1862
Lincoln Signs Homestead Act
On this day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signs the
Homestead Act, which opens government-owned land to small family farmers
(“homesteaders”). The act gave “any person” who was the head of a family 160
acres to try his hand at farming for five years. The individual had to be at
least 21 years old and was required to build a house on the property. Farmers
were also offered an alternative to the five-year homesteading plan. They could
opt to buy the 160 acres after only 6 months at the reasonable rate of $1.25 an
acre. Many homesteaders could not handle the hardships of frontier life and
gave up before completing five years of farming. If a homesteader quit or
failed to make a go of farming, his or her land reverted back to the government
and was offered to the public again. Ultimately, these lands often ended up as
government property or in the hands of land speculators. If, after five years,
the farmer could prove his (or her) homestead successful, then he paid an $18
filing fee for a “proved” certificate and received a deed to the land.
Before the Civil War, similar acts had been proposed in 1852,
1854 and 1859, but were defeated by a powerful southern lobby that feared new
territories populated by homesteaders would be allowed into the Union as “free
states,” thereby giving more power to the abolitionist movement. In addition,
many in the northern manufacturing industries feared the Homestead Act would
draw large numbers of their labor force away and into farming. In 1860,
President James Buchanan vetoed an earlier homestead bill, succumbing to
pressure from southern slave-holding interests. With the Civil War raging and
southern slave-owning states out of the legislative picture in Washington D.C.,
Lincoln and pro-western expansion Republicans saw an opportunity to pass a law
that opened the West to settlement.
By the end of the Civil War in 1864, 15,000 people had homestead
claims in territories that now make up the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming,
Montana and Colorado. Though some of these people were genuinely looking to
begin a new life as a western farmer, others abused the program. Much of the
land offered by the government was purchased by individuals acting as a “front”
for land speculators who sought access to the vast untapped mining, timber and
water resources of the West. The speculator would offer to pay individuals cash
or a share of profits in return for submitting a Homestead Act claim. By 1900,
settlers, legitimate or otherwise, had gobbled up 80 million acres of land
through the Homestead Act. To make way for the homesteaders, the federal
government forced Native American tribes off of their ancestral lands and onto
reservations.
The first Homestead Act claim was filed by a civil war veteran
and doctor named Daniel Freeman on January 1, 1863. Although the act was
officially repealed by Congress in 1976, one last title for 80 acres in Alaska
was given to Kenneth Deardorff in 1979.