In America in the latter part of the nineteenth century , land was everything . have land bestow a sure measuring stick of prestige and respectability . It provided stability . Possible wealthiness . It meant a hereafter .
For all those reasons , and others , thousands of people tromped westward in thenation ’s expansiontoward the Pacific in the 1860s and many decades that follow , claiming huge parcels of free state in the first dance step toward their own American dreaming .
For many — even those who had found it difficult , and sometimes impossible , to become landowners before ; women , former enslaved multitude and immigrants among them — the Homestead Act of 1862 made it potential .
" I think it ’s absolutely a representation of the American Dream , " says Jonathan Fairchild , the historian at theHomestead National Monument of Americain Beatrice , Nebraska , " the persuasion that , no matter who you are , where you ’re number from , that with hard work and a lilliputian second of luck , you may be successful . "
What Was the Homestead Act?
The Civil War still was rag whenPresident Abraham Lincoln , in May 1862 , signed into law the Homestead Act , which promised 160 acres ( 64 hectares ) of free land , most of it in America ’s expanding West , for anyone willing to work the land .
Some strings ( beyond the inevitable , even then , bureaucratic paperwork ) were attach to getting the ground in the first position . Among them :
Anyone who contact those criteria would be concede full form of address to the plot after five years ( and some more paperwork and a few more dollars in fees ) if they proved that they :
From the 1860s through the 1980s , almost 4 million the great unwashed took advantage of the offer . In the 123 years the Act was in outcome , about 1.6 million of those claimants successfully " proved up " — they met the final criteria for improving the operose , sometimes desolate , often untamable land — to gain deed to the property .
At its height , in the five - year period from 1911 - 1915 , more than 42.5 million acres ( 17.1 million hectare ) of landed estate were awarded under the Homestead Act and its various offshoots . Somewhere around 10 percent of U.S. kingdom — 270 million acres ( 109 million hectare ) — finally was render away under the Homestead enactment , according to theNational Park Service .
These homesteads would become the foundation of wealth for countless families for , in many case , generations to come . It ’s estimate that some 93 million people today are descendants of homesteaders .
" It is one of the most successful endeavors in American history , causing the with child earth rushing to the Wild West and form the vision for a newfangled homesteading program in urban America today,“President George H.W. Bush said in 1990 . " Because Abraham Lincoln ’s Homestead Act invest people , it unloosen people from the core of poorness . It freed them to insure their own destiny , to make their own opportunities , and to exist the vision of the American dream . "
The Legacy of the Homestead Act
After the14th Amendment to the Constitutionwas slip away in 1866 , slaves and former slaves became eligible to own land under the Homestead Act .
" If you ’re talking an African American family short after the Civil War … let the cat out of the bag about what it means to be going from potentially being enslaved , and literally being considered belongings by the law of the earth , to having your freedom , to owning hundreds of acres of land in your own name , to becoming an independent and successful small - family farm proprietor , " Fairchild says . " It ’s just unbelievable to verbalize about . "
Even before the19th Amendment to the Constitutionwas passed , give women the rightfield to vote , the Homestead Act concede them the chance to own land . Just owning land in many office in the country provided women a de facto right wing to vote . An estimated 10 per centum of all nester were women .
And though the Homestead Act originally excluded some who were not eligible to become citizen — notably , Native Americans whoseland was stolen away from themand granted to others eligible under the Act , and those from Asian countries — it provided a nerve pathway to many immigrant to become American landowners .
" It was the first patch of statute law to include all of the necessary factor to be considered an accommodating immigration law , " Fairchild says . " It did n’t omit on sex or race , and it provided , within the language of the law , everything required of immigrants to become naturalize citizens .
" The Homestead Act of 1862 was , for its metre , a remarkably democratic bit of legislation that help break barriers in the United States . "
