#slavery

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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Prison is much closer to straight up slavery in the spectrum of unfree labor. The fact that a lot of prisoners choose to work just to have something to do and to have money to spend at the commissary doesn’t negate the point either bc even antebellum chattel slaves could “voluntarily” rent themselves out to be wage laborers or indentured servants in some cases. Prisoners are effectively still slaves, just public slaves as property of the state. The fact that their continued care and survival is entirely up to their imprisoners just reinforces the point.

Indentured servitude these days is more those jobs that pay extremely low fixed wages that amount to the employer just outsourcing the care for the continued life of the worker to wherever they take their money to (most of it goes to rent and groceries) and whoever they live with (usually family or a bunch of roommates). Usually these workers are completely dependent on public assistance (in the U.S. usually meaning EBT) to supplement their wages for their own survival. A huge share of wage labor jobs amount to exactly this—peonage was just depersonalized and put in the hands of corporations, banks, and public agencies rather than abolished. Further along the spectrum the jobs that subject workers to these conditions in exchange for “being paid in experience” or “networking” or even getting a certification/degree at the end also fall under this modern indentured servitude. Those promised benefits, which aren’t actually guaranteed to the indentured servant, are effectively just modern day “freedom dues” (which in the old indenture used to be the promise of personal property, land, tools etc).

Jul 22, 2026 

It's been 250 years since Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a document that declared all men equal even while hundreds of thousands of people remained enslaved. Judy Woodruff traveled to his Virginia home of Monticello to learn more about the third president and how his own contradictions reflected the nation's. It's part of her series, Crossroads: America at 250....

Judy Woodruff:

Thomas Jefferson's legacy is written all over his beloved Monticello, his home and plantation perched on a mountaintop in Charlottesville, Virginia.

But some of the newest words here aren't his; 610 names are engraved on the 60-foot-long curved memorial wall, one for each of the enslaved people who lived and labored here. Made out of weathered steel, it opened in 2023....

Judy Woodruff:

For Gordon-Reed, the question isn't whether Jefferson was a hero or a villain. It's what Americans do with a founder whose ideals reached farther than he did.

You have said that understanding Thomas Jefferson calls on -- in a way, calls on all of us to think about, are we living up to our ideals at this moment? What did you mean by that?

Annette Gordon-Reed:

In looking at him and seeing flaws and the good parts and the bad parts, we -- and also the optimism that he had about the country, we have to look to ourselves to decide, are we up to this, this notion of keeping a republic?

And are -- do we really value the idea of science? Do we really value the idea of a multicultural society in a place that is -- has been from the very beginning full of all different types of cultures and religions, religious diversity? That's always been a part of America.

But do we value that? And it's not clear to me that many of our fellow Americans actually do. So I think it's an opportunity for us to search as we approach the 250th anniversary, do we want to go forward with all of this, this American experiment that he thought was something new under the sun?