Homestead Act
The Homestead Act gave 160 acres of public land to anyone who would live on it for five years and improve it, and it transferred some 270 million acres into private hands. The proposal had been blocked for a decade by southern votes in Congress, on the correct assumption that a west settled by smallholders would be a west without slavery. It passed in May 1862 because the southern members had left. The terms were a filing fee of about eighteen dollars, five years of residence, and the building of a dwelling and the cultivation of a portion. The eligibility was unusually wide for the period: any head of household or person over twenty-one who had never borne arms against the United States, which included women, immigrants who had declared their intention to naturalise, and after 1866 explicitly formerly enslaved people, of whom tens of thousands filed. About 1.6 million claims were eventually granted, roughly ten per cent of the land area of the country. The failure rate was high. A quarter-section was too small for the dry plains, where the rainfall could not support the farming methods brought from the east, and something like half of all claims were abandoned before proving up; the land laws were also worked by railroads, cattlemen and speculators through hired filers. The land was not empty. Every acre given away was taken by treaty or by force from Indigenous nations, and the act and the reservation system are two parts of one policy. It was repealed in 1976, and in Alaska in 1986.
- Year: 1862 CE
- Category: Political
