History’s ironies never cease to amaze me. The
same day that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, on
January 1, 1863, the Homestead Act went into effect; but there was no
immediate connection between these two famous pieces of paper.
One was law. The other was a use of the President’s war powers
to foment rebellion, to give harm and discomfort to the enemy; it
could be seen, in today’s terms, as the hostile intent of a terrorist
state. Only time has told us that, in the long run, the two
instruments did eventually connect, and the beneficiaries of that
connection were America’s newly freed slaves.
The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in
the ten Confederate states, serving the purpose of inciting those
suffering souls to defect from their masters and their lives of
hopeless bondage to flee to the welcoming arms of the Union armies,
many there to assist in quelling for good and for all the upstart
South, and reuniting the broken nation.
However... despite the obvious yen of many ex-slaves to
quit the South, they were not going to be allowed to claim land out
West; the first requirement of the Homestead Act of 1863 for those who
wanted to “prove a claim” was -- citizenship. This was followed
by the requirements that the claimant:
-
Be 18 years old or older;
-
Never have waged war against the United States (a
clause both sensible on its face and also obviously intended to keep
nearly all Southerners out of the game);
-
Pay $18 in fees;
-
Promise to improve the land with buildings, wells,
and crops over a five year period.
That being accomplished and duly witnessed, the settler
would own the property outright.
Ex-slaves were not made citizens until the Civil Rights
Act of 1866 which declared:
"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of
Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
that all persons born in the United States and not subject to any
foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be
citizens of the United States; and such citizens, of every race and
color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or
involuntary servitude....."
Then, and only then, could people of color assume the
right to grab the land being snatched up by whites, proffered by their
rich Uncle Sam.
Former slaves would seem to have had plenty of
incentive to leave Dixie after the Civil War was finally over, and,
with it, the institution of slavery. If they didn’t, it was
probably because of the false hopes of Reconstruction, an idea that
died on the vine in a few short years. It might have been
because they were unaware of other options such as the Homestead Act,
or fearful yet of what would happen to them if they removed themselves
from known environs, since in former times, the punishment for such
adventuring could get a black person whipped, sold, or dead.
Nonetheless, there was a trickle of African-Americans
westward; the migration, though short-lived, was remarkable for the
numbers. The trek was labeled the “Great Exodus” and the
wanderers were quickly dubbed Exodusters, an apt Biblical reference
that would have resonated well with most blacks at the time.
|
The Last Moments of John Brown
by Thomas Hovenden |
Inspired by racial separatists like Benjamin “Pap”
Singleton, himself a former slave, African-Americans were encouraged
to settle in Kansas, partly because of its rumored connection to the
near-mythological figure of abolitionist John Brown, and in Oklahoma,
which at one time was envisioned as an all-black state. Pap,
something of a self-promoter as well as a rabble rouser, first
exhorted ex-slaves to settle in Tennessee, but when locals refused to
sell them land, they pushed on to Kansas, with Pap considering himself
the Noah of this large migration. Afro-American enclaves in
cities like Topeka offered safety in numbers, and black men were
quickly swallowed up into low-paid industrial jobs, their wives to
domestic service. The Exoduster movement faded as quickly as it
began, lasting only from 1879 to 1880, leaving its charming moniker
blowing in the wind. Bad crops and fear of yellow fever along
the Missouri River were two discouraging factors, especially as some
locals blamed the outbreak of fever on the poor black transients.
|
Benjamin “Pap” Singleton |
The Homestead Act allowed about one hundred thousand
former slaves to seek claims west of the Mississippi. Despite
the racial phobias that seemed to exist at all times, there was a more
tolerant attitude towards every kind of strange, marvelous and
scurrilous character in the wide open spaces, where a man was judged,
as one observer put it, “by how he sits in the saddle.” The
Border States like New Mexico even then had a long history of
accommodation to people of other races, and that made transitions for
migrating blacks less painful.
Farming was something in which many blacks had
experience, often forced under slavery’s restraints to grow small
garden plots for basic survival. So logically ex-slaves might
refuse farm labor, having done so much, and in fact many preferred
safe city life and a regular paycheck to the risk of alien landscapes
and the vagaries of agriculture. But those who were motivated by
the Homestead Act were cut from different cloth from the mainstream of
ex-slaves.
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