Free Homesteads
image 1
image 2
image 3
image 4
cropped image 1
FREE HOMESTEADS.
Amid the excitement about Kansas,1 and the hubbub of the different schemers and aspirants for office, present and prospective, a really important question, like that of Free Homesteads, seems to be unable to make itself felt and heard amidst the din. In the meantime Congress is rapidly getting rid of the public lands—apparently desirous of shifting for itself, on any terms, the responsibility of such a large ownership. One of these ways, it seems, is, of late, to make use of the public lands to bribe new States into submitting their necks to the yoke of pro slavery constitutions.
It is to us quite unaccountable that Congress has not long ago passed a law giving a modicum of land to whoever should actually settle upon it, and make of it a homestead for himself and his present or prospective family. The reasons in behalf of such a law are so numerous, and the reasons against it so few, that we are quite at a loss to reason on the omission—especially when we take into consideration the plain fact that a party who should inaugurate and put through such a law, would by that means, get a hold upon the sympathy of the masses, that it would be almost impossible afterward to retrieve from them.
It is not indeed amazing that in a land like ours, professing to stand on the rights and prosperity of the common people, as on a substratum, there should not be a law of this kind proposed, made into the platform of some powerful party, and persistently adhered to until it succeeds? The unoccupied territories of the United States at this moment include sufficient land to give small homesteads to twenty millions of distinct families. (There are now in the United States but six or seven millions of distinct families.) With the improvements of farm-machinery, irrigation, due succession of crops, and improved farming generally, the advantages these lands offer could in time be increased to meet almost any demands made upon them.
We do not think it a favorable time now to push this subject before the national legislature. But it seems to us well worth while to bear it in mind, and occasionally present it to the attention of people's s we have just presented it.
Notes:
1. The period known as "Bleeding Kansas" (or "Bloody Kansas") saw a series of violent conflicts and massacres between pro- and anti-slavery forces in the territory of Kansas from the mid-1850s to the Civil War. [back]