domain were breaking down, and when railroads had so far supplemented the older water routes that the crop could get to a market wherever it was raised. The changes that came with the machines, caused by them in part, and in part by the opening of the rural mind to science, were far-reaching in their consequences. Of course they saved labor, making many thousands of men free to fill the Union armies in the Civil War. They educated the farmer, making him at once business man, mechanic, and a large employer of labor, and thus helping to break up the isolation of the rural class. And they increased the rate at which it was possible for the West to absorb the farm lands of the public domain. The profits to be got out of wholesale agriculture had once before stimulated the South to push the area of cotton culture. It now inspired the West to push to fulfillment the homestead policy.

There was an inconsistency in the western demands that broke down the last of the restrictions on the lands. Every community wanted railroads so badly that it was willing to vote alternate sections for every line. It was clear that these grants could not produce revenue for the roads unless they were sold, and the sections which the Government retained were held at double-minimum, and yet the West advocated them.

The grants of lands to the States for education in general, or agricultural education, or public works, had again little value unless the lands were sold at a profit. Yet it was possible for a western spokesman to advocate all these and still believe that the Government ought to give a free farm to each citizen who would reclaim it.

The inconsistency between using the lands to raise money, and giving them away, was clear to the Free Soil Democrats, who, in 1852, included in their platform a specific demand for a homestead policy, declaring, "That the public lands of the United States belong to the people, and should not be sold to individuals nor granted to corporations, but should be held as a sacred trust for the benefit of the people, and should be granted in limited quantities, free of cost, to landless settlers." The inconsistency became clear enough to the settlers, too, in the decade that followed the Civil War. But during the fifties the West wanted both railroads and free farms and failed to realize that one might block the other. There would have been a homestead law before the Civil War, if it had not been for James Buchanan. The movement for free lands was approaching a head, and within the new Republican

Party there were few who did not believe in the policy. A law permitting any head of a family or alien who had declared his intention to become a citizen, to occupy a quarter section for five years, and then buy it for twenty-five cents an acre, passed both houses of Congress in the summer of 1860. It did not make the land free, but the reduction in price was so sweeping that the homestead opinion accepted the law as a fair compromise and called it, "A Bill to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain." Buchanan vetoed it for the same reasons that induced him to veto the Morrill Act of the year before: it was in his opinion unfair and unconstitutional. It was not expedient, he thought, "to proclaim to all the nations of the earth that whoever shall arrive in this country from a foreign shore, and declare his intention to become a citizen, shall receive a farm of 160 acres, at a cost of 25 or 20 cents an acre, if he will only reside on it and cultivate it." This was, however, the stand not only of the adherents of the revenue theory of the public lands and of the strict constructionists who denied the powers of the Government, but also of the sections that feared the growth of a free farming West that might overbalance the South.

Lincoln signed the Homestead Bill, May 20, 1862. The only result of Buchanan's veto was to delay the policy two years, and abolish the price of twenty-five cents an acre. Its privileges were now extended to "any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such," with the exception made necessary by the war then raging, "and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies."

The homesteader was allowed a quarter-section of minimum lands, or half a quarter of double-minimum, on five years of residence and cultivation. The Pre-Emption Act was not repealed, but remained in force for those who did not desire to acquire title by residence or cultivation; and any homesteader was specifically allowed, at any time after his original entry upon the lands, to commute his homestead entry to a preëmption, and buy the land at the regular price.

On January 1, 1863, the first homesteaders made their entry on the public domain, the agricultural college lands were made ready

2 James T. Dubois and Gertrude S. Mathews, Galusha A. Grow, Father of the Homestead Law (1917), naturally gives Grow more credit than he earned.

for the States, and the railroad lands were held before the eyes of railroad builders to speed their efforts. The public lands were entered upon the last great period of their existence; to remain wide open for the next twenty-five years, until they were closed not by a change of policy but by the fact that the resources of the Nation were exhausted. In the census of 1880, and in the Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office for that year, it was noted that practically all of the farm land had been taken up. The open frontier disappeared, and with it vanished the most American of all the American forces that have operated on society. After 1862 the history of the American Frontier is in its final chapters.

CHAPTER LI

THE PLAINS IN THE CIVIL WAR

THE influence of the Civil War in making the United States a nation has long been a theme of patriotic writers and orators. They have pointed out how Lincoln's decision to maintain the Union, and the consolidating forces let loose by the military operations of the United States, changed the character of the Federal Government. A fair implication from many of their interpretations is that if there had been no Civil War the United States would have remained a loose Government, without power and without program.

From the standpoint of the plainsman, or the prairie farmer who appeared a generation before him, the error of this theory of American history is much like that of the statesman of the Old South, whose information as to American development ceased to grow after the Mexican War. The course of industry and transport, after the panic of 1837, had but one end, and that was an interstate organization of the business of the United States and a growing pressure upon Congress to provide the machinery for its direction and control.

The historian who finds the key to nationality in the Civil War has given too little attention to the necessary implications of the building of the railroads, the multiplication of territories, the land grant policies, and the complications these created. The Middle West and the Far West were the political creatures of the United States and looked to the Nation for coördination and support. They looked thus before the Civil War and kept on looking during that momentous struggle. New reasons for their dependence sprang up during the war itself, and were disconnected with it. The only effect the Civil War had on the Pacific railroads and the Homestead Act was to delay their accomplishment. The mining camps demanded roads, railroads, and post offices, without reference to the war, and the mere fact of their existence implied a necessary enlargement of the activities of the National Government in the ensuing years.

But the error of the historical interpreter is one of the study and the library, subject to correction and repair. The error of the

statesmen of the Old South was more costly, for it deprived their calculations of a vital factor, whose presence and proper appraisal might have altered the course of history. They believed that the whole Mississippi Valley, including the tributary basin of the Ohio, was still bound up with the current of the Father of Waters and that true western interest must forever lie with that power which should be able to control the outlet of the Mississippi at New Orleans. This was good doctrine for James Wilkinson and inspired a wise policy in the Spanish rulers who bought off the leaders of the Old West. It was good doctrine for Thomas Jefferson, too, who was driven by it to buy Louisiana and preserve the Union. It was not bad doctrine in the forties and early fifties, when the steamboat traffic of the Mississippi was at its height and the gaudy cabins of the floating palaces carried up and down the leaders of western and southern politics, business, and society.

But it was bad doctrine after the railroad era gained its stride, and it became worse every day after the trunk line railroads reached Chicago. The South formed an opinion and then closed its mind. Its orators continued to talk of the dependence of the Ohio Valley on New Orleans, at a moment when the banks of New York were filled with the paper and securities of the Northwest. The panic of 1857 made the error worse, for the North and West were prostrate, while the South still had in cotton a source of untouched prosperity. The grave analyses of southern writers, showing the panic to be due to a faulty economic organization of the rest of the Union, and the South to be impregnable in its economic situation, helped to confirm a general hope that the South could get along well alone and that the Northwest would ultimately follow it out of the Union. Wherefore, in part, secession; and a war that saved the Union, if it did not shape its future growth.

It is easy after the event to show how southern mistake and faulty analysis failed to see the unifying of the North and West by the normal process of industrial growth. Every northwest State gave its vote to Lincoln in 1860. And after the election, instead of following the South into the Confederacy, the Ohio Valley sent its young men, by hundreds of thousands, into the Union armies. No State that had been in actual contact with free territory went with the Confederacy. In all the Border States. Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, the forces of Union were strong enough to offset the overtures of the South. It was not always easy to do this. West Virginia, as has