By the middle of the seventeenth century, in New England and Virginia, land was passing into private hands to be held virtually freehold, except for the quit-rent in the south. So widespread was the process that no one thought it strange, yet for another century this restless hunger to own land made the British colonies unique in North America.
In Mexico and up the Pacific coast, the Spanish acquired land as part of a general pattern of royally sponsored exploration and settlement by the king’s representatives. A Spanish civilisation was created in Mexico, with a university, a bishop and a capital housing over fifteen thousand Spaniards, before the first English colonist landed in Massachusetts. The Law of the Indies, enacted in 1573, specified in detail how the colonial government was to lay out towns and settlements. The sites were to be surveyed, religious missions were created to convert the natives, military presidios to defend the colonies, and civilian pueblos where colonists and colonised could live. It was an empire created from above, belonging to the king and administered as a royal dominion, and even in its final years, during the half-century that Spain ruled California from 1769 to 1821, fewer than thirty individuals were permitted to acquire their own ranchos or estates.
For over 150 years, from 1608 when Samuel Champlain established an armed post at Quebec, New France was ruled almost as rigidly. A string of trading ports was established along the Saint Lawrence river, as far as the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Cities like Montreal and New Orleans were founded, and farms were cultivated in Canada and in the Mississippi delta. Nevertheless, French America was administered feudally. The Crown owned the land and chose who could settle there – Protestants, for example, were banned. It created monopolies to exploit the fur and timber. The habitant who actually worked the soil never had clear rights to it. What he owned was the use of the land and the improvements he made to it, but he held the land from a seigneur in return for dues and rents, and the seigneur held the land from the Crown. French traders and trappers knew the country intimately – they supplied British mapmakers with much of their geographical information – yet by the middle of the eighteenth century barely forty thousand had acquired land outside the main cities.
The land-hunger of the British colonists seemed most bizarre when set alongside the attitude of the native Americans. From the farming Powhatan in Virginia to the Iroquois in New York and the Six Nations in the Appalachians who were primarily hunters, they shared a pervasive understanding that a particular place belonged to a particular people only to the extent that the people belonged to the place. Rights over land were gained only by occupation, long usage or family burial, and these rights were communal, not individual. ‘What is this you call property?’ Massasoit, a leader of the Wampanaog, asked the Plymouth colonists whom he had befriended in the 1620s. ‘It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?’
Yet the British colonists bought and sold land as though they owned it outright – in fee simple, to use the legal term. Compared to the opportunities offered by New Spain and New France, the Atlantic colonies seemed irresistibly attractive. Little more than a century after the first permanent settlement was established in Virginia, over one and a quarter million settlers were scattered across the wide, empty spaces between the coast and the mountains.
The shape of British America was long and thin, stretching from thirty-one to forty-nine degrees north, a distance of over two thousand miles, but, so far as measured, settled land was concerned, rarely more than two hundred miles deep, a sort of northern Chile. It was in the first years of the eighteenth century that siren voices from beyond the swamps and pine barrens began to tell of the irresistibly fertile ground to be had in the piedmont. ‘The best, richest, and most healthy part of your Country is yet to be inhabited,’ wrote Francis Makemie in Plain and Friendly Persuasion in 1705, ‘above the falls of every River, to the Mountains.’
This was the time when the uncontrollable surge of German immigrants, most of them Mennonites and Moravians, followed by the Scotch-Irish, began to move into the area, upsetting Penn’s surveyed plan. Pennsylvania alone had an estimated one hundred thousand squatters by 1726, and two-thirds of the colony settled in the 1730s was occupied illegally. Further south in the Virginian piedmont, William Byrd watched crowds of Scotch-Irish squatters taking whatever land suited them, and was reminded of ‘the Goths and Vandals of old’. In Massachusetts, settlers moved out into the hilly Berkshires, and in New York up the Mohawk valley, constrained only by fear of French attack. In an attempt to retain control, the Massachusetts government established a string of new townships like Litchfield and Great Barrington in the Berkshires during the 1720s. Elsewhere, proprietors in Maryland and Pennsylvania, great landowners in New York and northern Virginia, either offered leases to squatters on their land, or tried to drive them out. Royal governors in Virginia and the Carolinas invented schemes to make the squatters legal by offering free land in new townships created on the frontier following the New England model.
None of it worked. The lure of so much property was irresistible. In Virginia, Governor Spottswood himself succumbed to the land rush and claimed eighty-five thousand acres of the newly opened uplands for himself, and in the Carolinas the system of land allocation was overwhelmed by the demand for surveys. Amateur surveyors were hired to help. Wildly unrealistic plats were registered. No one minded. Within two years, warrants were issued for about 600,000 acres, and nineteen thousand of them went to the Governor, while the Assembly Members voted themselves six thousand acres apiece. Between 1731 and 1738 approximately one million acres were registered in Carolina, and when the Surveyor-General, Benjamin Whitaker, complained in 1732 that ‘the law enables any common surveyor to perpetuate frauds for his employers through not having to turn his survey into any office’, the outraged Assembly sent him to prison for contempt. By then the proprietors had lost all control, and in despair turned the colony over to the Crown.
Georgia’s proprietors, particularly the idealistic James Oglethorpe, also intended to survey the colony’s territory before distributing it in order to create a slave-free society of smallholders and farmers. In the beautifully proportioned squares and gardens of the capital, Savannah, can be seen all that remains of the plan, for here too the temptation of so much potential property could not be resisted. South Carolinian planters moved across the border, and both they and the Georgians claimed vast estates beyond the Savannah river, outside the squares surveyed by Georgia’s founders. In 1751, these proprietors also gave up and returned the colony to royal control.
By that year the population of the Atlantic colonies had risen to over one million, far outstripping that of New France and outnumbering the Spanish-descended inhabitants of New Spain, who had been there for more than two hundred years. Families were larger than in the Old World because farms were bigger and more hands were needed to work them, but there was also the lure of unclaimed acres that drew the dispossessed from the far side of the Atlantic. If they could not pay their own passage, they came as indentured servants, willing to act as near-slaves for a number of years for the chance of eventually acquiring property.
Even in Elizabeth I’s reign, the enclosures in England deprived so many villeins and labourers of the common land and common grazing on which they depended to keep their families alive that they were forced to beg in the towns, giving rise to a series of ferocious laws against ‘sturdy rogues and vagabonds’ and ‘wandering beggars’. They were joined in the seventeenth century by the Diggers, radical Puritans who had fought for Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War