Land policy in New England and Virginia
- Also called:
- thirteen colonies or colonial America
- Date:
- May 14, 1607 - September 3, 1783
- Related Places:
- British Empire
- Massachusetts
- New Jersey
- Virginia
- Pennsylvania
- On the Web:
- American Battlefield Trust - Everyday Life in Colonial America (June 09, 2025)
The New England colonies grew by a process of group settlement. The general courts of the various colonies, most notably that of Massachusetts Bay, would make a grant of land to a migrating group, fixing its boundaries carefully. This group would then establish a new town. Its common lands, fencing, grazing practices, and the mode of apportionment of farms were regulated by the general court or legislature, but each town then took control of land allotments and management. The legislature determined who should be admitted to the town as settlers and freeholders. The town meetings, or boards of town proprietors, laid out the land of each settlement as house lots, common fields, meadow and pasture, and ultimately divided it among owners. Inhabitants of each town commonly dwelt together for society and protection and traveled from the town centre to till their acres. The typical town was thus closely akin to an English manor, but with no lord of the manor at its head. The town was, of course, the church centre, and its pastor was the community leader. Militia service, elections, and taxation were based on the town.
In Virginia, settlement followed an entirely different pattern. There the colonists spread out widely up the creeks and rivers, soon moving westward as far as the falls of the James River, where the city of Richmond now stands. Partly because tobacco rapidly impoverished the soil, they tilled land in much larger units, known as plantations, with almost no village centres, and they made much greater use of servants—and, significantly, slaves—than did New England. This pattern was unfavourable to social life, cooperation, and communal activities, but it created a spirit of independence equal to that existing farther north. Throughout the 17th century the planters preferred white indentured servants to African slaves, and for a time as many as 1,500 arrived every year. They were mainly English, along with some Scotch and Irish, and in general bound themselves, in return for transportation and support, to work without wages for four to six years. This indenture or redemptioner system became a highly efficient aid to colonization. When they had worked out their terms, the servants moved up the streams, took land, began shipping tobacco from their own wharves, and thus became in turn independent planters or freehold farmers.
The natural political units in Virginia were parishes and counties. Parish institutions were chiefly ecclesiastical, but under the English system they included education; every minister kept a school and the vestry saw to it that all poor children could read and write. Children of prosperous families usually had private tutors. The counties increased in number to keep pace with the steady spread of population. By 1652 Virginia had 13 counties, of which 9 lay on the James River and 2 on the York. The county courts held large powers of local government and tended to come under the control of a few influential families. Until 1636 the House of Burgesses was practically elected on manhood suffrage; thereafter the vote was restricted, and, when Sir William Berkeley became governor under the Restoration, he kept a compliant house in power for 15 years.
Founding of the middle colonies
Henry Hudson’s voyage of 1609 to what is now New York Bay was intended to serve trade rather than colonization. The Dutch wished for cargoes of fur, lumber, and tobacco. However, in 1621 the Netherlands government chartered the Dutch West India Company with power to build forts, to establish a government, and to colonize the land over wide areas, including the American coast. Two years later the heads of the company sent a vessel with 30 families of Walloons, Protestant refugees from the southern provinces of the Netherlands, to the mouth of the Hudson River, where they established the first permanent settlement on the island of Manhattan. More settlers arrived, and in 1626 Peter Minuit “purchased” the island from Indian sachems (variously characterized by historians as having belonged to the Lenape, Delaware, Munsee, or Algonquin people) and founded New Amsterdam as the seat of government for a colony. Fort Orange (now Albany) had been planted up the Hudson two years earlier as a fur trading post. New Amsterdam quickly became a cosmopolitan town, attracting people of various nations and faiths. It had the self-reliant lawless atmosphere of a seaport, full of privateers, smugglers, tavern keepers, and roistering sailors.
