Improving the Homestead Acts

I have no suggestion whatsoever on that, so I'll just ask you guys:

What changes, even if small, would you have made on the Homestead Acts or other policies in order to better colonize the American Frontier?

Also, would it be worse or better if they were passed earlier than 1862?
 

Kaze

Banned
The original plan for the homestead was the South post 1812, but it was delayed. Had it happened post 1812, it might has stemmed the tide of slavery across the southern states.
 
The classic article on the failure of the Homestead Act was Paul Wallace Gates, "The Homestead Law in an Incongruous Land System," in the American Historical Review, XLI (July 1936) https://www.jstor.org/stable/1842606. Gates' main point is that

"the Homestead law did not completely change our land system, that its adoption merely imposed upon the old land system a principle out of harmony with it, and that until about 1890 the old and new constantly clashed. In presenting this view it will appear that the Homestead law did not end the auction system or cash sales, as is generally assumed, that speculation and land monopolization continued after its development as widely perhaps as before, and within as well as without the law, that actual homesteading was generally confined to the less desirable lands distant from railroad lines, and that farm tenancy developed in frontier communities in many instances as a result of the monopolization of the land."

One way the Act was undermined was of course the fraudulent use of dummy entrymen. But "It was not entirely necessary...for speculators to resort to these illegal and fraudulent methods of acquiring lands since Congress proceeded to aid their schemes by enacting a series of laws which went far to vitiating the principle of land for the landless." Among them:

(1) The railroad land grants. "In the eight years after the passage of the Homestead Law five times as much land was granted to railroads as had been given in the twelve preceding years; 127,628,000 acres were granted between 1862 and 1871 to aid in the extension of the railroad net and 2,000,000 acres were granted for wagon roads and canals. Such imperial generosity was at the expense of future homesteaders who must purchase the land. As it was necessary to withdraw all lands from entry in the regions through which such roads were projected to prevent speculators from anticipating the railroads in making selections of land, and as the routes were rarely definitely established when the grants were made, more than double this amount of land was withdrawn from entry and remained unavailable for settlement for a long period of years...When the alternate government sections were finally restored to market settlers were frequently outbid for them by speculators."

(2) The continuation of the policy of granting to the states federal land within their boundaries also undermined the homestead principle. "With the exception of the swamp land grants, the purpose of these donations was to provide the states with a valuable commodity, the sale of which would produce revenue or endowment for educational and other state institutions....It is safe to say that over 140,000,000 acres of land were in the hands of the states for disposition after 1862. The philosophy behind the grants, and frequently the conditions embedded in the donations required their sale at the highest market price. The states were prevented, therefore, from giving homesteads to settlers and the prices asked for their lands...made them the prey of speculators. It is true that limitations were sometimes placed on the amount of land which individuals could purchase, but dummy entrymen were usually employed to circumvent such restrictions."

(3) The cash sale system remained in operation even after the Homestead Act was passed. "It is not generally appreciated that there were available in 1862 for cash sale 83,919,649 acres of land...this figure was later increased to well over 100,000,000 acres by the opening up of new lands to the auction and cash sale system...The richest and most fertile sections of Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, California, Washington, and Oregon were thus open to the cash purchaser after the enactment of the Homestead Act..."

(4) Indian lands--none of the lands ceded by the Indians was ever opened for homesteading. "Between 100,000,000 and 125,000,000 acres of Indian land have been sold since 1862, practically one half as much as the total acreage which has been entered under the Homestead Act."

Gates concludes that "with over 125,000,000 acres of railroad lands, 140,000,000 acres of state lands, 100,000,000 acres of Indian lands, and 100,000,000 acres of land for sale in large or small blocks, and with the opportunities for evasion of the Homestead and Pre-emption laws and their variations outlined above, it is obvious that there were few obstacles in the way of speculation and land monopolization after 1862."

Of course even if all good land had been subject to the Homestead Act, and even had there been no fraud, the Act could not have been the panacea for the landless that some of its advocates claimed. As the agricultural historian Fred Shannon pointed out, by 1860, it took something like $1,000 capital to purchase sufficient transportation, seed equipment, livestock, and food (to live on until the first crop) to make a go of it. It was hard for small farmers and practically impossible for unemployed Eastern workmen to raise that kind of capital.

