Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

As time went on, the common town land 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, 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 twelve acres of land to each squatter upon town property.
Under this system, landholdings in New England tended to be quite small,
in contrast to the large landholdings 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 Endecott, 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.* 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, Connecticut, a frontier town of western
Connecticut in the eighteenth 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 form-
*C. P. Nettels' 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" (Curtis P. Nettels, The Roots of American Civilization [New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1938], p. 530). For the main support for this view, see Roy
H. Akagi, The Town Proprietors of the New England Colonies (Philadelphia, 1924).
**Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
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