The Politics of Andrew Johnson
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Description: Examines the bitter political battle that caused the only impeachment of an American President.
Reconstruction America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1988 As if to demonstrate the land question's complexities, only two days after this vote and with virtually unanimous Republican support, the House passed Julian’s Southern Homestead Act, opening public land in the South to settlement and giving blacks and loyal whites preferential access until 1867. Republicans were quite willing to offer freedmen the same opportunity to acquire land as whites already enjoyed under the Homestead Act of 1862, but not to interfere with planters' property rights. Despite extravagant hopes that it would "break down land monopoly" in the South, Julian’s bill proved a dismal failure. Plantations monopolized the best land in the South; public land-swampy, timbered, far from transportation-was markedly inferior. The freedmen, moreover, entirely lacked capital, and federal land offices were few and poorly managed. By 1869 only 4,000 black families had even attempted to take advantage of the act, three quarters of them in sparsely populated Florida, and many of these subsequently lost their land. By far the largest acreage claimed under the law went to whites, often acting as agents for lumber companies.
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| Date | activated: 14-Oct-1987 last updated: 27-Feb-2012 expires: 31-Jul-2014 |