Futureface by Alex Wagner

Author:Alex Wagner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Decimated in number, diseased in body, broken in heart and soul, the Winnebago, who whites saw as a threat to their westward expansion, had been violently contained. By 1846, the tribe was uprooted yet again, moved out of neutral ground and over to Minnesota. Not surprisingly, the first white settlements in Allamakee County were established somewhere around this time. The town of Lansing was claimed and settled in June 1848.

The Homestead Act of 1862 opened up the great expanse of the American West to white settlement—and Allamakee County was no exception. If the fight to claim this land had been bloody and protracted, the process by which it was given away was, ironically, remarkably easy for most Americans (excepting, of course, native people, who weren’t considered citizens until 1926). Even immigrants could claim their acreage, provided they swore their allegiance to the United States, swore they were no longer faithful to whichever king or queen had once ruled their dominion, and further swore they would obtain proper American citizenship within five years.

All that swearing aside, the relative facility of this process was remarkable—the inherent generosity of giving away land, even to, ahem, illegals! (From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, in the gust and swirl of the roaring debate over immigration, it is nearly impossible to imagine any president ordering American land to be given away to “illegals,” refugees, or the undocumented.)

The Homestead Act was passed during the Civil War—and one of the driving forces behind it was slavery. Earlier attempts to parcel out western lands were met with resistance from Southerners, who feared the rise of small farmers on free land was a threat to their way of life: plantation slavery. What if the opening up of the West attracted anti-slavery Europeans or poor Southern whites? Many Northerners, meanwhile, wanted to ensure that the practice of slavery ended in the South and aimed to prevent it from corrupting the westward expanse of the United States, precisely by populating it with small farms owned by free persons, rather than wealthy landowners with slaves. (Not all Northerners were fans of this plan, however; some were concerned that the parceling out of free land would drain their factories of cheap labor.)

Anyway, there were several failed attempts to pass a homestead act, most of which were scuttled in Congress by the Southern states—until they seceded from the Union and departed the legislature. Once that happened, Lincoln was free to pass the law sans Southern resistance—and did.

So what did all this American bounty mean for the slaves themselves? My father had mentioned the lone black dry cleaner in town—shouldn’t there have been black-owned businesses sprouting up all over the Midwest once it was opened to homesteading and closed to slavery? Indeed, under the Homestead Act, and once the Civil War ended, former slaves were technically able to claim parcels of land for themselves. And with a southern landscape where racism and violence remained the order of the day, no doubt the West seemed enticing.

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