Agrarian Legislation of the United States, 1789–1865: From the Land Ordinances to the Homestead Act
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
The aim of the article is to conduct a comprehensive analysis of U.S. agricultural legislation from 1789 to
1865 as an instrument for shaping the American model of statehood and regulating land relations in the process of territorial expansion.
Conclusions. The article provides a comprehensive legal and historical analysis of the agrarian legislation of the United
States from the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 to the end of the Civil War and the enactment of the Homestead Act of 1862. Drawing upon primary sources and recent scholarship in American legal and agricultural history, the study examines key legislative acts: the Land Ordinance of 1785, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Pre-emption Acts (1830 – 1841), the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, and the Homestead Act of 1862. The constitutional foundations of federal land policy, the evolution of public land disposal mechanisms, and the legal regimes governing plantation agriculture in the South versus family farming in the West are thoroughly investigated. The article demonstrates that agrarian legislation of this period reflected deep contradictions between free labor and slavery, between federal authority and states’ rights, and between speculative capital and smallholder farming. It is concluded that the Homestead Act represented the culmination of Republican agrarian doctrine and fundamentally transformed the legal basis of land tenure in the United States.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
References
An Ordinance for Ascertaining the Mode of Disposing of Lands in the Western Territory (Land Ordinance), May 20, 1785. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 1. P. 464–469. [in English].
An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States North-West of the River Ohio (Northwest Ordinance), July 13, 1787. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 1. P. 51–53. [in English].
Land Act of 1796, May 18, 1796. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 1. P. 464–469. [in English].
Land Act of 1820, April 24, 1820. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 3. P. 566–567. [in English].
Pre-emption Act of 1830, May 29, 1830. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 4. P. 420–421. [in English].
Indian Removal Act, May 28, 1830. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 4. P. 411–412. [in English].
Pre-emption Act of 1841 (An Act to Appropriate the Proceeds of the Sales of the Public Lands), Sept. 4, 1841. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 5. P. 453–458. [in English].
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Sept. 18, 1850. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 9. P. 462–465. [in English].
California Land Act (An Act to Ascertain and Settle the Private Land Claims in the State of California), March 3, 1851. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 9. P. 631–634. [in English].
Kansas-Nebraska Act, May 30, 1854. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 10. P. 277–290. [in English].
Homestead Act (An Act to Secure Homesteads to Actual Settlers on the Public Domain), May 20, 1862. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 12. P. 392–393. [in English].
Morrill Land-Grant College Act, July 2, 1862. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 12. P. 503–505. [in English].
Pacific Railway Act, July 1, 1862. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 12. P. 489–498. [in English].
Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits, and Settlement between the United States and the Mexican Republic (Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), Feb. 2, 1848. Statutes at Large of USA. Vol. 9. P. 922–943. [in English].
U.S. Constitution (1787, ratified 1788, in force 1789). // The Founders’ Constitution / Kurland, P. B., Lerner, R. (eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Vol. 1. [in English].
Baptist, E. E. (2014). The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, p. 112–130.
Bryan, L. (2024). Unsettling the Settler State: Indigenous Land Rights and American Property Law. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 380 p. [in English].
Finkelman, P. (2002). Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson. 2nd ed. New York: M. E.
Sharpe. 280 p. [in English].
Foner, E. (2014). Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Updated ed. New York: HarperCollins. 688 p.
Gates, P. W. (1968). History of Public Land Law Development. Washington: Government Printing Office. 828 p. [in English].
Hurst, J. W. (1956). Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 164 p. [in English].
Miller, M. C. (2022). Land and Loyalty: Creating Community in the American Midwest. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 296 p.
Morris, T. D. (1996). Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 560 p.
Potter, D. M. (1976). The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848–1861. New York: Harper & Row. 638 p. [in English].
Richardson, H. C. (2020). How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. New York: Oxford University Press. 272 p. [in English].
Robertson, L. G. (2005). Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands. New York: Oxford University Press. 232 p. [in English].
Rohrbough, M. (1968). The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837. New York: Oxford University Press. 331 p. [in English].
Zahler, H. S. (1941, repr. 2021). Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy, 1829–1862. New York: Columbia University Press. 224 p. [in English].