Anyway, Gates has been subjected to criticism, and he himself later concluded that his 1936 assessment of the Homestead Act was too negative, as noted in https://www.unl.edu/plains/GPQ-changing-perceptions-of-homesteading.pdf In particular, a number of authors have warned against demonizing "speculators" or less pejoratively "land investors." The few who made a fortune--sometimes by fraudulent methods--were not typical:

"Despite often overheated rhetoric of condemnation, speculation was hardly dishonorable...Of course stories often appeared of speculators profiting from insider dealing, fraud, and outright theft, and they provoked outrage; but like recent corporate scandals that did little to undermine the legitimacy of big business in general, speculation scandals did little to damage the standing of the everyday “land investor.” Aside from Henry George and the Single-Taxers, no serious effort was made to prevent people from profiting from the rising value of their land, for the simple fact that it was widely assumed to be the landowner’s right, and besides, every landowner hoped to benefit. Indeed, many settlers and even homesteaders counted on rising land values in their own form of speculation. Nineteenth-century farmers were said to be perpetually over-invested in land, betting that land prices would rise. As Roy Robbins explained, “Many settlers had invested in lands on credit hoping to pay out of the increase in the value of their holdings. . . . Some were able to do so but many were not.” From time to time reformers like Commissioner Donaldson proposed that the homestead acts should be amended to limit speculation by homesteaders, but such limitations were uniformly rejected by Congress.." https://www.unl.edu/plains/GPQ-changing-perceptions-of-homesteading.pdf

So, granted that the Homestead Act was more successful than the early Gates believed, how could it have been improved? Well, for one thing, more good land could have been made subject to it rather than to railroad land grants or grants to states, for example. (Yet after all the railroad land grants did help get the railroads built, and the land sold to states was often used for education and other useful purposes.) A complete ban on speculation, though, was neither practical nor necessarily desirable. And there might of course have been better enforcement. Yet not even all the "fraud" or "cheating" was all that bad:

"We should recognize, however, that some “abuse” of the homesteading laws was in fact a creative and perhaps even socially positive response to the poverty of settlers, the 160acre maximum, and other limitations. That is, some and perhaps a significant amount of the manipulation and cheating on land laws, including clear illegalities, might be termed “benign abuse” that reflected attempts by poor settlers to create viable farms within the harsh restrictions they faced. There were two situations in particular that enticed settlers to skirt or violate the law. The first was simple poverty. In order to establish a viable farming operation, more was needed than just land. The homestead acts provided no assistance for the penniless settler. To obtain the capital required for successful homesteading—many months’ supply of food, labor to break the prairie, seed, farm equipment, animals, and building materials for house and barn—some entrymen chose to file claims and then, either by selling their homesteads as relinquishments or by making deals for commutations, walked away with the proceeds, perhaps to repeat (illegally) the process elsewhere. Certainly some and perhaps many homesteading “failures” were in fact part of an intentional strategy used by some poor settlers to accumulate sufficient capital to establish viable farms.

"A second circumstance that encouraged illegal or shady dealing was the fact that, as settlement moved beyond the 99th or 100th meridian, a 160-acre farm was no longer sufficient to support a family. Farmers needed to expand their holdings, and so they evidently turned more readily to schemes utilizing preemptions, multiple homestead filings by a spouse or other family member (as Elinor Pruitt Stewart did), and other possibilities. For example, since there was no restriction preventing homesteaders from owning preemption lands, a settler could file a 160-acre preemption and after six months pay up and take title, file on an adjacent 160-acre homesteading entry and also (after 1873) file on a 160-acre timber culture entry, thereby gaining control of 480 acres for the preemption price of two hundred dollars. This creative use of the homestead laws, so condemned by later easily scandalized scholars, really represented a continuation of the spirit of squatting. Settlers with few resources were willing to bend or even break the laws to create viable farms for themselves. They saw the immense bounty of the public domain that the government had opened, and, as Commissioner Sparks had put it, felt that “a strict compliance with the conditions imposed is not essential.”..." https://www.unl.edu/plains/GPQ-changing-perceptions-of-homesteading.pdf
 
David T brought up a key point in his last block quote: "A second circumstance that encouraged illegal or shady dealing was the fact that, as settlement moved beyond the 99th or 100th meridian, a 160-acre farm was no longer sufficient to support a family." i.e.: the HA needed to be more flexible in its classification of different lands.

The Homestead Act and subsequent legislation (generally) treated all western lands as uniform in their capacity and characteristics. Even the method of surveying (laying out vast square blocks of land along straight lines is efficient and rational, but creates some wacky property-lines in some areas. There's a great article from my grad school days I'll need to dig up, but it talks about the imposition of Enlightenment concepts of mathematical precision onto the landscape; that part of the settling of the west was to turn the land into a commodity, a rationalized/interchangeable block.

Now, I'm not suggesting a more 'natural' surveying, but rather back to the first point: adapting plot sizes, claim methods, and deed conditions to match on-the-ground realities.

John Wesley Powell, for example, advocated for the creation of watershed units, and for communal ownership. The arid southwest was completely incompatible with the standard 160-acre grant, so he suggested a division of ground among several families with shared water-rights and working on irrigation projects.
 
You could also look to the Canadian version.

It allowed a homesteader to double their land allotment, which apparently allowed for more efficient/permanent/sustainable farms in Canada's more arid southern reaches
 
Top