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Show 282 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT acres had been surveyed but not proclaimed and it had been assumed that these would be withheld for settlers and preemptors and not open to large entries by holders of warrants. Notwithstanding the evidence that soldiers had profited little from emissions of bounty warrants in the past and that such an emission would absorb much of the better land still in the possession of the government, and that real farm makers would gain little from the homestead bill if such a quantity of land went to speculators, Holman insisted, as did most conservative Democrats who were unhappy about the war, on supporting to the last an amendment to the bill to grant bounties to soldiers. The amendment was withdrawn by a parliamentary maneuver, thus avoiding a public vote on the question in the House; in the Senate it was defeated by a vote of 28-11. The measure then finally passed as a straight homestead act.91 Had the military bounty amendment been approved it would actually have required well over 233 million acres. Since the total acreage of final homestead entries to 1961 was 270,216,874 acres, one may wonder what effect the grant of this huge acreage to veterans would have had on the subsequent history of the West.92 Veterans of the Civil War had to wait 5 years before Congress got around to giving them some advantage in land matters for their services. In 1870 they were authorized to homestead on 160 acres of government 91 Clement Vallandigham, later to be denounced as a copperhead, made the ablest speech in opposition to granting land bounties. Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 1st sess., Dec. 18, 1861, pp. 133 ff.; Feb. 28, 1862, p. 1033; and April 1, 1862, pp. 1916, 1951. 921 have arrived at the 233 million acres by estimating the number of men who would be entitled to receive the bounties as 1,461,000, basing my estimate on Thomas L. Livermore, Numbers & Losses in the Civil War in America: 1861-65 (Blooming-ton, Ind., 1957), p. 51. The total acreage of final homesteads is from Homesteads, a brochure prepared by the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Dept. of the Interior. double-minimum priced land in the primary grant area of railroads, whereas nonveterans could only homestead on 80 acres. By the Soldiers and Sailors Act of June 8, 1872, veterans honorably discharged were allowed to count their period of service toward the 5 years homesteaders were required to live on their claims thereby shortening the period to as little as one year, which was required of all. Veterans who had homesteaded on 40, 80, or 120 acres were allowed an additional entry of 120, 80, or 40 acres.93 As originally provided in the Act of June 8, 1872, soldiers' additional homestead rights were to be located on land contiguous to the original homestead. This was changed by an Act of March 3, 1873, to make the rights assignable and locatable anywhere on un-offered land open to homesteading. Thus was created a form of scrip that had none of the disadvantages of military bounty warrants and agricultural college scrip, which could only be used on offered land or, in the case of some of the warrants, on unoffered land only as preemptions. According to the Commissioner of the General Land Office, the Act of 1873 breached a policy which had "for some years past withheld from public sale the lands of the United States, and prevented any accumulation of bodies of land subject to private entry, reserving the public domain for the benefit of actual settlers only," a policy, one might observe, which had been more honored in the breach than in the observance. He added that speculators learned the advantages of the new rights and proceeded to round them up quickly, for with them could be secured land not otherwise obtainable except through fraudulent use of homestead or preemption entries. They were used to acquire prompt control of choice tracts of pine, or watering spots in semi-arid regions, that would have taken from 6 months to 5 years to acquire legally as homesteads. The 93 Acts of July 15, 1870, April 4, June 8, 1872, and March 3, 1873, 16 Stat. 321, 17 Stat. 49, 333, 605. |