It was no accident of history that New England leaders called the Continental Congress into session and fired the shots at Concord Bridge, for it was in New England that men had learned to act together while maintaining their individualism; and it was there that the small farmer and the independent land-holder got a stake in America.
In the Middle Colonies, where the geography combined elements of both New England and the South, there were two kinds of landholding, with the large-estate system predominating. Farther from the seacoast, back in the Appalachian valleys, land ownership was modeled more on the New England pattern. There, beyond the domains of the great landlords, the very abundance of land encouraged the ambitions of immigrant commoners to acquire farms of their own, even as the demands of life in the wild hinterlands blurred old distinctions of class and caste. In the face of wolves, savages and blizzards, skill and comage measured men, and nature was the final arbiter of nobility. The hand of London or Charleston or Williamsburg could not reach into the back country; and if a man took up land in the mountains, who was there to stop him or to tell him how to live? The ideas of independence and free land were always inseparable.
Far in the Pacific Southwest another pattern of land use was developing under the aegis of the Franciscan and Jesuit padres. Of all the Europeans who came to America, these men of faith coveted land least. They came with cattle and seeds and saintliness, to build missions and to baptize. Unlike the Appalachian frontiersmen, the padres regarded the Indians as human beings to be civilized rather than as savages to be killed or subdued. In some areas they aided the natives in developing rude irrigation systems and followed the Indian custom of using land as a common asset—a practice which contrasted sharply with the patterns of individual ownership among the Eastern settlers.
Ultimately it was this system of private landholding, fostering a fierce independence of spirit, that was the undoing of the British rulers. They failed to understand that a virgin land settled by men bent on escaping feudal restraints would require a wholly new set of man-land relationships, and new social and political institutions as well. The frontier expanded and emboldened the thinking of the colonists, and democratic ideas seeped steadily into the dialogue of life. The squatter had no rights against the crown under Anglo-Saxon law, but squatter logic would in due course rule the new continent, overturn ancient laws and customs, and spell out the true meaning of land abundance.
The British failed to reckon the swift pace of American growth or to gauge its influence on the minds of men. Between 1700 and 1776 the population of the British colonies jumped nearly ninefold from 350,000 to 3,000,000, and Benjamin Franklin forecast that within a century there would be more English-speaking people in America than in the British Isles.
Most of these immigrants were land-hungry men. The vast stretches of unused land quickly convinced them that men strong enough to clear a thicket were entitled to own land outright. The mood of the newcomers was voiced by the Scotch-Irish squatters of western Pennsylvania who complained to the British governor that it was “against the laws of God and Nature, that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to labor on.”
However, in the 1760’s, King George and his ministers were oblivious to the hopes of the squatters. The biggest British blunder was the Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited settlement beyond the crest of the Alleghenies. As an expedient this order might have made sense, since the British needed time to formulate a plan for settling the Western lands and conciliating the Indians. But the effect of this proclamation was to close the very door that the French and Indian War had just been fought to open. At one stroke it angered the backwoods colonizers, ignored the Western land claims of the seaboard colonies whose original charters had contained “sea to sea” grants, and frustrated the ambitions of the politically powerful land companies that coveted the virgin soil of the Northwest Territory.
The man who, thirteen years later, would write the colonists’ answer to this proclamation, was then a seventeen-year-old boy in the back country of Virginia’s plantations. Neither Jefferson nor his father was an independent farmer on the far edge of Virginia’s planations. Neither Jefferson nor his father understood the facts of soil fertility. Jefferson’s explanation of the practices of Virginia tobacco growers —who exhausted the soil and then moved on—had in it no element of apology: “The indifferent state of agriculture among us does not proceed from a want of knowledge merely; it is from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labor being abundant; here it is to make the most of our labor, land being abundant.”
But in later years, the mature Jefferson, always open to new ideas, came to see the value of husbandry. All his life he considered himself a farmer by occupation, and the easy habits, once condoned, he came to deplore as his experience broadened. He developed new ideas in horticulture, designed a better plow, imported Merino sheep, and introduced the threshing machine to American farmlands.
To him, agriculture was “the first and most precious of all the arts.” By eighteenth-century standards, his sense of husbandry was in the best European tradition, and in his later years he became an advocate of soil studies and crop rotation. Along with contemporaries like John Bartram and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, he developed European farming practices, and sought to understand the art of renewing the soil for the benefit of future users as well as the current generation. “The land belongs to the living generation,” he once wrote. “They may manage it, then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct.”
Jefferson’s feeling toward the land was one of the strongest influences in the development of his political philosophy. “The small landholders,” he wrote, “are the chosen people of God . . . whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.”
To a man with these sentiments, the landowning tradition of the feudal aristocrats was an abomination. Jefferson believed that the system of land tenure and distribution adopted would ultimately determine the character of the new society. He saw in America’s surplus of resources an opportunity to develop a “natural aristocracy” of talent and virtue. He favored small freehold landownerships which would cause class distinctions to disappear. Growing as Jefferson would have had it grow, this country would have been a rural nation thinly populated by small farmers.
These were his theories, but Thomas Jefferson was more than a theorist; he was a practical reformer, who could go to the heart of, a political issue and win others to his opinions. In 1774, when most grievances against the royal reign were directed obliquely at Parliament, Jefferson struck hammer blows at tire King and his land policies. He publicly advocated free fifty-acre farms and boldly asserted that lands “within the limits which any particular society has circumscribed around itself, are assumed by that society and subject to their allotment.” He further counseled his countrymen to “lay this matter before His Majesty and to declare that he has no right to grant lands of himself.” The land question was the key to a society of equal opportunity, Jefferson was convinced, and the year he wrote the Declaration of Independence he struck a telling blow at the old order by pushing laws through the Virginia Assembly which abolished feudal entails and rights of primogeniture.
The first result of the Revolution—although this is a chapter of history that most Americans have forgotten—was a program of land reform. The Patriots expropriated and subdivided the Tory estates, and many huge holdings were sold cheaply, given free to small farmers, or parceled out to deserving war veterans. The uncertain claims of many squatters ripened overnight into fee titles that gave the owners the first installment of the new democracy—the right to vote.
The victory at Yorktown, however, did not decide who owned the unoccupied land beyond the Appalachians, and for a time this vexing problem threatened the unity of