This Day in Western History (Lincoln Signs Homestead Act)

May 20, 1862—Envisioning what a revitalized America might look like, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which turned over 270 million acres of the public domain to private citizens, for free or at minimal cost.

No other administration has been so associated, from its first day in office to its last, with a war and its consequences as Lincoln’s. By necessity, historians have concentrated on this aspect of his Presidency to the exclusion of almost all else.

But the Civil War did not undermine the determination of either the President or his party to enact sweeping domestic legislation. In fact, in a certain way—i.e., the elimination of “strict constructionist,” pro-slavery Southern Democrats—the outbreak of hostilities enabled Lincoln to pass more legislation than what otherwise might have been possible.

A modest bill to provide lands to settlers at either no or minimal cost/cheap credit, for instance, had been vetoed as recently as 1860 by President James Buchanan, and the Republicans had called for passage of the bill in their platform that election year. With no obstacle in its path two years later, Congress passed and the President signed a bill that gave irresistible momentum to the settlement of the West and provided a safety valve for people stuck in a stagnant economy.

If you’re not in a state directly influenced by this piece of legislation (and maybe even if you are), you’ll be hard-pressed to recall, years after seeing it in a high-school history text, the year it passed. But in this case, it’s important that this bill passed in 1862 rather than 1857 or 1867. As just seen, the measure had no chance of passing prior to secession by the Confederacy in 1861; had it been proposed five years later, its impact on returning veterans would have been late and limited.

To start with, the act was part of a series of measures—including the Morrill Act, which helped to establish agricultural colleges through land grants, and the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing the first transcontinental railroad—meant, as Lincoln told Congress, “to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” In other words, before the GOP increasingly became a party of entrenched privilege in the Gilded Age, it fostered egalitarianism in a diversified economy.

This program was also, in a sense, a later version of “the American System,” the economic development system proposed by Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman,” Henry Clay. Key to the American system were federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other "internal improvements" to develop markets for agriculture. Funds for these subsidies would be obtained from tariffs and sales of public lands.

A slaveholder himself, the Senator from Kentucky was concerned that slavery would fracture the Union.  He was a member of the American Colonization Society, seeing colonization of freed slaves back in front as a means of removing the evil from American life. (Lincoln likewise advocated that position, and only abandoned it during wartime when it provoked a storm of criticism from abolitionists and freedmen such as Frederick Douglass.) Clay saw markets as another means of unifying the nation across sectional lines, this time through commerce.

The Homestead Act provided a shot in the arm to what was then the major American employment source: agriculture. Approximately 2 million farms existed in 1860, but owners of small farms had been squeezed by the Panic of 1857 and the rise of large farms (particularly Southern plantations).  For a fee of only $18, the Homestead Act allowed someone to stake out a claim, build a cabin, live on the land for five years, and, at the end of that time, “prove up”and claim the land for himself.

The effects of the Homestead Act were immense, including a nation more united by commerce and the creation of a breadbasket region west of the Mississippi that, in the 20^th century, would feed a world badly damaged by catastrophic wars. Above all, it created a more egalitarian society, opening greater opportunities for freedmen, war veterans, women (over 10% of claims were filed by women), and immigrants.(See, for instance, Fergus Bordewich's assessment of the legislation in The Wall Street Journal this past weekend.)

At the same time, it should be recognized that the act did not achieve the full extent of its promise—or, in at least one instance, its impact was deleterious:

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      *Approximately 60% of lands reverted to the government, since the soil (especially in the Dakota Territory) was not always favorable to settlement;

·         * Although 2 million emigrants settled in these trans-Mississippi territories, a number of these newcomers were even less than dirt-poor—they literally could not afford farm tools;

·         * The postwar wave of white settlers increasingly pushed Native-Americans off they had once held for years.