For several reasons New Netherland did not grow as vigorously as the English colonies. The Dutch West India Company was at first much more interested in preying on Spanish commerce in the Caribbean and Atlantic than in finding permanent settlers. It was also anxious to develop the fur trade and to share in the tobacco trade. When it turned to settlement in earnest, it adopted an unfortunate method. Beginning in 1629, it granted any patroon who brought out 50 families a great estate on which to settle them as tenants, with certain monopolies, as of milling, in the hands of the owner. This kind of feudalism gave a few great families an unhealthy share of wealth and power. Some small farmers did establish independent farms or boweries here and there, as did interloping Puritans from New England who sifted into Westchester and the northern reaches of Long Island, but they were not numerous. Finally, the governors and councils appointed by the Dutch West India Company, who ruled without any such popular assemblies as Virginia and New England possessed, were harsh, autocratic, and blundering. Far from gaining any popular following, they were generally disliked. The most famous of the governors, Peter Stuyvesant, was also the most headstrong and shortsighted.
It was impossible for England to permit a Dutch colony to break the line of its possessions on the Atlantic seaboard for long. In 1664 a small English naval force obtained the surrender of the New Netherland without firing a shot. The 7,000 inhabitants of the area accepted the new regime without protest. Charles II appointed his brother James, the duke of York, ruler and proprietor of the colony of New York, a domain stretching from the Connecticut River to the Delaware. At once a more liberal regime began. The proprietor sent over a governor with instructions to treat the Dutch inhabitants generously, to permit them to keep their lands, and to make no interference with their language or religion. Immigration was encouraged and settlements thickened. In 1683 Gov. Thomas Dongan summoned a representative assembly for the province of New York.
One of the greatest of all colonial figures presided over the founding of what became Pennsylvania and Delaware. William Penn, son of the prominent English admiral Sir William Penn, had been converted to the Society of Friends, or Quakers, in 1667, in his early 20s. He aspired to establish a colony where every race and every sect could find both political and religious freedom. His friendship with the duke of York, and the fact that the king owed a large unpaid debt to Admiral Penn, enabled William Penn to gain control of a great part of the imperial domain assigned to the duke. When the crown gave him a proprietary charter in 1681, he immediately began to advertise for settlers. Publishing a description of Pennsylvania in four languages, he offered newcomers land on very liberal terms: 50 acres free, larger farms at a purely nominal rent, and 5,000 acres for £100. Penn visited his “holy experiment” in 1682. And in that year he laid down a charter of government which provided for a small elective council, to sit with himself as governor and initiate laws, and a larger elective assembly to pass or reject the proposed laws. Within a few years the assembly gained much larger powers and itself proposed legislation. In 1701 Penn granted a new charter that lasted until the American Revolution.
It is not strange that Pennsylvania flourished beyond other colonies. Immigrants flocked in large numbers, from England and Germany especially, to enjoy the religious freedom, the humane criminal legislation, the easy terms for gaining fertile land, and the opportunities for trade and manufacture. Penn had hoped that Philadelphia, his “city of brotherly love,” would always be “a green country town,” with gardens surrounding every house, and it did become a beautiful as well as a prosperous city. Quakerism, softened from its originally somewhat rigid outlines, gave the colony a special atmosphere. It was in Pennsylvania that a number of institutions on which America later prided itself found their first full-scale trial: complete religious freedom, the distribution of land to actual settlers at very low cost, the encouragement of a melting pot of peoples, and the establishment of excellent schools open to all. Because of the high intellectual and moral standards of the Quakers, the cultural level of Pennsylvania soon became one of unusual elevation. It was noted for its libraries, its refined homes, its interest in science, and its architectural taste. When it was only 10 years old, it had the first printing press to be established outside of New England.
Before Penn died, he bought from the duke of York three counties on the Delaware River which became the province and state of that name. Though they shared their governor with Pennsylvania, from 1702 they had their own elective assembly. The other middle colonies also began under proprietors. Maryland had a history of special interest because of its initial status as a refuge for Roman Catholics. Charles I granted the district between the Potomac River and the 40th parallel in 1632 to George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, who was much interested in colonization. His son, Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, almost immediately succeeded to the grant and resolved to establish a colony where his fellow Roman Catholics could find peace. Early in 1634 the first shipload of Roman Catholic settlers chose a site at St. Marys on a tributary of the Potomac near its mouth. Actually, Protestants soon constituted a majority of the settlers, for the Roman Catholics preferred to stay in England. To meet this situation, Cecilius Calvert persuaded the assembly which he called to pass an act of religious toleration in 1649. Unfortunately, this act was repealed before many years.
