Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

7
New York Land Monopoly
As early as the turn of the eighteenth century, New York, in its large
Hudson River manors, was the only colony where feudal landholding retained
an important foothold. In this colony, the few receivers of huge land grants
persisted in renting instead of selling their domains, and they thus formed,
along with the royal bureaucracy, a ruling oligarchy of the colony.
Robert Hunter, the relatively liberal governor of New York during the
second decade of the seventeenth century, saw the problem and warned of the
oppression of the tenants and the crippling of growth in the colony. The
problem grew acute again with an accession to the governorship of John
Montgomery in 1728. Montgomery renewed the old policy of granting huge
tracts of land in return for monetary reward—the main sale of such privilege
being a grant of 50,000 acres in eastern Dutchess County to Thomas Hawley
in 1731 in return for 750 pounds sterling. The new rash of land grants
reached full flower in the regime of William Cosby (1732-36), who took the
precaution of giving himself one-third of the total amount of his grants. This
orgy of special privilege even moved two of the leading officials of the colony
to protest to England. Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden noted in
1732 that enterprising youth were leaving New York in large numbers,
driven by the land monopoly to seek land of their own elsewhere, "while
much better and every way more convenient lands lie useless to the King and
Country. The reason for this is that the grantees themselves are not in a
capacity to improve such large tracts and other people will not become their
vassals or tenants." Colden eloquently pointed out that a leading reason that
so many people had left Europe for the New World "was to avoid the
dependence on landlords, and to enjoy a fee [simple] to descend to their pos-
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