President Lincoln signs a bill into law…

President Lincoln signs a bill into law on May 15, 1862, creating the U.S. Bureau of Agriculture (later renamed U.S. Department of Agriculture), to be headed by a commissioner without Cabinet status, and the agriculturalist Isaac Newton is appointed to be the first such commissioner.

Lincoln calls it the "people's department".

The "yeoman farmer" ideal of Jeffersonian democracy was still a powerful influence in American politics during the 1840–1850s, with many politicians believing a homestead act would help increase the number of "virtuous yeomen".

The Free Soil Party of 1848–52, and the new Republican Party after 1854, had demanded that the new lands opening up in the west be made available to independent farmers, rather than wealthy planters who would develop it with the use of slaves forcing the yeomen farmers onto marginal lands.

Southern Democrats had continually fought (and defeated) previous homestead law proposals, as they feared free land would attract European immigrants and poor Southern whites to the west.

After the South seceded and their delegates left Congress in 1861, the Republicans and other supporters from the upper South had passed a homestead act.

The intent of the first Homestead Act, passed in 1862, is to liberalize the homesteading requirements of the Preemption Act of 1841.

Its leading advocates are Andrew Johnson, Horace Greeley, and the late George Henry Evans.

The homestead is an area of public land in the West (usually one hundred and sixty acres acres or sixty-five hectares) granted to any U.S. citizen willing to settle on and farm the land.

The law (and those following it) requires a three-step procedure: file an application, improve the land, and file for the patent (deed).

Any citizen who has never taken up arms against the U.S. government (including freed slaves after the fourteenth amendment) and is at least twenty-one years old or the head of a household, can file an application to claim a federal land grant.

Women are eligible.

The occupant has to reside on the land for five years, and show evidence of having made improvements.

The process has to be complete within seven years.
 
Between 1844 and 1862, Congress has received petitions signed by fifty-five thousand Americans calling for free public lands for homesteaders.