Though Maryland profited from the proximity to Virginia, which gave it protection and trade, it had a troubled history. The Protestant settlers were irked by Calvert’s bestowals of land, offices, and favours on his relatives and Roman Catholic friends. They were also irritated by the very limited authority that he allowed his assembly. Friction over religious and economic questions culminated in hostilities in 1654, the Protestant small farmers finally winning their main objectives. When William and Mary came to the throne in England in 1689, the Calverts lost control of Maryland; however, when a new Lord Baltimore embraced Protestantism in 1715, the family regained its rights.
Meanwhile, the future New Jersey had undergone some confusing and unprofitable changes of name and jurisdiction. The duke of York, the original proprietor, had given the lands between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to two friends, Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, as the province of Nova Cesaria, or New Jersey. To bring in more settlers, they drew up a charter or set of “concessions and agreements” which largely anticipated Penn’s liberal ideas. That is, they offered generous terms for acquiring land, complete freedom of conscience, and a popular assembly. In 1674 Berkeley sold his half share to two Quakers, who took the southwestern part of the future state. In 1680 Carteret’s widow sold the northeastern half to a new body of proprietors. Ultimately, in 1702, the crown took over both sections.
The Carolinas and Georgia
The lands south of Virginia were also colonized under royal grants to great proprietors. Under Charles II a group of eight men obtained a grant of all North America between the 31st and 36th parallels. Two segments of this great domain were developed in very different ways. Sir John Colleton and Anthony Ashley Cooper, who later became Lord Shaftesbury, founded Charleston, South Carolina, in 1670 with settlers from England and overcrowded Barbados. Groups of French Huguenots and Scots at once migrated to South Carolina, giving it by the year 1700 a population, including black slaves, of about 5,000. At first the colony was based on exports of foodstuffs to the West Indies and of turpentine, tar, and furs to Europe. Then rice was introduced from Madagascar, and the South Carolinians developed large plantations which grew rice and indigo very profitably. The area to the north, meanwhile, was settled in moderate-sized farms by a variety of immigrants: English, Germans, drifters from Virginia, and adventurous New Englanders. A settlement of Swiss at New Bern added one especially prosperous element.
The “Fundamental Constitutions” which John Locke helped Shaftesbury draw up for the Carolinas, providing for a hereditary landed nobility bearing bizarre titles, was totally unsuited to the American scene and never went into real effect. The proprietors gave each colony instead a simple workable form of government with a governor, council, and assembly. In the Carolinas, as in Virginia, the population spread widely over the land. Although Charleston became an opulent and fashionable little city, other towns were few and small. In social and economic character the two colonies differed sharply. North Carolina found that its tobacco and naval stores, shipped from poor harbours, offered much less revenue than South Carolina’s staples. It had no merchants and ship captains to match those of Charleston, and it had very few great planters. Its populace tended to be poorer and less-educated, and only a few coastal centres could boast of the aristocratic atmosphere that was emerging in the southern colonies. In South Carolina many planters accumulated wealth at their country estates, where they lived most of the year. They had fine town houses in Charleston, where in the hottest summer months they kept up a pleasant social life with rich traders and a robust professional class. They gave the commons house, which they called the assembly, an English tone. North Carolina’s white population grew at a faster rate, however, and its slave population was smaller than its southern neighbour’s.
Georgia, the last of the 13 colonies to be founded, was the creation of a group of British philanthropists. These proprietors, obtaining a grant of lands between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers, hoped to give debtors and other deserving poor people a new start in life In 1733 they sent over Gen. James Oglethorpe with 100 settlers to establish the town of Savannah. Some of the regulations imposed by the trustees were more idealistic than realistic. Slavery was prohibited; the importation of rum, brandy, and other strong drink was forbidden; and, to prevent the growth of large estates, every charity colonist was restricted to 50 acres (20 hectares) of land, which he might transmit only to a male heir. This benevolent paternalism retarded the growth of Georgia. The settlers quickly found that they needed larger units of land for economic tillage and that slave labour would be advantageous. They wanted to exchange their lumber for importations of rum from the West Indies. The trustees gradually liberalized their rules, while in 1751 they allowed the colonists to elect an assembly. The following year, when their tenure of the proprietorship lapsed, they made no effort to renew it but allowed the crown to take over Georgia.
