RUDMENTS, pt. 1,328
(heritage and legacy live on...)
I never understood how, in the
midst of the Civil War, (1862),
President Lincoln and Congress
could pass and enact the Homestead
Law of 1862. It offered to any
American family man over
twenty-one 160 acres gratis
of surveyed public domain
after five years of continuous
residence, or purchase for $1.25
an acre after six months. Mind
you now, this was right in the
middle of the time that thousands
of those same, ordinary men were
being slaughtered and maimed
on the daily battlefields of the
War Between the States. The
timing just seems to be way off -
as if there had to be some other
reasoning behind this. The idea
in the background must have
dawned on someone - that the
risk of men just dropping things
and fleeing - the facts of desertion
nothwithstanding - to stake their
claim and say to hell with war had
to be reckoned with and would or
could pose a new and horrific problem
for the Northern war effort. Actually,
it was all very weird - the 'Govenment'
giving away public domain lands in
some greasy program of, what?
Eminent domain over any and all
local Native-dwellers. The massive
slaughter of Bison that came with
this, at about the same time, for me
gave it away. Railroads!
-
It was a huge swindle; nothing more,
nothing less. 'History is bunk,' Henry
Ford said, and he was right. America
was yet rural (1860). In that year only
16 percent of the people lived in cities
of 8,000 or more people. The 'Rural
Utopia' of Jefferson's imagining - the
free yeoman on freesoil - and its more
literal reality/idea could mobilize more
political power than ever, especially
among the growing middle-west. It
contributed to the formation of the
Republican Party, and not least to its
anti-slavery orientation. There really
had been a point where the 'classless
republic of freeholding farmers' had
nothing to do with slavery and little
interest in the Negro; it excluded
slavery. Weird right? This idea of a
Utopia failed - less than 400,000
benefited under the Homestead Act,
while the US population surged past
32 million! Most of those people
were just then totally preoccupied
too - what better time to slide
this trickery past them?
-
Here's where I found my key! Again,
Railroads : The railways alone, which
received enormous grants of public land
so they might recoup the losses of both
construction and operation by the profits
of public speculation and development,
sold more land at $5 than was conveyed
under the Act. The real beneficiaries of
free land were speculators, financiers,
and capitalist entrepreneurs. In the last
decades of the century little more was
heard of the bucolic dream of a free
yeomanry. 'In America, still the 'New'
World, no newspapers were more
adventurously journalistic, no
politicians more flamboyantly
corrupt, and no country more
unlimited in its 'possibilities.'
-
It's amazing to me how that 'New'
world stuff just got gobbled up and
thrown into the mismash of all
that we have today. (Frankly, I'm
writing this on the idea of theming
it somehow with 'Thanksgiving' -
that great American glugfest of
piggishness and gluttony; but I
don't yet see that coalescing).
There's nothing like celebrating
the loss of a country instead of its
bald, naked 'achievements' - which
aren't that at all, unless they're
contrived and figured into someone
else's making money. Workers of the
world, Unite! You have nothing to
lose but your chains!
-
Those giveaway acres, and all that
land, hidden like a gimmick in a
railway giveaway by which that
very land was transformed : crossed,
chopped, and channeled. When I
drive these byways and farm lanes
of where I now live I know intensely
that I've left all that other crap behind
and have seeded, at the least, and even
if I'm not here to grow it, another sort
of luxury-living for the few I leave
behind. I grant them that, and give
it willingly. If it changes - and I know
it will someday - even this land here
will still be holy and mine. Heritage
and legacy live on. They never die.
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