land to potential settlers and their families, incentivizing them to go and set up farms before the slaveholding elites could get their hands on the land. The Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, supported the idea. In February 1861, shortly after his election to the presidency, he proclaimed that "the wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefiting his condition" (quoted by history.org). By this point, several Southern slave states had already seceded from the Union. Two months later, Confederate cannons fired on Fort Sumter, triggering the American Civil War.

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For the most part, both of these places are nothing. Some farms, a lot of cows, and just openness. 

Iowa

Ryan, a friend of mine from Mansfield University, lives in Creston, Iowa, where he teaches jazz at a local community college. We were close friends my freshman year of college, but he was a senior at the time, so I’ve only seen him a handful of times since 2008. 

Here’s a picture of us from nine years ago when the Mansfield University Concert Choir was on tour in Europe. 

Now, almost a decade older, we’re not the party animals we once were. It’s always lovely catching up with Ryan. Talking about people from college we rarely see, finding out what’s going on in each other’s lives. The stop was brief, but lovely. 

I crashed at his place for the night and the next morning I began my long journey through the remainder of Iowa and most of Nebraska. 

Nebraska

Honestly, the drive is pretty damn boring. The ride consists of landscapes and pro-life billboards. You can only look at pretty clouds, fields and anti-choice signs for so long. At one point, I saw a sign for the Homestead National Memorial. It was 40 minutes out of the way and it wasn’t on my itinerary, which I had intensely stuck to since I began the trip, but I took the turn. I needed an excuse to stop driving. 

I walked into the visitor center and immediately found a park ranger. I told her, “I spontaneously made the turn to come here. What do I do?” She laughed at me and gave me a brief history of the place. It was a memorial of the Homestead Act - if you don’t remember from history class, it gave poor people land as long as they used it to live and farm. The park ranger directed me to the museum at the top of the hill, which included a lot of farming equipment from the 1800′s. She also mentioned the one room school that was on the property. When I went to the school, there were two volunteers there, both women who were probably in their late 70′s. Both of them lived in rural Nebraska for most of their life and attended one room schools, which still exist today. They had a lot of interesting stories to tell. 

Eventually, I got back on the road. After another two hours or so of driving, I began to notice the beauty of Nebraska. As I drove further west, the flatlands turned into small hills, the dirt turned into stone - the progression of the view was incredible. Often, in the distance, a sea of windmills could be seen throughout the land. If the land was not a wheat field, it was the greenest grass you could possibly imagine. At one point it reminded me of the childrens’ television show Teletubbies. My brother watched it when he was a little kid and I remember the grass being bright green and the sky being bright blue - that is what Nebraska is like. There were countless clouds, all of which looked like patches of the whitest cotton flowing through the sky. 

The Homestead Act was signed on May 20, 1862 and designed to open up rural parts of the country for settlement.  There were three requirements to get deed to 160 acres of land:

1.     File an application with a filing fee of $10

2.     Live on the land for 5 years, improve it by building a 12 x 14 building and grow crops

3.     At the end of the five years, file for patent or deed of title and provide proof of residency and the required improvements (and submit another nominal filing fee)

The only requirements for application was that the person had to be over 21, a single male or Head of Household, and a US Citizen or intended citizen.  Since the Act allowed non-citizens to file as long as they intended to become citizens, it had a profound effect on immigration and resulted in many first-generation immigrants taking advantage of the Homestead Act.

The provision stating that a Head of Household could file allowed single or widowed women to file for Homesteads as well.  Also, many freed slaves applied for Homesteads since, unlike other land acts of the time, they were not excluded.

Title to the Homesteaded land could also be acquired after a 6-month residency and trivial improvements, provided the claimant paid the government $1.25 per acre. After the Civil War, Union soldiers could deduct the time they served from the residency requirements, and widows of Union soldiers could also deduct time served.

Physical conditions on the frontier meant that it wasn’t easy to “prove up” the homestead.  Farming conditions were different then people had experienced in the eastern US or immigrants’ native countries.  And some Homesteaders had never farmed before at all.  The open plains in the mid-West forced many to build homes out of sod, and the lack of trees and hills resulted in strong winds and ferocious winter blizzards.

“Ironically, even the smaller size of sections took its own toll. While 160 acres may have been sufficient for an eastern farmer, it was simply not enough to sustain agriculture on the dry plains, and scarce natural vegetation made raising livestock on the prairie difficult. As a result, in many areas, the original homesteader did not stay on the land long enough to fulfill the claim.” -- http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/homestead-act

Six months after the Homestead Act was passed, the Railroad Act was signed, and by May 1869, a transcontinental railroad stretched across the frontier. The new railroads provided easy transportation for homesteaders, and new immigrants were lured westward by railroad companies eager to sell off excess land at inflated prices.

On January 1, 1863, 418 people filed claims, including Daniel Freeman who was recognized as the first claimant.  By 1934, over 1.6 million homestead applications were processed and more than 270 million acres—10 percent of all U.S. lands—passed into the hands of individuals. The passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 repealed the Homestead Act in the 48 contiguous states, but it did grant a ten-year extension on claims in Alaska.