The Southern Homestead Act’s land for freedmen was repealed in 1876 before distribution.

Evidence

The Southern Homestead Act, passed on June 21, 1866, and signed by President Johnson, set aside 46 million acres of public land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi for purchase as 80-acre plots, then later as 160-acre plots. The intended beneficiaries, at least in the beginning, were to be freedmen without land. In June 1876, however, before much of the land was distributed, the program was repealed. And what explains President Johnson’s support? Likely his belief that poor white Americans would benefit. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 261

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘40 acres’ promise as a real, repealed statute lost before distribution is the bedrock factual anchor for a reparations essay.
• XREF: Connects to the land-wealth foreclosure argument from The Whiteness of Wealth; also to the promised-but-revoked land grant pattern in Parable of the Sower-era history.