e States, and of different
political parties. But the extreme men of the South and most of
the moderate men of the North refused to assume this obligation,
while the Free Soilers felt perfectly sure that their cause would
be advanced by the very measures which had been taken to defeat
it. In this they were not mistaken. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," born of
the Fugitive Slave Act, was then making its first appearance in
weekly numbers of Dr. Bailey's "National Era." Hildreth's "White
Slave" and Sumner's "White Slavery in the Barbary States" were
widely circulated, and exerted a powerful influence. The writings
of Judge Jay and William Goodell on the slavery question found more
readers than ever before, while the pro-slavery literature and
"south side" theology, already referred to, called forth replies
from various writers, and contributed largely to the general ferment
which the friends of the Compromise measures were so anxious to
tranquilize. Indeed, while the champions of slavery were exerting
themselves as never before to stifle the anti-slavery spirit of
the free States, the Abolitionists were delighted with the tokens
of progress which everywhere saluted their vision and animated them
with new courage and hope.

It was early in the first session of this Congress that several
members of the House introduced bills providing homesteads of one
hundred and sixty acres each to actual landless settlers, without
cost, on prescribed conditions of occupancy and improvement. The
first of these bills in the order of time was that of Andrew Johnson,
which was referred to the Committee on Agriculture, and subsequently
reported favorably, and debated at different times. Similar
propositions were offered in the Senate by Mr. Webster, and by
Senator Walker, of Wisconsin. The fact is also worthy of note,
that Horace Greeley, during his short term of service in the previous
Congress, had offered a bill giving landless men the right to pre-
empt one hundred and sixty acres for seven years, and, on condition
of occupancy and improvement, the "right of unlimited occupancy"
to forty acres of the same, without price, by a single man, or
eighty acres by the married head of a family. But the legislative
initiation of the Homestead law, substantially as we now have it,
belongs to the House of Representatives of the Thirty-first Congress,
and its policy was borrowed from the Free Soil platform of 1848
and the Land Reformers of New York.