QUOTE : That same hypocrisy was evident in Johnson’s vision of landownership. While claiming that the government had never provided access to land for “hard toiling whites,” Johnson simply erased the nineteen years that he had worked for the passage of the Homestead Act to ensure that his constituency was given 160 acres wrested or browbeaten from Native Americans. Meanwhile, he cringed that the formerly enslaved would lease forty acres abandoned by those whom he had once called “traitors.” Perhaps this disparity in treatment reflected Johnson’s wish to reward those who embodied the “good old American work ethic.” The truth was much more complicated.