Hoping on Homesteading: The Failure of the Civil War to Galvanize a New Social Contract, 1862-1872
Janine Giordano Drake, Clinical Associate Professor of History, Indiana University Bloomington
The Civil War-era Congress missed a key opportunity to reconfigure the social contract. By the 1870s, while Congress boasted of “public schools” for whites and Blacks in the South, the bulk of the funding came from Northern missionary groups and the tuition of freed people themselves. Congress expected that homesteading would produce all the wealth needed to sustain new communities, but they actually continued the antebellum pattern of a welfare state funded by a combination of philanthropy and fees.
Commentator: Scott Nelson, University of Georgia
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