Conceived in Liberty (101 page)

**
Charles S. Grant,
Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent
(
New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).

Conflicts over land grants and claims, and over corollary governmental jurisdiction, were important sources of intercolonial conflict in eighteenth-century New England. Massachusetts laid claim to the bulk of New Hampshire, and the General Court handed out arbitrary grants to New Hampshire land. Furthermore, the Massachusetts towns insisted on claiming tax revenue from their junior New Hampshire neighbors. Massachusetts encroachment on New Hampshire was facilitated by their having a common governor, and by the 1730s Governor Jonathan Belcher, a wealthy Boston merchant, was heading the Massachusetts party in alliance with Secretary Richard Waldron III and the oligarchs of the New Hampshire Council. The popular opposition to Massachusetts in New Hampshire was led by Lieutenant Governor John Wentworth and then by his son Benning, also a powerful merchant. The opposition shepherded the New Hampshire legislature into making conflicting land grants of its own. To secure the favor of the Crown, the New Hampshire General Court voted the governor a fixed salary, thus going beyond Massachusetts. Influenced by this good conduct (in addition to bribe money spread where it could help), by the importance of New Hampshire ship masts, and by the perennial troublesomeness of Massachusetts, the English Privy Council finally decided in 1737 on a boundary in favor of New Hampshire. By 1741, New Hampshire was assured of approximately its present dimensions. Massachusetts conspired to revive the old Mason claim to proprietorship to New Hampshire.
*
Not only did this fail, but Britain, in disgust, removed Belcher from his post and ended the system of joint governorship,
which threatened to keep New Hampshire under the tutelage of Massachusetts. The leader of the popular opposition, Benning Wentworth, now became full governor of Ne Hampshire in 1741, and Massachusetts received a royal governor of its own. Freed from the burden of this struggle, New Hampshire flourished and grew apace. At his inauguration, Governor Wentworth prophetically hailed the final separation of the two colonies as “an event which... will... be a lasting advantage; will be a means of replenishing your towns with people, of extending and enlarging your commerce.”

With New Hampshire secure from Massachusetts aggression, Governor Wentworth decider! to safeguard the newly decided-upon western part of the colony (now Vermont) for his control by parceling out huge land grants to that unsettled region (known as “the New Hampshire Grants”). Here, Wentworth was worried about New York’s old claims to jurisdiction over this territory. Wentworth, should be noted, took good care to assign
himself
a fee of five hundred acres in each newly designated township. Fortunately, no feudalistic proprietary was sustained, as the grantees quickly divided and sold the land. An annual quitrent of one shilling per hundred acres was demanded by the grantees, but they, typically, found it impossible to collect. With settlement rapidly developing, the period of transfer of landholdings from grantees to actual settlers fortunately tended to be brief. New York, however, continued to make its claim and to hand out conflicting western New Hampshire grants of its own.

Governor Wentworth began the grants in 1749 by creating the town of Bennington, and by the 1760s was founding many towns per year (sixty-three in 1761 alone). Here, considerable absentee speculation served as “wholesale” and “jobber” intermediaries before the land developed fairly rapidly upon the settlers. In making the grants, incidentally, Wentworth did not neglect his own family; at least a dozen Wentworths received handsome gifts, as did many leading citizens of New Hampshire and New England.

*
See
Conceived in Liberty,
v. I, index listings for Robert T. Mason.

Another important intercolonial conflict over land and territory—and of long standing—was the Connecticut-Rhode Island struggle over the Narragansett Country in what is now southwestern Rhode Island. The controversy was resolved at last in 1726, when the Crown settled the territory in favor of Rhode Island. The detailed line was finally drawn two years later. By that time, however, the Atherton Company and ensuing land titles had been entrenched and confirmed, and the land pattern of the Narragansett Country had become considerably different from the rest of New England. Instead of compact towns, the Narragansett Country consisted of large “plantations,” differing from those in the South only in the commodities grown: berries, sheep, and horses, rather than tobacco and rice. And like Southern plantations, these large farms were maintained and worked only by extensive Negro and Indian slavery. In the major Narragansett township of South Kingston, the population in 1730 included 965 whites, 333 Negroes, and 223 Indians—the last two groups almost all slaves. Too, a proportion of the whites were indentured servants. The proportion of nearly one half the citizens as outright slaves was matched only in the Southern colonies.

Along with the heavy proportion of slaves came a rigorous slave code. Gone were the days of Samuell Gorton’s attempt to outlaw slavery in Rhode Island. Laws were now imposed prohibiting any Negro, free or slave, from being out of doors after 9
P.M.
on penalty of fifteen lashes; no household could allow any servant or slave to dance or gamble; and no ferryman could transport a Negro without an authorized certificate from a master or from the courts. In addition, South Kingston itself prohibited any free Negro from having a slave at his house, and in 1726 barred any outdoor social gatherings
of Indians or Negroes. Furthermore, a slave suspected of theft was liable to be tried without a jury.

In Rhode Island, as in the other colonies, only freeholders could vote. Whereas this ensured a democratic system in most of New England, the reverse was true in the Narragansett Country, where the landowners were few and large. In 1729, this requirement was fixed at the substantial sum of two hundred pounds sterling freehold, or an annual value of ten pounds sterling—a substantial sum for the time, and five times the Massachusetts voting requirement. As a result, the small landowners were disenfranchised and large landowners achieved strict oligarchic control of the local government of the Narragansett Country. And these governments, headed by town councils unique in New England, had far more power than the usual town selectmen. For one thing, the council decided absolutely on who could be admitted into the settlement and who prohibited; it functioned also as a local court. Furthermore, jury trial was discouraged in the area, and a body appointed by the council decided disputes over roads. In contrast to the elected officials of other townships, the town council was partially appointed and only partially elected. In all these ways, the rule of a local landed oligarchy was reinforced.

