Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The act offered any U.S. citizen 160 acres of land from the public domain, free or virtually free, after five years of continuous residence.… The effect on the Native Americans would be drastic, but between 1870 and 1920, the number of US farms swelled from 2,700,000 to 6,500,000, and the average acreage remained small at about 150 acres. The 1860s measures also helped to give the Republican Party a dominant position in US politics for 50 years." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "The Homestead Acts were several United States federal laws that gave an applicant ownership of land, typically called a "homestead", at little or no cost. In all, more than 270 million acres of public land, or nearly 10% of the total area of the U.S., was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River. An extension of the Homestead Principle in law, the Homestead Acts were an expression of the "Free Soil" policy of Northerners who wanted individual farmers to own and operate their own farms, as opposed to Southern slave-owners who wanted to buy up large tracts of land and use slave labor, thereby shutting out free white men." [Wikipedia]