Six Laws Passed in 1862 by a Republican Congress That Still Shape America

What do your state university, the farm down the road, the railroad that crosses the continent, the paper dollar in your wallet and your April tax filing have in common? One Congress, in one year, in the middle of the worst war in American history. The Thirty-Seventh Congress met in the shadow of cannon fire, and it did something modern legislators rarely manage. It passed the program it had campaigned on.

I want to give you a checklist, because this is the kind of history that is easier to use when it is organized. Six laws, each with a reason, a beneficiary and a bill that came due. At the end I will tell you what conservatives can honestly say against two of them, because a party that cannot hear its own critics is a party that has stopped thinking.

Why 1862 was different

First, the setup. For years before the war, the Republican platform had called for free land, a Pacific railroad and help for colleges and farms. Those proposals had stalled, and not by accident. Southern members of Congress had the votes and the incentive to block them. Free land in the West meant more free states. A railroad to the Pacific along a northern or central route meant the benefits flowed to the North. Federal support for agricultural colleges looked to many in the South like a gift to a rival section. A President, James Buchanan, had vetoed a land-grant college bill in 1859 and a homestead bill in 1860.

Then the Southern states seceded, and the Southern members left. The Republicans, who had campaigned on these ideas, now had the majorities to pass them. In 1862 alone they also ended slavery in the District of Columbia, in April, and banned it in the territories, in June. But the six laws below are the ones that built the country's economic bones, and they are the ones this checklist covers.

If you want to see the platform they were drawing from, read What the 1860 Republican Platform Promised Compared With What Democrats Offered. Now the list.

Group one: the farmer's laws

1. The Homestead Act (signed May 20, 1862)

• What it did: Any adult citizen, or a person who had filed to become one, who was head of a household or at least twenty-one, could claim up to 160 acres of surveyed public land. After living on it and improving it for five years, the claimant could receive the title for a small filing fee. A claimant could also buy the land after six months of residence at $1.25 an acre.
• The reason: The government owned enormous amounts of land in the West. The question was whether it would be sold in big blocks to speculators and rich planters, or given to families who would work it. The Republican answer, since the party's founding, had been the families.
• What it meant to a farmer: A chance to own the ground you worked. The law took effect January 1, 1863, and the first claim is traditionally credited to Daniel Freeman in Nebraska Territory on that day. Hundreds of millions of acres passed to private owners under the program over the following decades, and it stayed on the books until 1976, with an exception for Alaska that lasted ten more years.
• The cost: It was not a free lunch. Many claims failed. Land was often poor, the climate was brutal, and railroads and speculators got to much of the best land first. A fair reader should keep that in mind.

2. The Department of Agriculture (created May 15, 1862)

• What it did: Established a federal department, headed by a Commissioner, to collect and spread information about farming, seeds, plants and methods.
• The reason: Farming was the largest occupation in the country, and a farmer in Ohio had no easy way to learn what worked in New York. The department was a clearinghouse for knowledge.
• What it meant to a farmer: Information, seeds and a source of research. The department did not get a seat in the cabinet until 1889, when it became a full executive department. Today, it is a very large agency, and conservatives rightly argue about how big a role it should have. The 1862 version was small: a few people and a mission to spread know-how.

Group two: the student's law

3. The Morrill Land-Grant Act (signed July 2, 1862)

• What it did: Gave each state 30,000 acres of federal land for each senator and representative it had in Congress. States sold the land, and the money went into a permanent fund to support at least one college where the leading object was to teach agriculture and the mechanic arts, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics.
• The reason: Colleges of the day taught the classics and the professions to the sons of the comfortable. Representative Justin Morrill of Vermont, the bill's author, wanted institutions for the farmer's and the mechanic's child. Buchanan had vetoed an earlier version in 1859. Lincoln signed this one.
• What it meant to a student: A public university within reach. Dozens of today's state universities began as land-grant colleges. A later law in 1890 extended the program and led to the founding of a number of land-grant colleges for Black students.
• The conservative note: The land-grant colleges were created and run by the states, not by Washington. It was federal land, but state governance, and that is a feature, not a bug. For a related story on how a college's relationship with federal money can cut the other way, see The College That Turned Down Washington's Money and What It Teaches Us. And if you are weighing what a degree costs, A Worksheet for the True Cost of a College Degree Before You Sign Anything has a worksheet.

Group three: the worker's and traveler's law

4. The Pacific Railway Act (signed July 1, 1862)

• What it did: Chartered the Union Pacific Railroad to build west from the Missouri River and authorized the Central Pacific, already formed in California, to build east. The government issued bonds, in an amount per mile of track that depended on the terrain, and granted alternating sections of public land along the route. The two lines met at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory on May 10, 1869.
• The reason: To bind the coasts together with a line that could carry people, mail and freight in days instead of months. The war made it urgent; the gold of California and the loyalty of the Pacific states mattered to the Union.
• What it meant to a worker: Jobs. Thousands of workers laid the track, including many Irish immigrants on the Union Pacific and many Chinese immigrants on the Central Pacific. It also meant a transportation network that opened the West to settlement and trade.
• The cost: The railroad was built with public money and private contractors, and the combination invited abuse. The Crédit Mobilier scandal of the early 1870s involved a construction company tied to the Union Pacific whose shares were handed out to members of Congress, and the House censured two of its own members. That is a Republican-era scandal and it ought to be remembered. A party that tells the story of its triumphs and hides its failures isn't telling the truth, which is why the lesson of Teapot Dome and What a Party Owes Its Voters When Its Own People Fail applies here too.

