The Land Ordinance of 1785 was chosen by the United States Congress of the Confederation on May 20, 1785. It initiated up to a regulated method whereby immigrants could acquire right to farmland in the unactualized west. The 1785 law set the grounds of the land policy until the way of the Homestead Act in 1862. It was necessary because it built the pattern by which new states could become a portion of the union.