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Show 444 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT people too much to permit them to give thought to public lands.18 With the conclusion of the war all sales, patents and other changes that may have been made were voided and the public lands were back where they had been before secession. In 1866 Congress was persuaded to adopt a measure that reserved all public lands in these five states for homesteaders only. The Southern Homestead Act came about through the union of a number of congressional groups that had nothing in common except that each wanted restrictions placed on the disposal of the remaining southern lands. George W. Julian, earlier an abolitionist, was now the leader of a small group in Congress that wanted a land redistribution carried out in the South. These men had proposed, and during the war had secured, the adoption of two acts providing for the confiscation of the estates of the planter aristocrats who were in rebellion. They were seeking the division of these holdings into 40-acre tracts to be given to the freedmen, and the reservation of all remaining public lands in the five states for homestead applicants only. Essentially, the Southern Homestead Act was for Julian a land reform measure but he was also motivated by his hatred of the planters who had brought on the war. Others in Congress who supported the measure but were not land reformers, except for political reasons, were the "radical reconstructionists." They seemed to be thinking principally of the welfare of the Republican Party and its continuation in control of the country but they may have had some concern, as Julian did, for the welfare of the Negro, and thought of the act as one that would materially aid him. The vote in the House on the southern homestead bill-there was no division in 18 For the management of the southern public lands during the Confederacy see Paul W. Gates, Agriculture and the Civil War (New York, 1965), pp. 296-99. the Senate-was 112-29 with 41 abstentions. All 19 Representatives from the principal lumbering states, Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, voted; 17 were favorable and two opposed. Already the lumbermen millionaires were appearing in Congress. Two of them who were at least well along to that position, Philetus Sawyer of Wisconsin and John W. Longyear of Wisconsin, were among those voting yea. No great significance should be attached to this vote except in relation to its reversal 10 years later. It does seem fair to say that it was more a punitive measure than a land reform act for it is difficult to believe that tough-minded realists like Sawyer and Longyear and many others like them were influenced by land reform ideas.19 The Southern Homestead Act provided that the public lands in the five southern states should be reserved for homesteads only, and that for the first 2 years the unit of entry should be 80 acres. Until 1867 only citizens whose loyalty had been unquestioned during the Civil War could make entries.20 If the object of the act was to aid the freedmen to obtain and develop small tracts as farms, it was a failure. The best of the Delta land and the alluvial lands elsewhere, and all the land suitable for cotton, had long since been selected and what was left was refuse land not previously regarded as desirable, and an abundance of relatively infertile land covered with heavy stands of longleaf pine and cyprus. Such land had little attraction for farmers, and its timber was not regarded as favorably as the white pine of the North. Moreover, capital was needed to develop the lands and the freedmen and poor whites, for whom Julian had hoped 19 House Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 1865-66 (Serial No. 1243) , pp. 250-51; Richard N. Current, Pine Logs and Politics, A Life of Philetus Sawyer (Madison, Wis., 1950) , passim; Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York, 1965) , pp. 124 ff. 2014 Stat. 66-67. |