The Homestead Act and Who Could Not File

The Homestead Act of eighteen sixty-two offered one hundred sixty acres of federal land to any adult citizen or intended citizen who could farm it for five years and pay a small filing fee. On January first, eighteen sixty-three, at the Beatrice, Nebraska, land office, a man named Daniel Freeman filed claim number one. The site of that claim is now Homestead National Historical Park.

The act was transformative, and it was also selective in ways that are rarely mentioned at the monument.

The land being offered was federal land, which meant it was former Indigenous territory, ceded through treaties in the preceding decades, some of which were signed under duress and some of which were simply ignored when inconvenient. The nations whose territory was being homesteaded were not mentioned in the act.

The act offered its hundred and sixty acres to citizens and intended citizens. Chinese immigrants were ineligible for citizenship under federal law, which meant they could not file. Native Americans were wards of the government, not citizens, which meant they also could not file on the same land their nations had held. In practice, most Black Americans were also excluded, through a combination of violence, legal obstruction, and financial barriers, even though the act did not formally bar them.

Homestead National Historical Park in Beatrice tells this history more honestly than many comparable National Park Service sites. The exclusion story is part of the interpretation there, not buried. The land itself was taken before it was given.