Volume 1, Chapter 2, New World, New Land
The Englishmen and other Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries faced westward
to the New World in awe and in hope, for here was a vast virgin continent and its most striking
feature was the millions of square miles of new and potentially highly productive land.
To a Europe beset by the incubus of feudalism and statism, of absolute monarchy, of state-controlled
churches, of state restrictions on human labor and human enterprise, to a Europe with scarce
land which was engrossed by feudal and quasi-feudal landlords whose vast government granted estates
drained in rents the surplus over subsistence earned by the peasantry, to this Europe the
The new and vast land area appeared as potential manna from heaven.
At home the mass of Europeans, middle class and peasants alike, faced centuries of weary
struggle against the frozen cake of status restrictions, a network of taxes, feudal dues
and rents, and controls and shackles by states and state fostered guilds.
This was a relatively stagnant old world whose population pressed heavily upon the means
of subsistence. This was a Europe that recently emerged from the secular depression into which
the growth of statism had plunged it at the beginning of the fourteenth century. But abroad
they saw a quite different vision, new, productive and virtually unoccupied land with the important
In short, here at last was the opportunity for the individual to leave his unsatisfactory
conditions at home to try to carve out of the wilderness a better life for himself and
his family, a life offering him the freedom and opportunity to make his own way, stand
It is not the privilege of many generations of men to experience a revolution, a breeze of fresh air upon the stagnant social structure and an opportunity to break loose from the old mold and strike out afresh on one's own.
Through the discovery of the New World, the men of the 17th century experienced at least the potential of such a revolution, for the escape hatch to the untapped storehouse of the New World lay always at hand.
New land then confronted the Old World, and this vast stretch of land furnished the most striking fact about the Virgin American continent.
But how was the ownership of this great new land mass to be allocated?
Basically, new and previously unowned land can come into ownership in two different ways.
Either the settler, the pioneer who in the later phrase of John Locke mixes his labor with the soil
and brings the previously unused and fallow natural resources into productive use,
of Use is conceded ownership of the land he has in this way created or he is not.
If it be objected that the pioneer has not really created the land, it is also true that
no producer creates matter.
The builder of a factory has not in the ultimate sense created the matter in the factory.
He has rather transformed by the use of his labor the previously nature-given matter.
He has shifted this original matter into other forms more useful to himself and to his fellow
men.
This shifting is the meaning of production, and this is precisely what the pioneer has
done in transforming the land.
If he is not challenged, the pioneer settler of new land will naturally and automatically
There are two types of threats to this basic principle of first ownership to first user.
Either existing settler owners can be subjected to the arbitrarily imposed ownership of some overlord,
or else new land can be parceled out to some person or persons before any settlement has taken place.
In both cases, the arbitrary parceling is performed by the State, that institution that asserts its claim to a monopoly of legalized coercion in a given territorial area.
The former is one of the chief methods of feudalism, the parceling out of peasant-owned land to the ownership of overlords favored by the State.
But this method requires previously existing settlers. Clearly, in the case of a new and
untapped continent, the second method would be the major threat to settler ownership of
what the settlers would create. And this is precisely what happened in the case of North
America. It is the propensity of the state to parcel out arbitrary subsidies in disregard
Part of the individual's natural right to own what he has produced. This propensity
is here aggravated by the fact that the State always assumes sovereign ownership over new
and unused land, its self-proclaimed public domain. It hereby assumes the right to dispose
of this domain in any way it sees fit. Unless forced by the pressure of public opinion to
To do otherwise, the State will naturally tend to dispose of such land in a way best
calculated to maximize either its own revenue or the revenue of its privileged favorites.
The crucial question then becomes, will the land pass after time into the hands of the
settlers, or will it remain permanently in the hands of privileged overlords dominating
the settlers?
England, the major sovereign over the lands of North America, had been subjected to feudalism since at least the Norman conquest of the 11th century.
After the conquest of England in 1066, the conquerors parceled out large tracts of land to the ownership of their leading warlords,
and this newly created nobility became the liege lords of the subdued peasantry.
Since the overwhelming mass of Englishmen were still engaged in agriculture, feudalism became
the crucial fact about English, as well as other European, society.
The major attributes of the feudal system were the granting of huge estates to land-owning
warlords, the coerced binding of the peasants' serfs to their land plots and hence to the
and the further bolstering by the state a feudal status through compulsory, promogenitor, the passing on of the estate to the oldest son only, and entail, prohibiting the landowner from alienating, selling, breaking up, and so on, his land.
This process froze landlordship in the existing noble families and prevented any natural market or genealogical forces from breaking up the vast estates.
But after the late 14th century, the serfdom aspect of feudalism began a steady decline in England,
As compulsory labor service imposed on the peasants began to be commuted permanently into money rents, quit rents, which quit or freed one of the onerous obligations of feudal, including military, service.
By the early 17th century, however, feudal military service had not been abolished, and
the two other aspects of feudalism, promogeniture and entail, remained intact.
An important specific spur to imposing feudalism on the colonies of the New World was England's
experience in subjugating Ireland.
In the process of conquering Ireland during the 16th century, the English concluded that
the wild Irish were no better than savages and unreasonable beasts, and hence could be
treated as such, a significant preview of English treatment of the American Indian.
As a result, the English decided that, as in Ireland, a colony had to be planted under
Under direction of a central monopoly organization run along military lines, they also decided
to favor imposing on a colony a system of feudal land tenure.
It was no coincidence that the leaders in the early English colonizing projects in America
had almost all been deeply connected with the planting of Englishmen, largely a supposed
Surplus of Poor and Feudal Land Ownership in Ireland. Indeed, many of the active
incorporators of the Virginia Company had substantial interest in Irish
plantations. As recently as 1603, in fact, a crushing defeat of the Irish had
spurred renewed colonization in Ulster by the English government. The hapless
Most Irish peasants were declared to have no rights in owning land. Instead, their lands
were handed over by the Crown in large grants to privileged courtiers and monopoly companies,
all enjoying feudal powers over the new domain. The Irish were deliberately exterminated or
driven off their land, and the vacant lands compulsorily planted with an alleged surplus
of English Poor, who were now little better than serfs.
The treatment of the Irish and Ireland proved a directly illuminating model for the gentlemen
colonizing in Virginia.
That the first English settlements in the New World were organized not directly by the
Crown but by private monopoly companies meant that the proprietary company would be interested
in subdividing its granted land as quickly as possible to the individual settlers in
order to reap a rapid gain for its shareholders.
The situation was, of course, not that of the free market.
If it were, the British government would a. have refrained from claiming sovereignty over
the unused American domain, or especially b. have granted ownership of the land titles
to the actual settlers rather than to the company.
The privileges to the chartered companies, however, did not prove disastrous in the long
run.
The companies were eager to induce settlers to come to their granted land and then dispose
of the land to them at a profit.
The cleansing acid of profit was to dissolve incipient feudalism and land monopoly.
It is true that the fact of the land grant to the company engrossed the land for a time
and raised its price to the settlers, thus restricting settlement from what it would
have been under freedom, but the quantitative effects were not very grave.
Defenders of pre-settler land speculation have claimed that speculators, such as the
first charter companies, spurred settlement in the hope of profit.
This is true, but it does not offset the net restriction on settlement by virtue of the
land grants and the consequent raising of the price of otherwise free land to the settlers.
In a free market, the same companies could simply have loaned settlement money to the
colonists, and this productive credit could then have spurred settlement and earned them
a profit without the arbitrary restrictions imposed by the land grants.