Homestead Act

Audience

The Homestead Act of 1862 was conceived, written, and passed with the national audience in mind, although urban residents in the East and secessionist southerners were the least connected to it. Like many other land-policy reformers, Congressman Grow was intellectually rooted both in the agricultural worldview of his Pennsylvania district and in the larger dynamics of mid-nineteenth-century America. His politics were informed by a widely held belief in the independence and virtues associated with Jeffersonian agrarianism. The end result was a straightforward piece of legislation that, in granting relatively easy access to land to actual settlers, remapped the western half of the United States and transformed its landscape.