[Footnote 28:  There were three potent reasons for this migration:  financial stringency, overpopulation, and the growing rigor of the military service.  Over ten thousand processes a year were issued by the German Government in 1872 and 1873 for evasion of military duty.  Germans who had become naturalized American citizens were arrested when they returned to the Fatherland for a visit on the charge of having evaded military service.  A treaty between the two countries finally adjusted this difficulty.]

CHAPTER VII

THE CALL OF THE LAND

For over a century after the Revolution the great fact in American life was the unoccupied land, that vast stretch of expectant acreage lying fallow in the West.  It kept the American buoyant, for it was an insurance policy against want.  When his crops failed or his business grew dull, there was the West.  When panic and disaster overtook him, there remained the West.  When the family grew too large for the old homestead, the sons went west.  And land, unlimited and virtually free, was the magnet that drew the foreign home seeker to the American shores.

The first public domain after the formation of the Union extended from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi.  This area was enlarged and pushed to the Rockies by the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and was again enlarged and extended to the Pacific by the acquisition of Oregon (1846) and the Mexican cession (1848).  The total area of the United States from coast to coast then comprised 3,025,000[29] square miles, of which over two-thirds were at one time or another public domain.  Before the close of the Civil War the Government had disposed of nearly four hundred million acres but still retained in its possession an area three times as great as the whole of the territory which had been won from Great Britain in the Revolution.

The public domain was at first looked upon as a source of revenue, and a minimum price was fixed by law at $2 an acre, though this rate was subsequently (1820) lowered to $1.25 an acre.  The West always wanted liberal land laws, but the South before the Civil War, fearing that the growth of the West would give the North superior strength, opposed any such generosity.  When the North dominated Congress, the Homestead Law of 1862 provided that any person, twenty-one years of age, who was a citizen of the United States or who had declared his intention of becoming one, could obtain title to 160 acres of land by living upon it five years, making certain improvements, and paying the entry fee of ten dollars.

The Government laid out its vast estate in townships six miles square, which it subdivided into sections of 640 acres and quarter sections of 160 acres.  The quarter section was regarded as the public land unit and was the largest amount permitted for individual preemption and later for a homestead.  Thus was the whole world invited to go west.  Under the new law, 1,160,000 acres were taken up in 1865.[30] The settler no longer had to suffer the wearisome, heart-breaking tasks that confronted the pioneer of earlier years, for the railway and steamboat had for some time taken the place of the Conestoga wagon and the fitful sailboat.