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 posterity
that their children may reap the benefit of their labor and industry.” And Chief Justice Lewis Morris deplored the “engrossing of great tracts of land into few hands,” making it very difficult and expensive to settle these lands. In contrast, better and far cheaper lands were available in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which were thus attracting far more immigrants.

Despite these warnings, the venal policy of land engrossment continued apace. Governor George Clarke (1736–43), for example, evaded the maximum limit of 2,000 acres per grant by giving himself land through dummy associates. Thus, Clarke granted William Corry 100,000 acres in the Mohawk Valley, which Corry promptly transferred back to Clarke’s personal ownership. In this way, Clarke was able to amass a fortune of 100,000 pounds’ worth of land during his term of office. Clarke’s successor in the lucrative post, George Clinton (1743–53), also granted much land to himself through numerous dummy intermediaries. For grants to others, Clinton charged the high fee of thirteen pounds for each 1,000 acres given away. Through such means, Clinton was able to amass a fortune of 100,000 pounds in his decade of rule.

As the eighteenth century wore on, the discontent of the tenants increased, along with the extent of manorial landholdings. The farmers—significantly, generally referred to by the European name “peasants”—were subjected not only to rent payments, but also to juries constituted by the manor lord, as well as to various feudal fees and privileges. Unable to purchase their land, the farmers also faced insecurity of renewal of lease, and the increasing rents of any new lease ate into any farm prosperity they might have enjoyed. The farmers had therefore little incentive to improve the land, since they would only in the end have to pay more rent to the manor lord. Furthermore, the large feudal manors enjoyed their own direct representation in the provincial Assembly, with their own private “rotten boroughs.”

In addition to these numerous privileges, the New York government propped up the feudal manors in other significant ways. For one thing, New York did not adopt the significant English common-law realization that the mortgager is the true owner of the land; failure to do this preserved New York landlords from any compulsion to yield property to their creditors in case they could not pay. Also, New York established an elaborate system of registry of land titles, which, being costly, favored the large and wealthy landlords who could pay the expenses of registry and of hiring lawyers to do the job. And, finally, feudal entail and primogeniture were imposed to keep the huge manors intact and to prevent them from being divided. Thus, Frederick Philipse, one of the great manorial lords of New York, made a will in 1751 compulsorily entailing all his land to his firstborn and then to the latter’s firstborn, etc., forever.

The dominant manors of New York in the eighteenth century were those of Livingston, Philipse, Van Rensselaer, and Van Cortlandt. The Philipse
manor (the “highland patent”) began with a grant by Governor Benjamin Fletcher in 1697; the grant soon amounted to over 200,000 acres, covering some of Dutchess County and almost all of Putnam County. The Philipse manorial system was highly oppressive. Leases lasted only for the life of the tenant, at which point the land,
along with its improvements,
reverted to the manor lord. If any tenant wished to transfer his tenancy to another, he was forced to pay a one-third alienation fee. In addition, all property of mines and minerals was reserved for Philipse.

The Van Rensselaer manor of Rensselaerswyck was, of course, the pioneer manor in the colony, having been the only holdover from the Dutch policy of creating feudal patroonships. Amassing one million acres and covering most of Albany County by the turn of the century, Rensselaer leases were even shorter term than Philipse’s, amounting to a thirteen-year term. Rents were exacted in kind and in service, as in the Middle Ages, as well as in money. The manorial lord also reserved all rights of milling and mining and timber, and the tenants were liable for all taxes on the manor. But while the tenants paid the taxes, the lord, Van Rensselaer, virtually had the right to pick his own assemblymen by the 1680s. The tenants who voted in this and other manorial elections had, it should be noted, no such protection from landlord wrath as the secret ballot.

Livingston manor began with a grant in the 1680s, and was stretched, like the other grants, through dubious legality from Indian purchases to include 160,000 acres in Columbia County. Robert Livingston, the original grantee, was fortunate enough to marry the widow of his former employer, the Van Rensselaer patroon, and later rose to become Speaker of the New York Assembly and mayor of Albany. Livingston had his own assemblymen from 1715 on. Livingston’s rules were slightly more liberal than those of others. Terms of leases varied, but most ranged from life to the lives of three generations of tenants. In contrast to the other large manors, some subdivisions were actually sales of property in fee simple to the farmers. As in the other cases, tenants were responsible for payment of taxes.

Van Cortlandt manor, which began with 86,000 acres of Westchester County granted in 1697, was the most liberal of the large manors, especially after the 1750s. For one thing, the Van Cortlandts were the most willing to
sell
their land in fee simple—for a high price, of course, but at least they were willing. In addition, the lot of the tenant was greatly eased by permitting transfer of leases with almost no alienation fees. Furthermore, the Van Cortlandts, allowed their own assemblymen after 1717, permitted their freeholders on the manor to select an additional representative. Most important, the process of subdividing the ownership of Van Cortlandt lands was greatly accelerated by equal division among their heirs. Alone of the large manors, the Van Cortlandts eschewed the privileges of entail and primogeniture. With the combined pressure of subdividing inheritance and sales in fee simple, the
Van Cortlandt manor
very
gradually disintegrated into legitimate settler-ownership. But this was to take time; in the meanwhile, in 1769, five-sixths of the inhabitants of Westchester were the subjects of six manorial lords, with one-third of them on Van Cortlandt and Philipse manors. Other leading manorial lords of the province were the Schuylers—whose leases were long, covering three lives, and who were willing to sell land in fee simple—the Duanes, the Beekmans, and the Heathcotes.