Homestead Act

Context

Early land-disposal policies met policy makers' objectives with varying degrees of success and failure. Major legislation was passed as the Land Ordinance of 1785, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (which concerned the governance of new territories and their progression toward statehood, an important assurance to prospective land buyers), and subsequent revised land acts in 1796, 1800, and 1820. This series of land policies reflected Congress's recognition of the need to reform and liberalize citizens' access to land, with the goal of transferring as much public land into private ownership as possible. The earliest land policies offered large tracts of land for sale, which tended to favor speculators over individual purchasers (actual settlers), who could neither afford nor farm that much land. Yet western migration and settlement during this period often was made by a group seeking a large tract of land.

The Land Act of 1800 was a considerably more liberal land policy that was specifically geared toward the typical farmer. It offered the equivalent of four years of credit, a reduced minimum purchase tract of 320 acres at the price of $2 per acre, and closer western land office districts; it also gave the government the ability to compete for sales against major land companies that were selling to farmers. The act was crafted by William Henry Harrison, the Northwest Territory's congressional delegate and later the U.S. president, and Albert Gallatin, the congressman from Pennsylvania and soon-to-be treasury secretary, who had spearheaded an earlier land reform that had resulted in the 1796 act. The Harrison Land Act of 1800 succeeded well in stimulating sales, yet the experiment with land sales on credit had a ruinous effect on the economy, as evidenced by the Panic of 1819. The Land Act of 1820 was a corrective measure that ended credit sales but also reduced the minimum purchase tract size to eighty acres and the price to $1.25 per acre. Not surprisingly, without the option for credit, land sales plummeted. The land-policy historian Roy Robbins contends that the 1820 act “brought the whole population of the frontier to the brink of ruin” (p. 38).

Continued land-policy revision also was aimed at thwarting the many speculators or land monopolists as well as squatters. The illegal presence of squatters ahead of official land surveys frequently provoked Indian hostilities, created chaos in legitimating land titles, and theoretically robbed the U.S. Treasury of prospective sales. But as the noted land-policy historian Paul Gates has observed, squatters significantly influenced land policy by constantly forcing the matter of preemption (a squatter's right of first purchase at the government price when land came up for sale at public auction) in front of Congress. In 1830 the Preemption Act was passed. This tentative, temporary legislation had to be renewed periodically to remain in effect. In 1841 a more comprehensive preemption law was passed to offer some protection of squatters' rights, signaling a major ideological turning point in U.S. land law policy.

Another reform dealt with the graduation of land prices, which was meant to address the problem of less desirable lands that remained unsold because the government minimum prices were too high; potentially workable, productive land was staying unimproved, untaxed, and unsettled. Between 1820 and 1854 the graduation issue repeatedly appeared before Congress, usually at the urging of its chief proponent, Thomas Hart Benton, the Democratic senator from Missouri. The Graduation Act was eventually passed in 1854 and specified that the price of public land that had been on the market for ten years, with some exceptions, would be valued at graduated (reduced) levels. For example, the price for land that had been unsold for ten to fifteen years would now be valued at $1.00 per acre and valued lower, at $0.75 per acre, if it remained unsold for fifteen to twenty years.

During the 1840s and 1850s national expansionism, the prolonged aftermath of the Panic of 1837, and the Mexican War (1846–1848) led to a rising call to grant free land to actual settlers. The immediate antecedents to the 1862 Homestead Act were expansionist-driven settlement bills that functioned much like the practice of awarding military land bounties (free grants of land to soldiers). To attract settlers to then-remote territories such as East Florida, Oregon, Washington, and New Mexico, Congress began offering “donation lands” to heads of households willing to reside on and cultivate 160, 320, or 640 acres, depending on the location of the donation grant. For example, in the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, the original residence requirement to obtain the land title was four years, but this was later reduced to two years because of the apparent hardship experienced by the settlers. Here was the first inkling that free land might actually exact a heavy cost. These settlement laws also included terms for commutation—the homesteader's ability to commute the remainder of time owed on the residency requirement into a cash payment worth $1.25 per acre. Similar terms became an important provision in the 1862 Homestead Act.

One of the most prominent voices for land reform was the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. The enduring economic dislocations caused by the Panic of 1837 prompted Greeley and others to tout westward migration to those struggling in the East. (Greeley popularized the phrase “Go west, young man,” which was originally written by John Soule of Indiana in an 1851 editorial.) Their urgings kept up the public pressure on Congress to produce and enact a homestead measure, but the Mexican War and the resulting Mexican Cession altered the political landscape: Land reform was overshadowed by the brewing sectional storm over slavery and expansion. However, other factors kept pushing forward the idea of meaningful land reform. Increasing foreign immigration rates and the discovery of gold in California led to greater western migration. Ongoing development toward a complete transcontinental railroad, which required huge tracts of surveyed public land, also meant potential settlers would have easier access to the new territories.

Congressional movement toward a homestead bill became intertwined with sectionalism and the disintegration of the Whig and Democratic parties. In 1847–1848, a cross-party group of politicians formed the Free-Soil Party, which opposed extending slavery into the new territories ceded by Mexico and supported enactment of a homestead law. Proslavery Democrats came to believe that legislation offering free land would mean the spread of an antislavery ideology and reality, threatening the South's way of life. Several land bills were introduced in the late 1840s and into the 1850s, but they received strong opposition under the Democratic presidencies of Franklin Pierce (1853–1857) and James Buchanan (1857–1861). The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which let the territories' settlers vote on whether to allow slaves, had a chilling effect upon land reform. However, the resulting formation of the Republican Party (and death of the Whigs) meant land laws were not completely absent from the congressional agenda.

The tide began to change in January 1859 when Congressman Grow, now a Republican, introduced a homestead bill in the House. It was immediately opposed by Alexander Stephens of Georgia, yet it passed by a vote of 120 to 76, without any debate. In the Senate, southern opposition succeeded in tabling the bill. Undeterred, Grow introduced the bill in the House again in February 1860, where again it passed. This time, the Senate endeavored to put forth its own homestead bill, but the process broke down when an attempt was made to substitute Grow's bill for the Senate bill, provoking southern charges that the bill was actually an abolitionist measure. Even so, a compromise bill passed both houses in June—only to be vetoed by President Buchanan. Buchanan's veto was a bitter pill for reformers like Greeley, who remarked prophetically, “Does any one suppose that Abraham Lincoln would ever veto such a bill?” (Robbins, p. 182).

Indeed, Lincoln did not. His victory in the 1860 presidential election gave clear ascendancy to the Republicans, the antislavery party, and prompted southern states to secede from the Union, inaugurating the Civil War era. Grow correctly perceived that, with southern opposition removed, the time was right to reintroduce the homestead bill, which he did in February 1862. After the bill passed both houses, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862. Within a few months, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act and the Morrill Act, which offered land grants to the western states to establish agricultural colleges. Taken together, these three pieces of legislation formed a blueprint for modern America. The western half of the United States was soon imprinted with homesteads, railroads, and colleges, a fundamentally important triad that shaped the region's identity for years to come.