Jefferson liked the homestead act cause it was a good way to distribute property and keep people out of liberal cities. The Railroad of course was not a social program, although it is important to note that James J Hill built well quickly and profitably while the government sponsored lines were a bankrupt Solyndra soviet socialist nightmare.
The first Homestead Act was legislated in 1860 and signed by Lincoln on May 20, 1862. Thomas Jefferson died July 4, 1826, so tell me again what he thought about it and how did you acquire his opinion?
Jefferson’s vision for America was that of a nation of small, independent farmers. He resisted what he viewed as any form of intrusion by a large6 powerful national government. He also disapproved of urbanization and hoped that America would always be a society and an economy based on agricultural pursuits. Jefferson’s dream of independent farmers making up the mass of the body politic came to be known as the “Jeffersonian ideal.” Though this ideal was never fully realized and America later industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace6 the concept of everyone having the opportunity to own and work a piece of land took hold in the nation’s collective mind. It is in the Jeffersonian ideal that many historians find the intellectual roots of the free land idea that eventually culminated with the Homestead Act.
Commerative Stamp. 100 Years of the Homestead Act
Thomas Jefferson also greatly influenced the history of the Homestead Act while serving as President of the United States (1801-1809). In 1803, at his direction, the United States purchased the 820,000 square mile Louisiana Territory from the French for $15 million, or roughly three cents per acre. Not long after, Jefferson sent the Corps of Discovery under Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark into the vast Louisiana wilderness to explore and report their findings. Many of the lands through which they traveled were later made available as homestead lands. Without the foresight of Jefferson and the expertise of Lewis & Clark and the members of the Corps of Discovery, homesteading may never have existed due to a lack of suitable land. Instead, the vast midwestern and western territories became American soil and, six decades later, began to be broken by the plows of “free land” farmers.