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Show HOMESTEADING, 1862-1882 395 there was evidence of abandonment, though settlers could prove up and get title at the end of 5.22 Congress attempted to prevent misuse of the homestead law by inserting several requirements in it that were to be strengthened by instructions sent by the Land Office to all registers and receivers. Homesteaders must swear that the land was intended for actual settlement and cultivation and that the entries were not being made for any other person. Five years' residence on the land and cultivation were required before the homesteader could prove up and take title. After 1872 Civil War veterans were permitted to count the time they had been in the service toward the required 5 years but had to put in one full year's residence on the land. Only one homestead could be acquired, but the measure specifically retained the preemption law, thereby making it possible for settlers to acquire both a preemption and a homestead, each for 160 acres, though not at the same time because residence was required on each. Homesteaders who wished to get title to borrow on it or wanted to sell their tracts were permitted to commute their entries to preemption entries, if they had not already taken advantage of the preemption law, by paying the price for which the land was held. Liberal, forward-looking, and attractive as was the promise of free land under the Act of 1862, it lacked the safeguards the National Reformers had insisted were essential if the public lands were to be saved for actual settlers. It neither took from the President the right to proclaim additional land for sale nor repealed the cash sale law of 1820. Land reformers had tried unsuc- 22 Lee, "Kansas and the Homestead Act," p. 126; Henry N. Copp, The American Settler's Guide; A Popular Exposition oj the Public Land System oj the United States (Washington, 1882), p. 26. The commissions charged in the far western states were somewhat higher. cessfully in 1858-60 to get Congress to withdraw the public lands from "private entry" so that speculators and other men of capital could no longer anticipate the settler by buying land in unlimited amounts. When the homestead law was enacted there were 83,919,649 acres subject to private entry, and some 15 million acres of additional land in California, Colorado, Washington, and Wisconsin were later ordered into market and opened to unlimited purchase.23 Included in the areas open to unlimited purchase, either at this time or a decade later after the repeal of the restrictive Southern Homestead Act of 1866, were heavily timbered areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Colorado, considerable fair land in the eastern third of Kansas and Nebraska, and all the remaining public lands in the five southern states. If settlers had not established preemption rights in these areas before the sale, speculators and lumber companies were generally able to buy the choice lands their cruisers selected for them at the $1.25 price. Impractical in an American context as the inalienability proposal of the National Reformers may appear, it offered more promise of preventing abuse of the homestead law than the relatively weak safeguarding features which the law contained. Past experience had shown that westerners had no compunctions about flouting the laws banning agreements to prevent competition at public auctions. They had taken advantage of the preemption and graduation laws contrary to the spirit and the letter of these laws. In giving evidence about land claims many people had perjured themselves. Settlers had "hooked" timber from public lands, ganged up against Federal marshals trying to levy upon stolen timber, packed juries to free the accused, and managed to turn the law ™GLO Report, 1862, p. 8; Paul W. Gates, "The Homestead Law in an Incongruous Land System," American Historical Review, XLI (July 1936), 660. |