Rick Edwards on the Southern Homestead Act

Center for Great Plains Studies Author

06/25/2019 Added

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Recently freed slaves had the opportunity to homestead on land in five Southern states thanks to the 1866 Southern Homestead Act, but in this video, Rick Edwards talks about how extreme poverty, violence, and unsuitable land made it nearly impossible for many to take advantage of it, leading them to homestead in the Great Plains instead. Read the article in the Spring 2019 edition of Great Plains Quarterly: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/723271

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[00:00:05.390]The title of this paper is
[00:00:06.597]"African Americans and the Southern Homestead Act."
[00:00:10.320]The Southern Homestead Act was a measure passed
[00:00:13.250]immediately following the Civil War,
[00:00:15.230]which was intended to create opportunities
[00:00:17.580]for black people to gain land ownership in the South,
[00:00:21.290]in five Southern states that had public lands available.
[00:00:26.380]Why should people interested in the Great Plains
[00:00:28.590]be interested in the Southern Homestead Act?
[00:00:30.200]Well, African Americans, like other groups,
[00:00:34.200]brought to the Great Plains when they came to homestead
[00:00:38.180]their experiences and culture
[00:00:41.190]and aspirations, disappointments,
[00:00:45.210]hopes for the future that they derived
[00:00:49.030]from their prior place they lived.
[00:00:52.330]And for black people, that was largely the South.
[00:00:57.150]Most of them came from the South.
[00:00:58.750]Some came from other areas as well.
[00:01:01.530]And so it was against that background
[00:01:03.990]that they homesteaded in the Great Plains.
[00:01:06.710]Now, the Southern Homestead Act was a measure passed
[00:01:10.740]by Congress in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.
[00:01:14.670]It was part of the Reconstruction program.
[00:01:17.440]And the idea was to use land in five Southern states,
[00:01:21.770]the public land states,
[00:01:24.370]which had land available for homesteading,
[00:01:27.410]and it was to give particular emphasis
[00:01:31.620]to those lands for homesteading.
[00:01:35.350]It was passed in 1866,
[00:01:38.710]and it ran for 10 years,
[00:01:41.750]until 1876.
[00:01:44.130]Basically, it was a failure.
[00:01:46.780]Land reform in the South depended on two things.
[00:01:50.330]One was land reform on the plantations,
[00:01:53.690]which was really the big possibility for land reform.
[00:01:58.570]That land reform was defeated
[00:02:00.800]by the reemergence of the planter class in the South
[00:02:05.680]and the opposition of whites
[00:02:09.620]to land reform.
[00:02:11.670]So the 40 acres and a mule, which was intended
[00:02:14.800]to occur on the plantations, didn't happen.
[00:02:18.640]When President Johnson pardoned Confederate officers
[00:02:22.250]and ordered the Freedmen's Bureau to return
[00:02:25.790]confiscated plantations to their previous owners,
[00:02:30.130]that eliminated the possibility
[00:02:31.840]for significant land reform on Southern plantations.
[00:02:36.270]The other alternative was the Homestead Act,
[00:02:40.090]the Southern Homestead Act
[00:02:42.030]in the five public land states in the South.
[00:02:46.180]There was quite a bit of excitement about the possibilities,
[00:02:50.230]the opportunities for black homesteaders in the South,
[00:02:53.530]but those were defeated mainly by
[00:02:57.390]the fact that the lands were not
[00:02:59.440]often very amenable to homesteading.
[00:03:03.170]Many were forested, which required enormous investment
[00:03:07.770]in clearing of the land and preparing the fields
[00:03:10.230]before they could even plant them.
[00:03:13.280]It was defeated by the extreme poverty
[00:03:16.090]of the slaves who had,
[00:03:17.690]of the ex-slaves who had no opportunity really
[00:03:21.130]to amass enough resources to get them
[00:03:23.440]through the first year or two of homesteading
[00:03:26.750]when they would not have a crop to sell.
[00:03:29.230]So they needed resources to provide food for their families
[00:03:33.320]and invest in the farms they were trying to create.
[00:03:38.530]But mostly, it was defeated by the harsh opposition
[00:03:41.810]of white Southerners who engaged in a relentless
[00:03:46.880]war of intimidation,
[00:03:49.730]of violence,
[00:03:52.940]of oppression against black homesteaders
[00:03:57.340]so that it became very difficult
[00:03:59.970]for black homesteaders in the South
[00:04:02.480]to be able to create farms and build new futures.
[00:04:06.320]A few succeeded, but many did not.
[00:04:09.470]And in any event,
[00:04:10.320]the conditions were very, very oppressive for black farmers.
[00:04:16.660]That was the background against which some migrants came
[00:04:19.910]to the Great Plains looking for
[00:04:25.133]a farm, looking for land ownership,
[00:04:27.130]looking for someone to make good
[00:04:29.460]on the idea of 40 acres and a mule.
[00:04:32.690]They never got the mule,
[00:04:33.830]but, of course, through the Homesteading Act,
[00:04:35.950]they were able to claim 160 acres in the Great Plains.
[00:04:40.250]And many succeeded in creating viable farms out of that.
[00:04:45.560]Land ownership for these people was a key ingredient
[00:04:49.640]of their becoming full
[00:04:52.060]and equal citizens in the society.
[00:04:55.380]They saw land ownership,
[00:04:56.840]which, of course, had been denied them under slavery
[00:05:00.600]and even in the post-Reconstruction period, as being
[00:05:06.180]essential to their idea of who they were
[00:05:09.750]and how they could function in society
[00:05:12.180]as free and equal citizens.
[00:05:14.030]So land ownership was not just a means of earning a living,
[00:05:18.650]although it certainly was that,
[00:05:20.500]but it was also an affirmation of their freedom,
[00:05:24.410]of their equality in the society.

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Rick Edwards on the Southern Homestead Act

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