Passed by the U.S. Congress in response to the growing demand for land in the West, the Homestead Act greatly stimulated settlement of vast territories by making it possible for thousands of families to obtain land for free.
The United States grew enormously between 1840 and 1860, and reached its full continental limits in 1854, through the acquisition of Mexican territory ceded in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the Gadsden Purchase (1853). At the same time, its population continued its upward spiral, rising from slightly more than seventeen million people in 1840 to more than thirty million in 1860. Meanwhile, new canals, steamboat companies, turnpikes, and railroads were knotting the nation together into an integrated economic unit. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans crossed the Atlantic to take up residence in the dynamic new nation, while other hundreds of thousands moved into the western regions of the country.
The growth of the West was especially marked. While the population of all sections grew, the North and the South experienced less relative growth during these two decades than did the West. As the West approached a position of equality with the older sections, it became more insistent in its demands upon the federal government. At the same time, the intensification of sectional antagonisms engendered by the controversy over slavery and its future in the nation fatally obstructed efforts at the national level to provide guidelines and incentives for growth.
By 1840, sectional lines had hardened. Southern majorities in Congress consistently blocked legislation introduced by legislators from the other sections of the country. This was true in debates over tariffs, internal improvements, central banking, and land policy. However, the West won a significant victory in the congressional debate over the disposition of the public domain with the passage of the Preemption Act of 1841,
The campaign to achieve free land was waged on two fronts. Westerners, such as Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton
It was obvious that the idea of free homesteads would work to the advantage of free-soil groups by attracting into the newly won territories settlers from the North, who, being slaveless, were more mobile. Therefore, the Free-Soil Party
A struggle for homestead legislation was waged in Congress through the 1850’s. The congressional sessions of 1851, 1852, and 1854 devoted much time to such proposals. Southerners were opposed to the concept and argued that no benefits would accrue to their section. In spite of the leadership of Andrew Johnson
The election of Republican Abraham Lincoln
Under the provisions of the bill, which was to go into effect January 1, 1863, settlers twenty-one years of age or older who were, or intended to become, citizens and who acted as the heads of households could acquire tracts of 160 acres of surveyed public land free of all but ten-dollar registration payments. Titles to the land went to the settlers after five years of continuous residence. Alternatively, after only six months, the claimants could purchase the land for $1.25 per acre. Over the years, amendments and extensions of the act made it applicable to forest land and grazing land and enlarged the maximum acreage tract that individual settlers could acquire.
In 1873, the Timber Culture Act
The Homestead Act was not the complete success its supporters hoped it would be. Homesteading never proved attractive to members of the working class and the urban poor in the East. There also were many competing forms of federal land distribution, including purchase by speculators, massive land grants to railroads, sales of dispossessed Native American lands, and Morrill Act
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Diamond, Henry L., and Patrick F. Noonan, eds. Land Use in America. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996. Collection of articles on a wide variety of topics relating to land use in the United States. The general emphasis is on contemporary issues, but many of the essays touch on historical issues, including the Homestead Act. -
Fite, Gilbert C. The Farmers’ Frontier, 1865-1900. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. Basic survey of western agriculture during the nineteenth century with an especially strong treatment of the Homestead Act. -
Gates, Paul Wallace. History of Public Land Law Development. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968. Summary of the work of one of the foremost scholars of the Homestead Act and public land law. -
Lanza, Michael L. Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics: The Southern Homestead Act. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. The only extensive treatment of this neglected aspect of homestead legislation. -
Layton, Stanford J. To No Privileged Class: The Rationalization of Homesteading and Rural Life in the Early Twentieth-Century American West. Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1988. Brief work that focuses on the cultural and intellectual aspects of the homestead movement. -
Richardson, Heather Cox. The Greatest Nation on Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Examination of the domestic policy agenda in the United States during and following the Civil War. -
Shannon, Fred A. The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860-1897. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1945. An older but detailed and still important standard work on nineteenth century agriculture in the West. -
Stratton, Joanna. Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981. Documents women’s perspectives on homesteading. -
Tilghman, Wendy B. The Great Plains Experience. Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Mid-America, 1981. Companion volume to the documentary series of the same title. One segment, “The Settling of the Plains,” chronicles the settlement of Custer County, Nebraska, from 1865 to 1900.
Westward American Migration Begins
Congress Passes Land Act of 1820
Congress Passes Preemption Act of 1841
Gadsden Purchase Completes the U.S.-Mexican Border
Apache and Navajo War
Lincoln Signs the Morrill Land Grant Act
Congress Creates the Freedmen’s Bureau
Dominion Lands Act Fosters Canadian Settlement
Powell Publishes His Report on the American West
General Allotment Act Erodes Indian Tribal Unity
Thomas Hart Benton; Horace Greeley; Andrew Johnson; Abraham Lincoln.