Volume 2, Chapter 4, Land Tenure and Land Allocation in New England
While there were many instances of arbitrary land grants by the governments to individuals,
the basic form of land settlement in colonial New England was the town.
The government of the colony would give a joint grant to a group of fifty to one hundred
People who would found a town and then divide the land by lot amongst themselves.
This would have roughly approximated the libertarian principle of individual settler ownership,
but for two vital points.
The joint proprietary reserved some of the land to be kept by itself in common, and also
kept the power of governmental regulation of the territory.
This procedure accounted for the compactness of the typical New England settlement.
The common land would remain off the market for years or be used as common pasture or
be reserved for a government minister or school.
As the years wore on, governmental privileges would be transferred from the joint proprietors
to an elected government, but the proprietors remained in charge of the undivided land.
As the population of the town grew, more citizens would appear who were not proprietors, and
a separation of interests emerged setting off the two groups. For instance, in Newbury,
Massachusetts in the 1680s and in Haverhill, Massachusetts in the 1720s, serious clashes
developed between the proprietors and the non-proprietors for control of government
and of the Common Lands. However, while oligarchic rule by proprietors emerged in some cases,
care must be taken in applying this term, since in many cases the proprietors remained
as the large majority of the town's total population. Government decrees aggravated
any such cleavage. Thus the town of Springfield in the seventeenth century outlawed voluntary
Alienation of Land to Land Owners of Any Other Plots, and insisted that the town authorities
had to approve of any purchasers of townland. As time went on, the common townland became
increasingly divided, and in effect changed from arbitrary joint proprietorship to individual
ownership by the settlers. The scope of proprietary action therefore steadily dwindled. Furthermore,
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.
Thus, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1689 granted 12 acres of land to each squatter upon town property.
Under this system, land holdings in New England tended to be quite small.
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.
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.
Then, beginning in the 1730s, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire changed their previous method of creating new townships.
Instead of granting land to bona fide settlers, they began to sell new town lands in advance to speculative purchasers.
This established an artificially high price for land for the genuine settlers and amounted to the subsidization and privileging of the land speculators.
The government gained revenue from the change, the speculators hoped to gain and often did,
and the settlers and the bulk of the consumers lost from this distortion of free market conditions.
From these facts, historians have tended to leap to the conclusion that a critical class
struggle soon emerged in New England between absentee speculators who were assumed to live
and Concentrate in the Older Seaboard Cities and Resident Frontier Farmers and Settlers.
The speculators were further assumed to be wealthy creditors and the residents of the
new towns to be poor debtors. C.P. Nettles' treatment is characteristic. The Frontier Farmers
viewed the speculators as their natural enemies who withheld land from cultivation, waged
War Against Squatters and Controlled Town Governments as Absentee Voters. The most important legacy
of speculation was this sharpened antagonism between seaboard wealth and frontier poverty.
That this entire picture may well be in need of drastic revision is strongly indicated
by Professor Charles Grant's important and detailed research of the town records of Kent,
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.
Grant demonstrates that, for Kent, one of the six Western land towns founded at auction
to speculators in 1738, the speculators, rather than forming a separate absentee oligarchy,
actually were, overwhelmingly, the settlers themselves.
And since land speculation has harmful effects only to the extent that it precedes and restricts
Settlement by the first comers. This means that the class of speculators merged quickly
with the resident settlers and hence few harmful effects developed or persisted. It also means
that no class struggle between absentee easterners and frontier residents developed out of the
new land system. While the typical frontier Connecticut town of Kent had no problem of
Absentee speculative landholding, land allocation, was not idyllic. Speculation by residents
prior to settlement abounded on town lands other than their own, but at least the length
of time until bona fide settlers became owners of their own plots was relatively brief. Furthermore,
In important respects, entrance to settlement and land ownership in new towns were freer
than in the previous century. Although new settlers had to pay local speculators for
their land, they did not have to meet the clannish requirements of 17th century Puritanism.
In the final analysis, payment of a market price is far less restrictive than meeting
Non-Monetary Conditions
If the land speculators were resident settlers rather than a separate class, this means that
the common legend of the happy yeoman interested only in the soil and communing with nature
is open to serious revision. Rather than a simple but noble rustic, uninterested in such
grubby matters as making money, the Connecticut frontiersmen happily and cheerfully engaged
in land speculation as well as in other profit-seeking deals and ventures. If, then, the yeoman was
not simple and scornful of moneymaker, neither was he poor. According to Grant, poverty was
rare in eighteenth-century Kent. As to debt and credit, Grant's corollary finding is
that there was no clash of eastern creditor versus frontier debtor. On the contrary, debt
and credit permeated the economy of the residents of Kent. As might be seen from the extent
of land speculation and other ventures within the town, most people were in and out of debt
and often shifted rapidly from the net debtor to the net creditor category and vice versa.
There was no rigid class or lasting stratification of debtors and creditors. Furthermore, net
Cat debtors could not be deemed poor, as been the historiographical fashion. On the contrary,
the leading debtors, as might be expected, were precisely the wealthier land speculators.
A good part of the credit for the failure of absentee land speculation to flourish goes
to the very act of 1737 by which Connecticut organized the auction of the new towns. For
For the law provided that every purchaser of land rights at auction had to settle, fence
and construct a house on the land within two years.
This clause ensured that original absentee proprietors had to sell their rights to genuine
settlers within a two-year period.
To the extent that speculation in land settlement coincided and therefore the body of proprietors
The Period of Proprietary Rule of the Land offers an instructive example of how the voluntary
methods of the free market can successfully provide services that are almost always regarded
as uniquely governmental. For the settler proprietors themselves built roads, bridges,
The proprietors realized that speedy construction of roads would encourage rapid influx into the town and thus raise the value of their lands.
In a couple of years after founding, however, the towns were invariably incorporated and town governments created,
and with them the inevitable accompaniment of burdensome taxation and compulsory labor on the roads.
Roads. It is interesting to muse on what would have happened if these New England towns had
remained permanently under proprietary rule. For one thing, services would have been voluntarily
provided to earn a profit from their consumers, instead of the imposing of a compulsory governmental
tax burden necessarily severed from any link with voluntary consumption by the members
of the Public.