Taking star-sights with the zenith sector, and sun-sights with the quadrant, cutting a long swathe or ‘visto’ through the forest for back-sights and fore-sights with the theodolite, and measuring each yard with brass-tipped rods carried in special boxes and calibrated to a five-yard brass standard constructed by the Royal Society of London, Mason and Dixon spent five years on surveying 244 miles at a cost of £3500. To the Calverts of Maryland and the Penns of Pennsylvania, it was worth paying that massive bill to have the extent of their property established beyond doubt. They would have been gratified to learn that the far cheaper line between North and South Carolina was not agreed for another eighty years.
Establishing the exact boundaries of a colony or plantation could be deferred until the population had grown large enough to reach the borders, but from the start every proprietor needed to decide how land inside those boundaries should be measured and settled. There were two models to choose from. In Virginia, the thousand-acre tobacco plantations, and the fifty-or hundred-acre farms granted to each colonist who had paid his own passage, had to be surveyed and registered, but the actual choice of land and of its shape – usually the bottom land along a navigable river with some nearby woodland to provide building material – was left to the landowner.
The early planters developed a crude way of gauging their acreage. Each property was reckoned to run back for a mile from the riverbank. Using the old English measurement of a rod, they simply measured out a length of twenty-five rods along the riverbank, making a straight line which ignored the river’s bends. This produced a seemingly awkward distance of 137 yards, one foot and six inches – but multiplied by the 1760-yard depth of the farm, it gave a total of 242,000 square yards, or precisely fifty acres. A hundred-acre farm was fifty rods broad, while a shareholder entitled to five hundred or a thousand acres measured out 250 or five hundred rods. This was frontier maths, and it became second nature to anyone who wanted to own land.
These first farms and plantations were more or less square, but later arrivals fitted in around them, producing crazy patterns of settlement. To define the boundaries of their property they blazed trees or scratched boulders or raised mounds, and described their holdings in terms of these markers. This was the old English practice of using ‘metes and bounds’ to define the extent of an estate. Thus a surveyor’s notes might describe a line as running from the river, ‘thence S[outh] 36 [degrees] E[ast] 132 rods to a white oak blazed, thence S 40 W 11 poles to two barren oaks’. Because trees were often destroyed by fire and boulders washed away by floods, boundary disputes filled the courts. It was easier to move on and occupy fresh land far from other claims. ‘People live so far apart,’ the German immigrant Gottlieb Mittelberger complained in 1756, ‘that many have to walk a quarter or a half-hour just to reach their nearest neighbour.’
A different method of surveying evolved in New England, because the climate and soil were harder, and the first colonists arrived as religious groups. It placed the emphasis on communal rather than individual exploitation, and the land was usually granted in rectangular blocks, six or ten miles square, to an association or church which then allocated it to individuals. On 14 May 1636, for example, William Pynchon, Jeheu Burr and half a dozen others were given permission to create a new settlement at Agawam just west of the Connecticut river. The land was to be divided between forty and fifty families, each of which was to have enough property for a house together with some farmland, and parts of a ‘hassocky marsh’ and nearby woodland. The precise width of each house lot was laid down: ‘Northward lys the lott of Thomas Woodford beinge twelve [rods] broade and all the marish before it to ye uplande. Next the lott of Thomas Woodford lys the lott of Thomas Ufford beinge fourteene rod broade and all the marish before it to ye uplande. Next the lott of Thomas Ufford lyes the lott of Henry Smith beinge twenty rod in bredth and all the marish before it, and to run up in the upland on the other side to make up his upland lott ten acres.’
No gaps were left between one individual holding and the next, and one township and the next. The northern settlers might not be able to choose the precise parcel they wanted, but they enjoyed one advantage over the southern planters. In the south, the last remnant of feudalism required landowners to pay the proprietor or colonial government an annual ‘quit-rent’ of up to two shillings (about fifty cents) an acre, to be quit of the obligations and services they would otherwise owe as vassals. Failure to comply would result in a notice ordering the owner ‘to pay your arrears of Quit-Rents and Reliefs and to make your Oath of Fealty’ or be fined. In New England, the complication of levying the quit-rent through the church or town soon led to it being abandoned, which meant that freeholders in a New England town effectively owned their farms in fee simple – free of all feudal dues and obligations. They had other social duties – to pay the minister’s salary, and attend the church or meeting-house – but their land was undeniably property.
Looking at the two ways of measuring out the land, later proprietors automatically opted for the New England model. The square township, which in New England was known simply as a town, seemed to the aristocratic Carolina proprietors to be ‘the chiefe thing that has given New England soe much advantage [in size of population] over Virginia’. They also believed, mistakenly, that this system would give them more control over the colonists. Accordingly their 1665 constitution decreed that all the lowland area, the Tidewater, should be pre-surveyed by a surveyor-general and divided into squares and rectangles ‘by lines running East and West, North and South’. From these blocks they proposed to build an American aristocracy, with ordinary immigrants receiving a headright of one hundred acres, and paying quit-rent on them, and above them proprietors, lords of the manor and lesser nobles whose rank depended on the size of their landholding. To ensure compliance, the proprietors instituted a complex system which required the settler to obtain a land warrant from the governor, followed by a survey from the surveyor-general, before the land could be allocated and the claim registered.
Had the colonial proprietors and councils succeeded in maintaining control, the history of North America might have remained colonial. But the idea of property that the colonists carried with them created its own revolutionary current.
The first years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed in Plymouth in the bitter winter of 1620 indicated the direction that history would take. Under the terms of their agreement with their financial backers, they were to work the land in common, sharing the proceeds with the investors in England. The goal of communal land ownership should have been particularly attractive, for they arrived with a close sense of unity arising from the shared desire for religious freedom. Yet in the first years, when they attempted to pool their resources and farm collectively, with young men assigned to work for those who had families, the fields were neglected and they almost starved. In desperation, Governor William Bradford responded to demands that the land be divided up. ‘And so,’ he noted in his history of the Plymouth colony, ‘assigned to every family a parcel of land according to the proportion of their number … This had very good success for it made all hands very industrious.’
The dramatic increase in yields soon assured the colony’s food supplies; but the change came at a cost. ‘And no man now thought he could live except he had catle and a great deale of ground to keep them all,’ Bradford observed sadly, ‘all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scatered all over the bay quickly and the towne in which they lived compactly till now was left very thinne.’ Religious freedom might have been the settlers’ prime reason for sailing to America, but once they were there, the desire to own land came a close second. Or as Richard Winslow put it in his 1624 pamphlet Good Newes from New England, ‘Religion and profit jump together.’
In 1691 the thinly populated colony was absorbed into the wealthier Massachusetts Bay colony. But it too had changed since John Winthrop had founded it as the shining light of Puritanism, ‘the city upon a hill’. By then the Puritan preacher Increase Mather was lamenting that the grandchildren of the original settlers had grown insatiable for land. ‘How many men have since coveted after the earth,’ he thundered, ‘that many hundreds nay thousands of acres have been engrossed by one man, and they that profess themselves Christians have forsaken churches and ordinance, and for land and elbow-room enough in the world?’
In Virginia, the first Jamestown colonists never had that religious sense of cohesion. They only saved