| For many years, starting around 1840,
America's labor groups demanded that the country's public lands be granted
in limited quantities, free of cost, to landless workeis. This hope of
free land may have lifted the spirits of thousands of jobless or poorly
paid workers in the East, but it disturbed their employers, who wanted
to keep their supply of cheap labor. It also bothered slaveowning Southern
cotton plantecs, who did not want the Western lands crowded with homesteaders
who opposed the extension of slavery west of the Mississippi River. Nevertheless,
after Abraham Lincoln became president in 1861, the Republican controlled
Congress passed the Homestead Act, which the President signed in 1862.
The act gave to heads of families or persons
21 years of age or over, who were citizens or intended to become citizens,
a quarter section of land ( 160 acres) after occupying and cultivating
it for five years, and on payment of a $ 10 fee. If the homesteader wanted
to speed up the grant of title to his land, he could buy it outright after
only sixmonths residence for $ 1.25 an acre.
The Homestead Act greatly aided in pushing
the nation's frontier farther West, but it did little to help the landless
workers in the East. Most of them could not afford the cost of travel to
the West, nor were they able to support themselves until they harvested
their fiist crop. Thus most of the successful homesteaders turned out to
be experienced farmers from Indiana, Illinois, and other Midwestern states,
who soon discovered that more land was needed to make a living on the dry,
windswept high plains of Kansas and other states farther west.
Thousands of homesteaders were forced to
give up the struggle and sold out to cattlemen who wanted more grazing
land. Large cattle companies often induced persons to file their homestead
claims, then turn their land over to the companies after the sixmonths'
residence period. Between 1862 and 1890 only about 400,000 homesteaders
settled permanently on free government land. During this same period more
than seven million others occupied farms that they rented from land speculators
or bought from the railroads. Many of these people were Germans, Swedes,
Norwegians, and Danes, who were lured from Europe by the land agents of
the railroad companies and the western states and territories. They met
the challenge by establishing profitable farms on the broad, harsh land
of the American Northwest.
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