The Homestead Act of 1862 was a piece of legislation which was passed by the Union government in 1862 in the midst of the American Civil War. It was one of a series of settlement acts passed by the United States government in the nineteenth century designed to encourage westward settlement in the Great Plains and other regions, albeit the 1862 Act is generally understood to have been the most consequential of these laws. It allowed for grants of land up to 160 acres to be made to all US citizens or immigrants who had filed to become US citizens. An initial fee of $10 was paid and the government held the land in trust for five years. Thereafter, after an inspection confirmed that the Homesteader had lived on and improved the land in the five years since it had been granted, the land was passed to them as the legal owner in perpetuity. The Homestead Act laid the foundations for the distribution of 270 million acres of land to Homesteaders down to 1986, making it one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history. The immediate consequence was that it fueled westward settlement during the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s and 1890s into lands which had previously experienced little western settlement, notably the Dakota Territory and the northwest around modern-day Montana and Washington State. Millions of Americans today will be able to trace their genealogical roots to a great-great-grandparent or great-great-great-grandparent who availed of the Homestead Act in the half century after it was passed.[1]
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Homestead Act of 1862 chronology of eventsHomestead Act of 1862 chronology of events
In the Anglophone world, the concept of offering lands to individuals along with certain preconditions that they live on and develop those same lands goes all the way back to Ireland in the middle of the sixteenth century. At this time, the English government began developing terms like these as part of the plantation of the counties of Laois and Offaly in the Irish midlands.[2] Later the terms were extended to other plantations in Ireland and then to some of the Thirteen Colonies in North America. Thus, a tradition of using legislation of this kind to promote colonization and westward settlement was imported to North America by the English/British.[3]
Discussion of the use of legislation of this kind to promote the westward drive to the Pacific Ocean began in the United States after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the expedition of Lewis and Clark directly thereafter. It intensified in the 1840s as new waves of European migrants began to arrive to the US in ever greater numbers. The government was anxious to encourage some of these newcomers to leave the eastern cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia that were teeming with new immigrant slums and head out west instead.[4] Nevertheless, there were ideological differences over how Homestead Acts should be framed. Politicians in the northern free states wanted to make the terms as open as possible, while their compatriots in the slave-owning southern states were much less permissive and wanted any Homestead Acts to work to replicate the kind of plantation society of states like Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas out further to the west.[5]
Despite these ideological divisions, a Preemption Act of 1841 laid down many of the foundations for the later Homestead Act, including the idea that citizens or citizen applicants over 21 years of age would be granted estates of up to 160 acres provided they live on and develop them in the next five years. Still, the geographical span of land which this applied to was restricted to places like Kansas and Nebraska and there was a constant tug-of-war in Congress over the implementation and extension of legislation of this kind in the 1840s and 1850s.[6] This is the reason why the most wide-ranging Homestead Act was not finally passed through the House of Representatives until the 28th of February 1862. By this time the American Civil War had broken out and the rump Union Congress, shorn of the oppositional members from the southern states, was able to pass a clean Homestead Act that extended the legislation enormously by a margin of 107 votes to 16.[7]
Extent of migration as a result of the Homestead ActExtent of migration as a result of the Homestead Act
The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed for basically anyone (including freed slaves) who was a citizen of the US or who had applied for citizenship to apply for grants of up to 160 acres of land. Given the current trajectory of the country at that time it was intended that this would primarily encourage migration to and settlement in places like the Dakota Territory and the northwest, as well as vast stretches of the region further south in what would become Utah, Colorado, Oregon, New Mexico and Arizona that remained thinly inhabited even after the California Gold Rush had brought hundreds of thousands of people through those regions in the 1850s and early 1860s. In addition to granting the lands to the Homesteaders in perpetuity if they lived on them and developed them for five years, the Homestead Act included a clause whereby the Homesteader could buy the land directly early at a price of $1.25 per acre.[8]
The terms were lucrative. Moreover, there were many additional pull factors present in the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, including the absolute deluge of European migrants into the US from countries like Ireland, Italy, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Norway and the Russian Empire. A huge number of these people headed out west and took up farms under the terms of the Homestead Act.[9] Amendments changed the terms slightly over time, but the Homestead Act of 1862 formed the core of the Homesteader movement down to as late as 1986. It was, for instance, utilized extensively as well in the attempted settlement of Alaska in the twentieth century. Approximately 1.6 million Homesteads covering 270 million acres of land were granted between 1862 and 1986 when the movement was completed in Alaska.[10]
Demographic impact of the Homestead ActDemographic impact of the Homestead Act
It is not possible to overstate how significant the Homestead Act of 1862 was in the history of the United States and the shaping of the country. In the immediate term the major impact was on places like the Dakotas and the north-western states like Montana, Washington and Idaho where little westward expansion had happened by 1862 and where land was most aggressively parceled out and granted out under the terms of the Homestead Act.[11] This in turn fueled the Dakota Boom and other historical developments like movement along the Montana Trail and the exponential growth in towns and cities like Seattle down to the end of the nineteenth century. These emerged as urban hubs to facilitate the wider agricultural communities developing in the states around them via the Homestead Act.[12]
The wider impact of the Homestead Act over the long duration was greater still. Given that an estimated 270 million acres of land were distributed, over 10% of all of the land in the United States was parceled out under the terms of the Homestead Act. That alone gives an idea of the kind of impact. Bodies like the US National Park Service estimate that as many as 93 million Americans today are descended in one shape or another from a Homesteader; that is around 27% of the country’s population. Many people today will still live in the same state or even county as an ancestor who acquired lands there as a consequence of the Homestead Act. No other piece of legislation did more to transform the demographic and genealogical landscape of North America.[13]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the Homestead Act of 1862Explore more about the Homestead Act of 1862
- Homestead Records - Broken Bow, Nebraska records collection on MyHeritage
- 1885 Dakota Territory Census records collection on MyHeritage
- South Dakota School Registers, 1879-1934 records collection on MyHeritage
- South Dakota, Deaths and Burials records collection on MyHeritage
- North Dakota Deaths records collection on MyHeritage
- 1880 United States Federal Census records collection on MyHeritage
- 1900 United States Federal Census records collection on MyHeritage
- The Homestead Act of 1862 records collection on MyHeritage
- Using Homestead Records to Tell Your Ancestor’s Story at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Women Homesteaders and Genealogy at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Homestead Act of 1862 – Following the Witnesses at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Hannah L. Anderson, ‘That Settles It: The Debate and Consequences of the Homestead Act of 1862’, in The History Teacher, Vol. 45, No. 1 (November, 2011), pp. 117–137.
- ↑ Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (Oxford, 2001).
- ↑ Manning C. Voorhis, ‘Crown Versus Council in the Virginia Land Policy’, in The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 4 (October, 1946), pp. 499–514.
- ↑ https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/american-era-old-immigration
- ↑ Anderson, ‘That Settles It’.
- ↑ https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/preemption-act-1841
- ↑ https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/homestead-act
- ↑ Robert E. Lang, Deborah Epstein Popper and Frank J. Popper, ‘“Progress of the Nation”: The Settlement History of the Enduring American Frontier’, in Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 289–307.
- ↑ Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘What Drove the Mass Migrations from Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century?’, in Population and Development Review, Vol. 20, No. 3 (September, 1994), pp. 533–559.
- ↑ ‘History of Alaska Homesteading’, US Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management.
- ↑ Paul F. Sharp, ‘When Our West Moved North’, in The American Historical Review, Vol. 55, No. 2 (January, 1950), pp. 286–300.
- ↑ https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/homestead-act
- ↑ https://www.nps.gov/home/learn/historyculture/bynumbers.htm