Does anybody know how many African Americans staked claims in the West under the Homestead Act? Or what percentage of the total homestead claims were filed by African Americans?
After the Civil War, with all those newly freed slaves needing to make their own living, and with the bitterly hostile atmosphere they were living in, one would think that moving West would be a very attractive option for them. But then, there was also the problem that the freedmen’s former owners tended to shoot them if they looked like leaving.
The only information I’ve been able to find is about ex-slaves moving West is the Exodusters of 1877 who founded a colony in Kansas. But my Henretta Concise HIstory of America says there were only about 5,000 Exodusters, hardly a drop out of the four-million-plus Southern blacks. And were the Exodusters homesteaders, anyway?
Homesteading required a certain cash outlay, for tools, seeds, food and clothing until the crops began to bear and could generate more cash, transportation to the site itself, stuff like that, and there probably weren’t many freed slaves who could come up with that kind of capital.
It also required a certain amount of expertise to homestead, and I wouldn’t think that slaves chopping cotton 24/7 would have had opportunities to learn skills that would be useful on the frontier, such as how to use a rifle (including disassembling and cleaning it), or how to measure out your own land to make sure your next-door neighbors weren’t helping themselves to part of your 40 acres.
Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma all had “substantial” numbers of Black homesteaders; in a similar vein, I remember reading something to the effect that as many as one in seven cowboys were black but I can’t provide a cite. I personally knew a few members of one large Black family in South Dakota whose forebears had homesteaded there.
Not to pick a quarrel, DDG, but not all slaves chopped cotton 24/7; most plantations were largely self supporting and had slaves who were trained cobblers, wagon builders, carpenters, blacksmiths, mid-wives, etc., etc. Surveyors in the South, and elsewhere, often had Black servants, cooks, porters, etc., who accompanied them on surveying jobs and who learned the art just by observation. This is not to be construed as a defense of slavery; it is just an attempt to point out that not all Blacks were field hands.
And, even in the face of the “bitterly hostile conditions” Blacks lived in, there were several all-Black and quite prosperous villages and towns scattered here and there in the South.
I’ve used the records of the U.S. homestead offices, and I never saw any racial description of the homesteaders listed in the registration logs. You would have to match up census records (which do list racial classifications) with homestead tract books to find the answer.
I’m thinking so. DId you go to the National Archives to get those homestead records?
I’ve read the same, in Henretta and also in Time-Life’s The Cowboys. One in seven was black, another one in seven Hispanic.
I also agree, it’s important not to overlook the very wide variety of jobs slaves did in the South, particularly urban slaves and those too aged to work the fields.
Really? That does surprise me, not that there were Southern all-black town and villages, but that they were prosperous. My understanding was that any Southern African-American who grew noticeably prosperous was almost sure to be burned out, and quite possibly murdered, by racist whites. But then, it may be inevitable that such horrific cases get more “press” than cases of black people quietly and peaceably growing prosperous.
State archives. I think each office kept two sets of books, one to be forwarded to Washington, and one to be kept in the state, to be used for title searches.
The OP may be interested to know that there was a follow-on to the original Homestead Act, called the Southern Homestead Act, passed in 1866 specifically to address the needs of former slaves. It opened public domain land in the South to homesteading, with preference given to “loyalists” (which in the deep South meant mostly black people) for the first six months.
The SHA was largely unsuccessful. The remaining public domain in the South didn’t include a lot of prime agricultural land, and most former slaves lacked the capital to move to remote areas and survive until clearing the land and harvesting their first crop. As the article notes (the statistics agree with what I’ve read elsewhere), only four or five thousand black families ever took out claims under the SHA, and only about 1,000 succeeded in “proving up” their homesteads and gaining ultimate title.
The article also discusses blacks and the original Homestead Act:
Some black communities were sufficiently isolated and self-sufficient to escape racist attention: Mound Bayou, Mississippi, for example, which was founded by the son of a man who had been enslaved by Jefferson Davis, or the South Carolina sea islands. These were exceptions, obviously; far more African Americans in the South sharecropped on white-owned land or performed relatively low-paying wage labor.