WEBVTT NOTE 4. Land Tenure and Land Allocation in New England 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.640 Volume 2, Chapter 4, Land Tenure and Land Allocation in New England 2 00:00:06.640 --> 00:00:12.860 While there were many instances of arbitrary land grants by the governments to individuals, 3 00:00:12.860 --> 00:00:18.660 the basic form of land settlement in colonial New England was the town. 4 00:00:18.660 --> 00:00:23.660 The government of the colony would give a joint grant to a group of fifty to one hundred 5 00:00:23.660 --> 00:00:31.500 People who would found a town and then divide the land by lot amongst themselves. 6 00:00:31.500 --> 00:00:38.180 This would have roughly approximated the libertarian principle of individual settler ownership, 7 00:00:38.180 --> 00:00:40.580 but for two vital points. 8 00:00:40.580 --> 00:00:47.180 The joint proprietary reserved some of the land to be kept by itself in common, and also 9 00:00:47.180 --> 00:00:51.720 kept the power of governmental regulation of the territory. 10 00:00:51.720 --> 00:00:58.120 This procedure accounted for the compactness of the typical New England settlement. 11 00:00:58.120 --> 00:01:04.460 The common land would remain off the market for years or be used as common pasture or 12 00:01:04.460 --> 00:01:08.540 be reserved for a government minister or school. 13 00:01:08.540 --> 00:01:14.340 As the years wore on, governmental privileges would be transferred from the joint proprietors 14 00:01:14.340 --> 00:01:21.080 to an elected government, but the proprietors remained in charge of the undivided land. 15 00:01:21.080 --> 00:01:26.960 As the population of the town grew, more citizens would appear who were not proprietors, and 16 00:01:26.960 --> 00:01:33.680 a separation of interests emerged setting off the two groups. For instance, in Newbury, 17 00:01:33.680 --> 00:01:40.680 Massachusetts in the 1680s and in Haverhill, Massachusetts in the 1720s, serious clashes 18 00:01:41.520 --> 00:01:47.660 developed between the proprietors and the non-proprietors for control of government 19 00:01:47.660 --> 00:01:54.660 and of the Common Lands. However, while oligarchic rule by proprietors emerged in some cases, 20 00:01:54.660 --> 00:02:00.360 care must be taken in applying this term, since in many cases the proprietors remained 21 00:02:00.360 --> 00:02:06.340 as the large majority of the town's total population. Government decrees aggravated 22 00:02:06.340 --> 00:02:13.340 any such cleavage. Thus the town of Springfield in the seventeenth century outlawed voluntary 23 00:02:13.340 --> 00:02:20.860 Alienation of Land to Land Owners of Any Other Plots, and insisted that the town authorities 24 00:02:20.860 --> 00:02:27.980 had to approve of any purchasers of townland. As time went on, the common townland became 25 00:02:27.980 --> 00:02:35.340 increasingly divided, and in effect changed from arbitrary joint proprietorship to individual 26 00:02:35.340 --> 00:02:43.300 ownership by the settlers. The scope of proprietary action therefore steadily dwindled. Furthermore, 27 00:02:43.300 --> 00:02:56.300 were individual squatters, courageously but illegally settled on unused town government land and were often recognized in their ownership of the land they had transformed and tilled. 28 00:02:56.300 --> 00:03:06.300 Thus, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1689 granted 12 acres of land to each squatter upon town property. 29 00:03:06.300 --> 00:03:12.300 Under this system, land holdings in New England tended to be quite small. 30 00:03:12.300 --> 00:03:30.300 In contrast to the large land holdings in the southern colonies, however superimposed on this basic pattern were arbitrary individual grants by the magistrates to the magistrates themselves, often as a reward for creating the new township. 31 00:03:30.300 --> 00:03:45.300 As early as 1635, large land grants had been made in the newly settled townships to such leading officials as John Winthrop Sr., Joseph Dudley, John Endicott and Simon Bradstreet. 