Group four: the country's accounts

5. The Legal Tender Act (signed February 25, 1862)

• What it did: Authorized the Treasury to issue United States Notes, which came to be called greenbacks, in an initial amount of $150 million. The notes were not redeemable in gold or silver on demand, and they could be used to pay most debts, public and private. Duties on imports and interest on the public debt continued to be paid in coin.
• The reason: The war was costing more than the government could raise by taxes and by selling bonds. Gold was leaving the banks. Paper money kept the Treasury paying soldiers and suppliers.
• What it meant to a worker: Soldiers and workers on war contracts were paid in a currency that the government stood behind. But prices rose during the war, and wages did not always keep pace. The country did not return to paying out gold on demand until January 1, 1879.

6. The Internal Revenue Act (signed July 1, 1862)

• What it did: Created the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue and a bureau to collect new taxes on manufactured goods, licenses, stamps and other items. It also imposed the first federal income tax that was actually collected (an earlier 1861 income tax was never put into effect), a modest percentage on incomes above an exemption of $600, with a higher rate on the largest incomes.
• The reason: Taxes on imports alone could not pay for a war of this size. Congress needed a broad base, and it built one.
• What it meant to a worker: A clerk earning $500 a year owed no income tax at all, because the tax began at $600. For the typical laborer, the larger effect was a higher price on goods from the new excise taxes. The income tax itself was allowed to expire in 1872.

Three hypothetical households, one Congress

Numbers on a page make the point only so far, so picture three households in the years after 1862. These are illustrations, not records of real families.

The farm family. A young couple in Ohio has no land and no prospect of buying any. Under the Homestead Act they can file a claim in Nebraska Territory, live on it, build a dugout or a sod house, and after five years own 160 acres outright. The Department of Agriculture's seed and information service helps them choose a crop that suits the soil. The trade-off is plain: they leave family behind, and the first winters are hard.

The student. A farmer's son in Michigan could never have afforded a classical college in the East. A state college founded on land-grant money teaches him surveying, soil, machinery and animal husbandry, and sends him home able to run a better farm than his father did. The law's phrase about the "mechanic arts" meant that a boy who wanted to build engines, not read Greek, had somewhere to go.

The worker. An immigrant laborer in the 1860s signs on with a railroad crew. The pay is steady if the work is rough. Years later, the line he helped build carries grain east and manufactured goods west, and a town grows up beside a station that did not exist before. In the same period he is paid in greenbacks, which buy a little less each year than they did, and he pays an excise tax on goods he buys without ever filling out an income tax form.

Three households, three different kinds of benefit, and one honest cost for each. That is how you should read any piece of legislation: not as a slogan, but as a set of trade-offs that real people live inside.

What conservatives can honestly say against two of them

Now the part where I tell you the other side of the ledger. Two of these laws draw real objections from serious conservatives, and I want you to have the best version.

The greenback. The Constitution gives Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value. It says nothing explicit about printing paper notes that nobody can redeem for metal. In 1870, the Supreme Court in Hepburn v. Griswold held the Legal Tender Act unconstitutional as applied to debts made before it was passed. The next year, with two new justices on the bench, the Court reversed itself in the Legal Tender Cases and upheld the act. The question was settled in law, but the underlying worry has never gone away: when a government can create money by decree, it can pay for almost anything by diluting what every saver owns. That is a hidden tax, and I make the argument in Inflation is the one tax that never needs a vote in Congress.

The income tax. The Revenue Act of 1862 was presented as a war measure, and it was allowed to lapse. But it created a template, and the machinery it built, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, outlasted the war. That bureau became the Internal Revenue Service in the twentieth century. A federal income tax returned in 1894 and was struck down in 1895 in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Co. The Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, then gave Congress the power to tax incomes without apportionment among the states. A conservative can say: a temporary tax, sold for an emergency, became a permanent fixture, and that is how government grows.

A fair reader will weigh those objections against the other side of the ledger: without the paper dollar and the new taxes, the Union may have had trouble paying for the war that ended slavery. You can believe the objections have merit and also believe the laws were defensible given the emergency. These are not mutually exclusive.

A checklist for reading any Congress's record

The 1862 laws offer a method you can use on any legislature, including the one in your own state:

1. Ask what the party promised. Compare the platform with the laws passed.
2. Ask who benefits. Was it a farmer, a student, a worker, a company, or a lobbyist?
3. Ask what it costs. Who pays, in dollars, in prices or in lost freedom?
4. Ask what the Constitution says. Does the power exist, and in which clause? A good start is Congress Can Only Do What the Constitution Lists and Madison Said So.
5. Ask what lasted. Which parts are still here after a century and a half, and are they working?

By that test, the Homestead Act and the Morrill Act score well. The Pacific Railway Act delivered, at a price. The greenback and the income tax were emergency measures whose long shadow is a legitimate subject for argument.

The bottom line

• In 1862, with Southern members gone, a Republican Congress passed the program it had campaigned on: the Homestead Act, the Morrill Land-Grant Act, the Pacific Railway Act, the Department of Agriculture, the Legal Tender Act and the Internal Revenue Act.
• Two of the six, the homestead law and the land-grant colleges, moved land and opportunity to ordinary families and still shape small-town life through family farms and state universities.
• The greenback and the first income tax were war measures that raise fair constitutional and economic objections. Know them well enough to make the argument yourself.
• Keep the scandal alongside the success. The Pacific railroad was a great achievement and a case study in how public money and private contractors can go wrong.
• When your own legislators make promises, hold them to the five questions above: what was promised, who benefits, what it costs, what the Constitution says, and what lasts.