As a crown colony it still remained so weak that it needed constant subsidies. Its agriculture became more and more like that of South Carolina, and it developed a society of slave-owning planters in the lowlands, merchants in Savannah, and small farmers in the uplands. But the philanthropists had accomplished three valuable results: they had saved a considerable number of neglected and abused people, they had maintained a buffer between the other southern colonies and Spanish Florida, and they had laid the foundations for one of the greatest of the southern states.
New shapes of colonial development
In the 80 years between 1660 and 1740, three great new forces began to reshape the British colonies in North America. They were the economic regulations embodied in the Acts of Trade and Navigation, the partial systematization of imperial administration, and the contest with the French for dominion over the continent. By the year 1700 the colonists probably numbered about 250,000 and were increasing at a rate that has seldom been equaled in the history of Western nations. Immigration, early marriages, the economic value of children in an agricultural society, and the relatively high level of health sped this growth.
Under the concept of mercantilism generally accepted by western Europe, English economic policy regarded the colonies as part of an imperial whole which should aim at self-sufficiency and a favourable trade balance. Each part of the empire had something to give and something to receive. This policy was first embodied in three Navigation Acts by Parliament in 1651, 1660, and 1663. The law of 1651 provided that all goods imported into England or the colonies must be carried in ships of which the owner, captain, and crew were English (colonials, of course, were considered Englishmen). The exception to this rule was that all goods imported into England and the colonies from Europe might come in ships of the country which produced the goods. The law of 1660, strengthening the first, required that ships used in carrying goods in and out of England must be built as well as owned and manned in England or the colonies. It also required that certain “enumerated articles,” of which sugar, tobacco, and indigo were the chief, be sold only to England or to other colonies. To give the colonists full control of the home market, no one could grow tobacco in England or import it from a foreign land. The law of 1663 was more serious. It stipulated that European goods must be shipped to the colonies through England and thus made it necessary for many colonial merchants to add an extra leg to their voyages.
Many colonists attempted to evade these acts. They shipped enumerated articles to Europe instead of to England, and they imported European goods directly from Europe without stopping in English ports. New laws of 1673 and 1696 were then passed by Parliament to end the evasions. Moreover, the list of enumerated articles was lengthened, so that by the year 1721 rice, molasses, naval stores (tar, pitch, and turpentine), furs, and copper, all important to the colonies, had been placed under control. In 1733 the British Parliament adopted a still more serious measure, the Molasses Act, which placed heavy duties on all sugar, molasses, rum, and other spirits imported into the colonies from the French, Dutch, and Spanish possessions. The object was to restrict trade to the British West Indies. Had it been enforced, this law would have been disastrous, for the colonies exchanged large quantities of fish, lumber, meat, and foodstuffs with the foreign islands for these commodities. Fortunately, the British government winked at the wholesale violations.
Other irksome restrictions on the colonies concerned manufactures, for the mother country wished to preserve the colonial market for its own industries. The Wool Act of 1699 prohibited the shipment of woolen fabrics across any colonial boundary. The Hat Act of 1732 similarly forbade any colony to export its hats and limited the number of apprentices. Late in the colonial period the Iron Act of 1750 stopped the erection in the colonies of rolling and slitting mills, forges, and iron-making plants. Like all new communities, the colonies needed a more abundant currency than they had and wished to print paper money, but the British authorities feared an inflation which would hurt British creditors and raise the price of colonial exports. In 1751 they therefore forbade the issuance of paper money by New England and in 1764 applied the ban to the other colonies.
But the mercantilist enactments had many features favourable to the colonies, and in total effect they were far from harsh. The navigation laws fostered shipbuilding in the colonies. A number of important American products were given a monopoly of the British market. Colonial pig iron and bar iron were admitted to Great Britain without duty. British bounties were paid on the production of naval stores. These facts, coupled with the salutary neglect of the colonies introduced by Robert Walpole and the nonenforcement of the more onerous laws, permitted a steady development of American economic life. The colonists meanwhile had the protection of the British army and navy. Nevertheless, two facts respecting the acts of trade had their bearing on later events. First, the colonies, like most frontier agricultural communities, were plainly exploited by the older countries both as a source of low-priced raw materials and as a market for manufactured wares—and, like other frontier lands, they resented the fact. Second, widespread law evasion fostered in the colonists a spirit of disobedience and insubordination.
