Farming and Populism

​Farming and Populism

The Homestead Act of 1862

• Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862 during the Civil War, the Homestead Act was the most comprehensive land distribution bill passed in the nineteenth century.

• Prior to the act, the U.S. government auctioned or sold public land in large lots that ordinary citizens could not afford to buy or manage.

• The Homestead Act ambitiously shifted land ownership and development towards average American citizens.

• Was created to encourage people to move west with free land

The Homestead Act of 1862

The Homestead Act of 1862 stated that any current or future citizen, with a mere ten dollars, could claim a homestead of up to 160 acres of government land, and “improve” the land by putting it to use as a family plot.

This meant erecting a dwelling and farming the soil for a period of five years. If the claimant did so for the allotted period, they could then gain ownership of their land free of charge.

The act did not define what it meant to be the “head of a family,” save for an age restriction of twenty-one years if a single individual sought land, which made the Act egalitarian; it allowed African Americans, persecuted and famine-struck immigrants, and even women a chance to find freedom and success in the West.

Morrill Act

• On July 2, 1862, President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which led to the establishment of land-grant universities.

• Under the Morrill Act, the federal government designated land for sale in each state, 30,000 acres for each of the state’s U.S. House representatives. That’s the “land-grant” in “land-grant university.”

Exodusters

• Many African Americans fled the south to Kansas, a state that welcomed them.

• They were nicknamed "Exodusters" from the story of Exodus in the Bible.

• They started all black towns like Nicodemus, Kansas.

Farming the Plains

• Plains farmers faced challenges like extreme weather and root-filled sod beneath the plains grass

• sodbusters – the nickname for plains farmers for the hard work needed to break up the plains soil to farm it 

Farming the Plains

• dry farming – a new method of farming that shifted the focus away from water-dependent crops such as corn and switched to more hardy crops like wheat

• The Great Plains became known as the “Bread Basket of the World” due to the large production with fewer workers that was made possible by mechanical farming and railroad shipment to the east

Problems and Innovations

• Lack of wood for houses • sod houses

• Lack of wood for fences • barbed wire 

• Lack of water • windmills

• Thick rooted soil of plains • steel plow by John Deere

• Hard, labor intensive farm work• reaper (harvests crops) by Cyrus McCormick • thresher (separates the kernel from the stalk of grain)

Building Communities

• Annie Bidwell – one of the founders of Chico, California who used her influence to support causes like women’s suffrage and temperance

• Building churches and a schools helped build a sense of community in the remote areas of the west

The National Grange

• Farmers formed organizations to solve the economic problems they faced, which they blamed on business people

• Oliver Kelley toured the South as part of the US Dept. of Agriculture and saw firsthand the problems that farmers faced

Free Silver Debate 

• Farmers hoped that new laws relating to the money supply would help them

• The US had been on the gold standard , which means that the paper money was backed by gold in the treasury, which grew slower than the population

• deflation – a decrease in the money supply and overall lower prices

• One solution proposed by the Free Silver Movement was to allow the unlimited coining of silver to back currency along with gold

Free Silver Debate

• Increasing the money supply would increase inflation, which would allow farmers to sell their goods for more and pay back their debts to banks with cheaper money

• In the late 1870s many farmers began to support candidates that supported the Free Silver Movement

• William Jennings Bryan – a lawyer from Nebraska who was elected as a Democrat to Congress who became one of the best-known advocates of free silver

Populist Party

• Farmers’ Alliances – new organizations for farmers to elect candidates that would help them 

• The Farmers’ Alliances had many victories in the 1890 election and met with labor and reform groups to join to create a national political party - The Populist Party

End of the Frontier 

• In 1870 only small portions of the Great Plains remained unsettled

• In 1889 the US govt. decided it would allow homesteaders to buy land that had belonged to Native American tribes in what is now Oklahoma

•  11 million acres of land was claimed in what is known as the Oklahoma Land Rush, which is seen as the last event that closed the frontier in the US