The Homestead Act

A homestead is a plot of land the state gave away to whoever would settle on it and farm it. The act passed while the southern states had left Congress, and was impossible before that: the South had blocked free smallholdings in the West because they would create free states. It shaped the Midwest's property structure and grain economy, and together with the ploughing of the prairie made the Dust Bowl possible seventy years later. Black families — the Exodusters — also sought land under the act, on far worse terms in practice.