Legal Document

You want crazy narrative structure? Check out some Virginia Woolf.

You want straightforward, dry-as-kindling legal doctrine? Hey: you're in the right place. This act is mega-important…but it's not exactly innovative writing.

Written by Congress, signed by the President, enforced through a government agency: this is definitely a legal text. The "be it enacted," "be it further enacted," and "provided" scattered throughout give that away, even before you get to the overuse of commas.

It doesn’t have flow or rhythm like a speech or essay would, because it's just a bunch of consecutive sections that, put together, cover everything the law says you can, or can’t do. The beginning is easy to figure out with the very official sounding "Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled[…]" starting out Section 1.

The following sections don’t really have any logical layout and there’s no real ending. It just ends when all the provisos and requirements are stated, which are organized in a way that suggest Congress was just throwing out ideas and writing them down as they liked ‘em.

How it Breaks Down

Section 1

The Who, The What

Twenty-one or older? Check. Head of household? Check. Citizen or becoming a citizen? Check. No traitorous actions? Check. Go pick out up to 160 acres.

Section 2

The How

Swear to the above and pay $10 to the clerk. Now go and work the land for five years, and then come back and see us again sometime for the title to the land.

Section 3

Bureaucracy

Oh yeah, somebody better write down all the info about claims and proof and stuff like that. Better make it official and write it into the law. Bureaucracy: it’s a wonderful thing.

Section 4

Debts

Nope, sorry, can’t stake a claim and then give it up to satisfy debts. You can, however, attempt to make a living off your free land and pay back your creditors that way. You might starve to death or horribly maim yourself, but at least you can try.

Maybe one of the senators had a bad run of luck with the ponies to throw this in right in the middle of the rest of the clauses.

Section 5

Game Over

This section in particular gives the government a reset button to trade in new players. Why here? No idea, but it makes this clause seem a little more important than what follows after.

Section 6

What Have We Forgotten?

This one is basically the dustbin of everything they left out earlier. A homestead can only be up to 160 acres. Also, the General Land Office clerks can’t get paid any more for claims under the Homestead Act than they do for land bought outright. Oh, and you can be grandfathered in if you’ve filed a claim before January 1st, 1863.

But hey, if you’ve served in the military during actual wartime and happen to be younger than twenty-one, sure, you can file a claim for a homestead. There, that should be the end of it…unless they forgot something else.

Section 7

Don’t Do Bad Things

They forgot something else

Basically, if this other act—"An act in addition to an act more effectually to provide for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States, and for other purposes"—already listed out something that’s illegal and a prospective homesteader had already done it, they weren’t getting a homestead.

Stay legal, folks.

Section 8

Money, It’s a Gas, or That’s a Wrap

Don’t feel like waiting five years and actually proving you’ve done a lot of work? Just fork over the equivalent amount of cash according to the government, and you too can have your very own homestead.

And that’s all she wrote. Not really a logical progression of ideas (this is Congress after all), but the basic gist was covered, at least.