Southern Homestead Act

“An Act for the Disposal of the Public Lands for Homestead Actual Settlement in the States of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Florida,” better known as the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, helped both whites and African Americans create homesteads on formerly public land across the South. The act remained in place for approximately a decade before it was repealed. During that time, more than 26,000 claims for land were made in Arkansas.

The act originated from efforts during the Civil War to provide freedmen land formerly owned by white landowners. Various efforts took place across the South, including Federal Military Farm Colonies in both the Arkansas Delta and northwestern Arkansas. Many of these efforts focused on giving formerly enslaved people a way to provide for themselves and relieve some of the strain placed on Federal supply lines.

The Homestead Act of 1862 opened public land to settlement in Union states, allowing settlers to obtain up to 160 acres of land for a minimal cost. Because this legislation was passed during the Civil War, public land in Southern states was not available for settlement. This changed with the passage of the Southern Homestead Act.

Postwar efforts included legislation in December 1865 that provided plots of land of no more than forty acres and necessary farming implements, including livestock. This effort contributed to use of the phrase “Forty acres and a mule” as a way for formerly enslaved people to move ahead following their emancipation, although the exact origin of the phrase is unclear. This effort was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, but the following year, weakened legislation known as the Southern Homestead Act was passed by Congress and became law after Johnson signed the bill on June 21, 1866. The former states of the Confederacy did not yet have representation in Congress following the end of the Civil War, allowing the bill to become law without strong, organized opposition.

The legislation provided that public land could be claimed by homesteaders in five southern states: Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana. For the first two years of the act, homesteaders could claim up to eighty acres, and 160 acres could be claimed after that date. The act provided for only loyal citizens to be able to obtain land under the legislation until the end of 1867, when the process opened to all homesteaders.

More than forty-six million acres of land across the South were opened to settlement by the creation of the act. In Arkansas, more than nine million acres of land were included. A total of 26,395 entries were created in Arkansas as part of the act. Of those, only 10,807 were completed, however. Approximately 1,000 entries were made on behalf of African American homesteaders, although of that total, only about 250 were carried through to completion. In total, more than two million acres of land in Arkansas were claimed as part of the act.

In 1865, only about six percent of the land in Arkansas was deemed improved. This included land that was used for farming, mining, forestry, and other industries. Much of the land available for homesteaders was not desirable and was considered to be too poor for farming.

Land offices operated in Washington (Hempstead County), Little Rock (Pulaski County), and Clarksville (Johnson County), along with other locations. Federal agents and local residents both helped and hindered the abilities of African Americans to participate in the claim process. Dr. William Granger, a surveyor in Little Rock, worked with groups of interested settlers to identify and properly claim land, helping some with the logistics needed to move onto the property. Opposing the efforts of African Americans moving to the state, the Arkansas Gazette published an editorial that read, in part, that they should not “be coming to our city, bridle in hand, fully expecting to lead the coveted mule home to the promised forty acres.”

This did not deter many people from filing paperwork to stake their claims. A mixture of Arkansas residents and formerly enslaved people from other Southern states obtained land in the state through the act. This included seventy-two Black families from Georgia who moved to western Arkansas in 1867, with each family securing a claim to eighty acres. Other groups of African Americans joined together to create communities, with each family obtaining a claim. Examples of these communities existed in Pulaski County, where fourteen families worked together, and Hempstead County, where about fifty families created a community near Washington.

Problems arose due to the poor records kept by the land offices before the Civil War. Granger determined that anywhere from forty to seventy percent of the land opened for settlement was actually too poor to farm. Land grants made to railroad companies that then failed to construct tracks further complicated the matter.

Ultimately, the Southern Homestead Act did not help large numbers of African Americans obtain land and become self-sufficient. The failure of the act gave rise to the tenant farming and sharecropping systems that emerged in the late nineteenth century across the South, tying landless farmers to the land with little economic mobility.

For additional information:
Finely, Randy. From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom: The Freedmen’s Bureau in Arkansas, 1865–1869. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996.

Gates, Paul Wallace. “Federal Land Policy in the South 1866–1888.” Journal of Southern History 6 (August 1940): 303–330.

Lovett, Bobby L. “African Americans, Civil War, and Aftermath in Arkansas.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 54 (Autumn 1995): 304–358.

Matkin-Rawn, Story. “‘The Great Negro State of the Country’: Arkansas’s Reconstruction and the Other Great Migration.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 72 (Spring 2013): 1–41.

David Sesser
Southeastern Louisiana University