Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

ing a separate absentee oligarchy, actually were overwhelmingly the settlers
themselves. And since land speculation has harmful effects only to the extent
that it precedes and restricts settlement by the first-comers, this means that the
class of speculators merged quickly with the resident settlers, and hence few
harmful effects developed or persisted. It also means that no class struggle
between absentee Easterners and frontier residents developed out of the
new land system.
While the typical frontier Connecticut town of Kent had no problem of
absentee speculative landholding, land allocation was not idyllic. Speculation
by residents prior to settlement abounded on town lands other than their own
—but at least the length of time until bona fide settlers became owners of
their own plots was relatively brief. Furthermore, in important respects
entrance to settlement and land ownership in new towns were freer than in
the previous century. Although new settlers had to pay local speculators for
their land, they did not have to meet the clannish requirements of seventeenth-century
Puritanism. In the final analysis, payment of a market price is
far less restrictive than meeting nonmonetary conditions.
If the land speculators were resident settlers rather than a separate class,
this means that the common legend of the "happy yeomen" interested only
in the soil and communing with nature is open to serious revision. Rather
than a simple but noble rustic, uninterested in such grubby matters as making
money, the Connecticut frontiersman happily and cheerfully engaged in land
speculation as well as in other profit-seeking deals and ventures. If, then, the
yeoman was not simple and scornful of moneymaking, neither was he poor.
According to Grant, poverty was rare in eighteenth-century Kent.
As to debt and credit, Grant's corollary finding is that there was no clash of
Eastern creditor vs. frontier debtor. On the contrary, debt and credit permeated
the economy of the residents of Kent. As might be seen from the
extent of land speculation and other ventures ivithin the town, most people
were in and out of debt, and often shifted rapidly from the net-debtor to the
net-creditor category, and vice versa. There was no rigid class or lasting stratification
of "debtors" and "creditors." Furthermore, net debtors could not be
deemed poor, as has been the historiographical fashion. On the contrary, the
leading debtors, as might be expected, were precisely the wealthier land speculators.
A good part of the credit for the failure of absentee land speculation to
flourish goes to the very act of 1737 by which Connecticut organized the auction
of the new towns. For the law provided that every purchaser of land
rights at auction had to settle, fence, and construct a house on the land within
two years. This clause ensured that original absentee proprietors had to sell
their rights to genuine settlers within a two-year period.
To the extent that speculation and land settlement coincided, and therefore
the body of proprietors with the body of settlers, the period of proprietary
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