-: The title of this paper is
"African Americans and the Southern Homestead Act."
The Southern Homestead Act was a measure passed
immediately following the Civil War,
which was intended to create opportunities
for black people to gain land ownership in the South,
in five Southern states that had public lands available.
Why should people interested in the Great Plains
be interested in the Southern Homestead Act?
Well, African Americans, like other groups,
brought to the Great Plains when they came to homestead
their experiences and culture
and aspirations, disappointments,
hopes for the future that they derived
from their prior place they lived.
And for black people, that was largely the South.
Most of them came from the South.
Some came from other areas as well.
And so it was against that background
that they homesteaded in the Great Plains.
Now, the Southern Homestead Act was a measure passed
by Congress in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.
It was part of the Reconstruction program.
And the idea was to use land in five Southern states,
the public land states,
which had land available for homesteading,
and it was to give particular emphasis
to those lands for homesteading.
It was passed in 1866,
and it ran for 10 years,
until 1876.
Basically, it was a failure.
Land reform in the South depended on two things.
One was land reform on the plantations,
which was really the big possibility for land reform.
That land reform was defeated
by the reemergence of the planter class in the South
and the opposition of whites
to land reform.
So the 40 acres and a mule, which was intended
to occur on the plantations, didn't happen.
When President Johnson pardoned Confederate officers
and ordered the Freedmen's Bureau to return
confiscated plantations to their previous owners,
that eliminated the possibility
for significant land reform on Southern plantations.
The other alternative was the Homestead Act,
the Southern Homestead Act
in the five public land states in the South.
There was quite a bit of excitement about the possibilities,
the opportunities for black homesteaders in the South,
but those were defeated mainly by
the fact that the lands were not
often very amenable to homesteading.
Many were forested, which required enormous investment
in clearing of the land and preparing the fields
before they could even plant them.
It was defeated by the extreme poverty
of the slaves who had,
of the ex-slaves who had no opportunity really
to amass enough resources to get them
through the first year or two of homesteading
when they would not have a crop to sell.
So they needed resources to provide food for their families
and invest in the farms they were trying to create.
But mostly, it was defeated by the harsh opposition
of white Southerners who engaged in a relentless
war of intimidation,
of violence,
of oppression against black homesteaders
so that it became very difficult
for black homesteaders in the South
to be able to create farms and build new futures.
A few succeeded, but many did not.
And in any event,
the conditions were very, very oppressive for black farmers.
That was the background against which some migrants came
to the Great Plains looking for
a farm, looking for land ownership,
looking for someone to make good
on the idea of 40 acres and a mule.
They never got the mule,
but, of course, through the Homesteading Act,
they were able to claim 160 acres in the Great Plains.
And many succeeded in creating viable farms out of that.
Land ownership for these people was a key ingredient
of their becoming full
and equal citizens in the society.
They saw land ownership,
which, of course, had been denied them under slavery
and even in the post-Reconstruction period, as being
essential to their idea of who they were
and how they could function in society
as free and equal citizens.
So land ownership was not just a means of earning a living,
although it certainly was that,
but it was also an affirmation of their freedom,
of their equality in the society.