Homestead Act Of 1862 Quotes

The United States had the Homestead Act of 1862, which enshrined small landholdings and laid the foundation for the world’s most prosperous middle class.

That’s why, white America, we had no objection to (and indeed supported mightily) the “big government” intervention known as the Homestead Act, passed in 1862, which gave over 200 million acres of essentially “free” land to white families: land that had been confiscated from indigenous people or from Mexico and was then made available to white settlement.

Homestead”  term was first used in USA in the Homestead Act in 1862 and before.  In Saharan Africa, especially in nations which were controlled by the British, a homestead is the single extended family’s household compound.

To take just one example, the 1862 Homestead Act gleefully gave away millions of acres of stolen land almost exclusively to whites.10 And, quiet as it’s kept, white people continue to be the number-one beneficiaries of affirmative action today. Race scholars are aware that white women are the top recipients of affirmative action, but few have considered that white women’s primary access to affirmative action helps maintain the racial wealth gap.11 Because these white women typically marry white men, their affirmative action benefits are channeled toward their white families.

The Federal Homestead Act, enacted in 1862, became one of the foundation pieces of the settlement of western America. More than ten percent of the land in the United States was settled under this law. From the Act: Be it enacted, That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first of January, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter-section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands . . .

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of expropriated Indigenous land west of the Mississippi to any citizen or person eligible for citizenship (which, after the 1790 Naturalization Act, was only white immigrants) if they could reach the land and build on it. A free grant of property! Fewer than six thousand Black families were able to become part of the 1.6 million landowners who gained deeds through the Homestead Act and its 1866 southern counterpart. Today, an estimated 46 million people are propertied descendants of Homestead Act beneficiaries.

Particularly galling was the way the Homestead Act was abused. Passed during the Civil War, it was supposed to make a reality out of Lincoln’s version of the free labor, free soil dream. But fewer than half a million people actually set up viable farms over nearly half a century. Most public lands were taken over by the railroads, thanks to the government’s beneficent land-grant policy (another form of primitive accumulation); by land speculators backed by eastern bankers, who sometimes hired pretend “homesteaders” in acts of outright fraud; or by giant cattle ranches and timber companies and the like who worked hand in glove with government land agents. As early as 1862 two-thirds of Iowa (or ten million acres) was owned by speculators. Railroads closed off one-third of Kansas to homesteading and that was the best land available. Mushrooming cities back east became, in a kind of historical inversion, the safety valve for overpopulated areas in the west. At least the city held out the prospect of remunerative wage labor if no longer a life of propertied independence. Few city workers had the capital to migrate west anyway; when one Pennsylvania legislator suggested that the state subsidize such moves, he was denounced as “the Pennsylvania Communist” for his trouble. During the last land boom of the nineteenth century (from about 1883 to 1887), 16 million acres underwent that conversion every year. Railroads doubled down by selling off or mortgaging portions of the public domain they had just been gifted to finance construction or to speculate with. But land-grant roads were built at costs 100 percent greater than warranted and badly built at that, needing to be rebuilt just fifteen years later.

homesteaders, who were entitled to 160 acres each under the 1862 Homestead Act.

The dispossession of the Dakota, the Homestead Act of 1862, and the war that they touched off set the stage for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life.

By 1877, three Congressional acts, the 1862 Homestead Act, the 1873 Timber Culture Act, and the 1877 Desert Land Act, with various fees and provisions, allowed a homesteader to claim 840 acres. Through these acts, the national government encouraged the settlement of the public domain by the American ideal of the independent farmer who owned his own land, an idea promoted by Thomas Jefferson. Thousands of people attempted to pursue that dream and flocked to Wyoming during the first three decades of the 20th century. Settlement in many parts of Wyoming

ere able to acquire their land, thanks to federal policy - the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on May 20, 1862, and went into effect the following year. In 1863.