Senate, instead of directly voting the bill down, set it aside and passed a substitute which provided that any free white person, head of a family, should be entitled to enter on a quarter-section of public land and after five years' occupation and cultivation purchase it for twenty-five cents an acre. This substitute contained a number of other provisions, for the right of pre-emption by the states, for a general grant of land to the states for the building of railroads, etc.[1] It seems to have been supported by both the friends and the opponents of the regular homestead bill.[2] This bill went back to the House, but was not acted upon there.
It was not until about four years later that the question of homesteads again came before Congress. Early in the session which began in the fall of 1857 a bill for free grants was introduced into the Senate but was postponed after a short discussion to January, 1859. There was some factious opposition expressed in a proposition to give to any head of a family a land-warrant for 160 acres, that he might enjoy the benefits of the act without leaving his home and going to the West.[3] The doctrine of laissez faire was brought up as opposed to the principle of the bill; it was declared that a person's self-interest should be sufficient to cause the settlement of the new lands as rapidly as was good for the country.[4] Johnson attempted to remove the feeling which he said existed in the South that the homestead bill was a sort of Emigrant Aid Society, by showing that the bill had been before Congress since 1846, before there was, as he expressed it, any question of slavery.[5]
At the short session of this Congress the House passed a homestead bill by a vote of 120 to 76. The sectional and party divisions are particularly significant at this time, as they show clearly the intimate connection between slavery and the question of territorial expansion as expressed in the proposed bill. That the bill was a northern Emigrant Aid measure can be doubted by no one who remembers the slowness with which the Southerners could be induced to move into the territories, and the corresponding willingness of the Northerners to migrate even without homestead inducements. Both sections were alive to this aspect of the bill; only 7 votes from the free states were cast against it and only 5 votes from the slave states for it. The Democrats were 38 to 60 against it and the Re- publicans 82 to 1 in its favor. The fear that the bill would encourage immigration was shown in the votes of the i 5 Americans
