In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed into law one of the most ambitious experiments in American democracy ever attempted: the Homestead Act. The promise was breathtaking in its simplicity. Any citizen, including formerly enslaved people and single women, could claim one hundred and sixty acres of public land for free. All they had to do was live on it, improve it, and endure five years of backbreaking work to prove they were serious. Over the following seven decades, the federal government transferred roughly one hundred and sixty million acres of land into private hands, an area larger than the state of Texas. The story behind this massive giveaway stretches back decades before Lincoln's signature. Eastern wage laborers, Western expansionists, and abolitionists all saw free land as the answer to different problems. For laborers, it was an escape from f ...