Conceived in Liberty (100 page)

*
For further discussion of the servant problem in Massachusetts, see Lawrence W. Towner, “A Fondness for Freedom: Servant Protest in Puritan Society,”
William and Mary Quarterly
(April 1962): 201–19.

*
See Tower,
op. cit.,
pp. 213 ff.

*
Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker,
The Puritan Oligarchy
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1947), p. 15 8.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, Connecticut,
mirabile dictu,
replaced Massachusetts Bay as the fountainhead of Calvinist orthodoxy in America. While the Massachusetts church was prevented by determined opposition from budging much beyond its halfway position between Congregational and Presbyterian polities, Connecticut Puritanism eagerly went all the way toward a Presbyterian position. By adopting the Saybrook Platform in 1708, the Puritans of Connecticut became virtually Presbyterian in church government; Connecticut now had an established Presbyterian church. Not only that: the orthodox Calvinists of Connecticut, seeing Harvard go the way of liberalism, determined to establish another college, to reestablish a fountainhead of rigid Calvinism for New England. Accordingly, Yale was founded in 1701, receiving its permanent location at New Haven in 1716.
*
The governing body of the college consisted completely of ministers who, it was ruled, must be free of all deviations, whether to the ecclesiastical right or left.

Even the Connecticut establishment, however, found that it had to relax its full rigor. As in Massachusetts, it was compelled, after a while, to exempt members of various religious sects from having to pay taxes to support the Presbyterian establishment. In 1727, the Connecticut General Court passed a law exempting any Anglicans from payment, and two years later this immunity was extended to Quakers and Baptists.

*
Its original name was Collegiate School of Connecticut, becoming Yale College in 1718.

Though lacking its old-time consistency and zeal, Rhode Island continued as one of the most individualistic of the American colonies. No church establishment marred its libertarian record, and many religious sects flourished peacefully side by side in the small colony. Indeed, to ensure the prevalence of the voluntary principle, Rhode Island passed a law in 1715 forbidding any churches from obtaining any of their revenue by compulsion. And as there was no establishment, neither was there a network of government schools, as in Massachusetts and Connecticut, to impose Calvinist theology upon the inhabitants. The Quakers and especially the Baptists progressed rapidly under this libertarian regime.

True to its tradition of freedom and free trade, Rhode Island paid even less attention than the other colonies to British trade restrictions. Nor did Rhode Islanders, with their Quaker traditions of antimilitarism, treat war as sacred; they continued happily to trade with their designated “enemies” even in time of war. The militia too was raised strictly voluntarily, without imposing the compulsion of conscription. Indeed, the towns themselves elected their militia officers, a highly democratic check on the military that was abandoned in 1713 under the urging of Governor Samuel Cranston. But town voting for militia officers was restored the following year, after violent controversy. However, this unique system was finally scrapped in 1718, when Rhode Island joined the other colonies in appointing militia officers by the General Assembly and the governor. In fact, by 1741, Rhode Island had taken a large step toward militarism by establishing a permanent Council of War, consisting of the governor, the Council, and the various high officers of the colony.

No colony was as decentralized as Rhode Island. Each town largely governed
itself and often an individual town would simply neglect to tax its inhabitants for military or other expenses. As a result, taxes in Rhode Island were in fact minimal. Twice yearly general elections for numerous posts, coupled with an eager willingness to turn officials out, also kept a continuing check on arrogance or entrenched power in the hands of public officials. Government itself was so lax as to be charmingly irregular and freewheeling, and even liberals such as Lord Bellomont were shocked at the democracy, decentralization, failure to keep records, and generally minimal government abiding in Rhode Island.

Even this great home of religious liberty, however, began to falter in its ideals and principles. In the young town of Westerly, at the southwestern tip of Rhode Island, a group of Sabbatarians, who celebrated Saturday as the Sabbath, gained strength. Their neighbors began to denounce bitterly the Sabbatarian “profanation” of Sunday. In 1725 the General Assembly officially ordered Westerly to mend its ways and observe Sunday as the day of rest, “considering that, though the ordinances of man may not square with their private principles, yet they must be subject to them, for the Lord’s sake.” Thus far had a land founded by Anne Hutchinson and Samuell Gorton and Roger Williams fallen! And this was not all, for a law excluding Roman Catholics from the franchise and from holding public office also appeared on the books after the turn of the century.

As Rhode Island, in the early eighteenth century, began to slip toward uniformity with the other colonies in the area of religious liberty and in its attitudes toward the military, so too did it move toward the other colonies in imposing, in 1724, a freehold property qualification for voting; specifically, a freehold value of a hundred pounds sterling or an annual real estate income of two pounds.

While there were many instances of arbitrary land grants by the governments to individuals, the basic form of land settlement in colonial New England was the
town.
The government of the colony would give a joint grant to a group of fifty to one hundred people, who would found a town and then divide the land by lot amongst themselves. This would have roughly approximated the libertarian principle of individual settler ownership, but for two vital points: the joint proprietary reserved some of the land to be kept by itself in common, and also kept the power of governmental regulation of the territory. This procedure accounted for the compactness of the typical New England settlement.

The common land would remain off the market for years, or be used as common pasture, or be reserved for a government minister or school. As the years wore on, governmental privileges would be transferred from the joint proprietors to an elected government, but the proprietors remained in charge of the undivided land. As the population of the town grew, more citizens would appear who were not proprietors, and a separation of interests emerged setting off the two groups. For instance, in Newbury, Massachusetts, in the 1680s and in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in the 1720s, serious clashes developed between the proprietors and the nonproprietors for control of government and of the common lands. However, while oligarchic rule by proprietors emerged in some cases, care must be taken in applying this term, since, in many cases, the proprietors remained as the large majority of the town’s total population. Government decrees aggravated any such cleavage. Thus, the town of Springfield, in the seventeenth century, outlawed voluntary alienation of land to landowners of any other plots, and insisted that the town authorities had to approve of any purchasers of town land.

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 forming
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
within
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
rule of the land offers an instructive example of how the voluntary methods of the free market can successfully provide services that are almost always regarded as uniquely governmental. For the settler-proprietors themselves built roads, bridges, mills, and schools. The proprietors realized that speedy construction of roads would encourage rapid influx into the town and thus raise the value of their lands. In a couple of years after founding, however, the towns were invariably incorporated and town governments created, and with them the inevitable accompaniment of burdensome taxation and compulsory labor on the roads. It is interesting to muse on what would have happened if these New England towns had remained permanently under proprietary rule. For one thing, services would have been voluntarily provided to earn a profit from their consumers, instead of the imposing of a compulsory governmental tax burden necessarily severed from any link with voluntary consumption by the members of the public.

*
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).