32 00:03:45.300 --> 00:03:55.300 Then, beginning in the 1730s, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire changed their previous method of creating new townships. 33 00:03:55.300 --> 00:04:06.300 Instead of granting land to bona fide settlers, they began to sell new town lands in advance to speculative purchasers. 34 00:04:06.300 --> 00:04:18.300 This established an artificially high price for land for the genuine settlers and amounted to the subsidization and privileging of the land speculators. 35 00:04:18.300 --> 00:04:25.860 The government gained revenue from the change, the speculators hoped to gain and often did, 36 00:04:25.860 --> 00:04:32.980 and the settlers and the bulk of the consumers lost from this distortion of free market conditions. 37 00:04:32.980 --> 00:04:39.120 From these facts, historians have tended to leap to the conclusion that a critical class 38 00:04:39.120 --> 00:04:46.160 struggle soon emerged in New England between absentee speculators who were assumed to live 39 00:04:46.160 --> 00:04:53.160 and Concentrate in the Older Seaboard Cities and Resident Frontier Farmers and Settlers. 40 00:04:53.800 --> 00:04:59.360 The speculators were further assumed to be wealthy creditors and the residents of the 41 00:04:59.360 --> 00:05:06.360 new towns to be poor debtors. C.P. Nettles' treatment is characteristic. The Frontier Farmers 42 00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:14.240 viewed the speculators as their natural enemies who withheld land from cultivation, waged 43 00:05:14.240 --> 00:05:21.640 War Against Squatters and Controlled Town Governments as Absentee Voters. The most important legacy 44 00:05:21.640 --> 00:05:29.260 of speculation was this sharpened antagonism between seaboard wealth and frontier poverty. 45 00:05:29.260 --> 00:05:35.460 That this entire picture may well be in need of drastic revision is strongly indicated 46 00:05:35.460 --> 00:05:42.420 by Professor Charles Grant's important and detailed research of the town records of Kent, 47 00:05:42.420 --> 00:06:09.420 A frontier town of western Connecticut in the 18th century. By exploring town records in depth, Grant went, at last, beyond the windy rhetoric of petitions to the legislature on which historians had hitherto relied. For in such petitions, it was all too easy to magnify tales of woe and dark charges of oppression. 48 00:06:09.420 --> 00:06:16.940 Grant demonstrates that, for Kent, one of the six Western land towns founded at auction 49 00:06:16.940 --> 00:06:25.500 to speculators in 1738, the speculators, rather than forming a separate absentee oligarchy, 50 00:06:25.500 --> 00:06:30.300 actually were, overwhelmingly, the settlers themselves. 51 00:06:30.300 --> 00:06:37.500 And since land speculation has harmful effects only to the extent that it precedes and restricts 52 00:06:37.500 --> 00:06:43.420 Settlement by the first comers. This means that the class of speculators merged quickly 53 00:06:43.420 --> 00:06:50.220 with the resident settlers and hence few harmful effects developed or persisted. It also means 54 00:06:50.220 --> 00:06:57.220 that no class struggle between absentee easterners and frontier residents developed out of the 55 00:06:57.220 --> 00:07:03.180 new land system. While the typical frontier Connecticut town of Kent had no problem of 56 00:07:03.180 --> 00:07:10.740 Absentee speculative landholding, land allocation, was not idyllic. Speculation by residents 57 00:07:10.740 --> 00:07:18.460 prior to settlement abounded on town lands other than their own, but at least the length 58 00:07:18.460 --> 00:07:26.220 of time until bona fide settlers became owners of their own plots was relatively brief. Furthermore, 59 00:07:26.220 --> 00:07:33.220 In important respects, entrance to settlement and land ownership in new towns were freer 60 00:07:33.420 --> 00:07:39.320 than in the previous century. Although new settlers had to pay local speculators for 61 00:07:39.320 --> 00:07:46.320 their land, they did not have to meet the clannish requirements of 17th century Puritanism. 