Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

24
The Land Question in South Carolina
The leading conflict within the new royal colony centered on the land question.
Since the proprietors had closed their land office, no grants of land had
been made by the Crown. But during the interim period of the 1720s, vague
claims were revived to large tracts of coastal land granted in the early days of
the proprietary. These land patents were revived because the Crown insisted
on raising the quitrent from one shilling to four shillings per one hundred
acres.
But since proprietary grants reserved only one shilling per hundred acres
for quitrents, this royal decision spurred many recipients of large land baronies,
from 12,000 to 40,000 acres in size, to revive their old claims. By the
end of the 1720s, almost 800,000 acres of valuable coastal land were appropriated
under these old speculative claims. In 1731, the Assembly passed a
law giving a blanket validation to all the huge land grants under the proprietary.
Robert Johnson, the royal governor, defended the law as "absolutely necessary
for the peace and tranquillity of the province," but James St. John,
surveyor general and comptroller of the quitrents, and Benjamin Whittaker,
the attorney general, pointed out that a 24,000-acre land grant inherited by
Johnson himself was at stake in the outcome. St. John also denounced the
grantees for engrossing all the best lands and thus keeping legitimate settlers
from migrating to the colony. He advocated throwing open the vast land
tracts to legitimate settlers. But, although the Board of Trade recommended
disavowal of the act, the Privy Council did not do so, and the mass validation
of the land engrossments thus remained in force.
In the struggle that ensued between Governor Johnson and the land
monopolists on the one hand, and St. John and Whittaker on the other, the
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