Homestead Law

an act signed by President Lincoln May 20, 1862. It marked the beginning of a new public policy with reference to lands. Within ten years 28,000,000 acres of public land were home steaded. As early as 1852 the Free Soil party, in the interest of white farmers, agitated the plan of permitting settlers to occupy public lands free of charge. Southern members of Congress preferred to continue the old method of selling land in tracts, as it gave a planter an opportunity to obtain a plantation large enough for the profitable employment of slaves. A homestead bill was introduced repeatedly. Galusha Grow championed the homestead act on the floors of Congress for ten years. An act passed both houses of Congress in 1860, but President Buchanan vetoed it on the ground that free farms would be an injustice to old settlers who had paid for their land, that the older states would lose their population under the stimulus of free lands, and that it was a questionable public policy to invite foreigners to take up free homes in this country. By the provisions of the act as finally passed, any citizen or person who has declared his intention to become a citizen, whether male or female, if twenty-one years old and the head of a family, may become the owner of a homestead of 80 or 160 acres merely by living on it and cultivating a field. An unmarried woman twenty-one years old may take a homestead. A married woman loses her right so long as her husband is living. The only charge made is one for land office fees, amounting in all to not over $34. During the decades immediately following the passage of the act an enormous immigration of desirable settlers poured in from the northern countries of Europe. The act is still in force. There are not far from 300,000,000 acres of land now surveyed and subject to homestead entry, but they lie largely in semiarid districts, less desirable than the land which formerly attracted homesteaders. See Irrigation; Public Lands