62 00:07:46.860 --> 00:07:52.420 In the final analysis, payment of a market price is far less restrictive than meeting 63 00:07:52.420 --> 00:07:55.100 Non-Monetary Conditions 64 00:07:55.100 --> 00:08:00.780 If the land speculators were resident settlers rather than a separate class, this means that 65 00:08:00.780 --> 00:08:07.660 the common legend of the happy yeoman interested only in the soil and communing with nature 66 00:08:07.660 --> 00:08:14.100 is open to serious revision. Rather than a simple but noble rustic, uninterested in such 67 00:08:14.100 --> 00:08:20.860 grubby matters as making money, the Connecticut frontiersmen happily and cheerfully engaged 68 00:08:20.860 --> 00:08:27.980 in land speculation as well as in other profit-seeking deals and ventures. If, then, the yeoman was 69 00:08:27.980 --> 00:08:34.940 not simple and scornful of moneymaker, neither was he poor. According to Grant, poverty was 70 00:08:34.940 --> 00:08:42.440 rare in eighteenth-century Kent. As to debt and credit, Grant's corollary finding is 71 00:08:42.440 --> 00:08:50.200 that there was no clash of eastern creditor versus frontier debtor. On the contrary, debt 72 00:08:50.200 --> 00:08:56.760 and credit permeated the economy of the residents of Kent. As might be seen from the extent 73 00:08:56.760 --> 00:09:03.880 of land speculation and other ventures within the town, most people were in and out of debt 74 00:09:03.880 --> 00:09:11.120 and often shifted rapidly from the net debtor to the net creditor category and vice versa. 75 00:09:11.120 --> 00:09:19.040 There was no rigid class or lasting stratification of debtors and creditors. Furthermore, net 76 00:09:19.040 --> 00:09:26.920 Cat debtors could not be deemed poor, as been the historiographical fashion. On the contrary, 77 00:09:26.920 --> 00:09:34.240 the leading debtors, as might be expected, were precisely the wealthier land speculators. 78 00:09:34.240 --> 00:09:40.200 A good part of the credit for the failure of absentee land speculation to flourish goes 79 00:09:40.200 --> 00:09:47.680 to the very act of 1737 by which Connecticut organized the auction of the new towns. For 80 00:09:47.680 --> 00:09:54.440 For the law provided that every purchaser of land rights at auction had to settle, fence 81 00:09:54.440 --> 00:09:59.440 and construct a house on the land within two years. 82 00:09:59.440 --> 00:10:05.960 This clause ensured that original absentee proprietors had to sell their rights to genuine 83 00:10:05.960 --> 00:10:09.300 settlers within a two-year period. 84 00:10:09.300 --> 00:10:15.320 To the extent that speculation in land settlement coincided and therefore the body of proprietors 85 00:10:15.320 --> 00:10:23.880 The Period of Proprietary Rule of the Land offers an instructive example of how the voluntary 86 00:10:23.880 --> 00:10:30.880 methods of the free market can successfully provide services that are almost always regarded 87 00:10:30.880 --> 00:10:39.320 as uniquely governmental. For the settler proprietors themselves built roads, bridges, 88 00:10:39.320 --> 00:10:51.320 The proprietors realized that speedy construction of roads would encourage rapid influx into the town and thus raise the value of their lands. 89 00:10:51.320 --> 00:11:00.320 In a couple of years after founding, however, the towns were invariably incorporated and town governments created, 90 00:11:00.320 --> 00:11:07.320 and with them the inevitable accompaniment of burdensome taxation and compulsory labor on the roads. 91 00:11:07.320 --> 00:11:13.800 Roads. It is interesting to muse on what would have happened if these New England towns had 92 00:11:13.800 --> 00:11:20.920 remained permanently under proprietary rule. For one thing, services would have been voluntarily 93 00:11:20.920 --> 00:11:27.560 provided to earn a profit from their consumers, instead of the imposing of a compulsory governmental 94 00:11:27.560 --> 00:11:33.800 tax burden necessarily severed from any link with voluntary consumption by the members 95 00:11:33.800 --> 00:11:34.440 of the Public.