Homestead Act
Signed by Abraham Lincoln on 20 May 1862 — made possible only by the secession of Southern legislators who had long blocked it — the Homestead Act granted any adult citizen (or intending citizen), including women and, later, freed slaves, up to 160 acres of surveyed public land in the West. Title passed after five years of residence and improvement, for only a small filing fee, or could be bought outright after six months. Over its life the law transferred some 270 million acres — about a tenth of the United States — into private hands and drew waves of settlers and immigrants onto the Great Plains. It embodied the free-labour, free-soil vision of the Republican Party: a continent settled by independent smallholders rather than slave plantations. Its costs fell on the Plains nations, whose lands and bison were displaced by the advancing frontier, and much of the best land in practice went to railroads and speculators.
- Year: 1862 CE
- Category: Political
