American Nightmare. Randal O'Toole

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СКАЧАТЬ laws and customs. Many of those city-states, including Athens, allowed and encouraged private ownership of farms. Farm ownership was vested with families, not individuals, and lacked one of the sticks we generally associate with private ownership: the right to sell the land. Instead, the land was tied to the family in perpetuity (or, in actual practice, until a foreign invader changed the system of property rights, generally by putting most land in the hands of a few people).¹⁷ This system of private ownership proved to be very productive, and farm productivity notably declined when it was replaced by a system of absentee owners over large areas.¹⁸

      Ancient Rome, too, had a system of private property rights that probably contributed to that empire’s success. Unlike the Greek system, owners could sell their property, which may be why the best lands were eventually held by a few powerful families.

      Medieval Homeownership

      Roman rule of Britannia influenced English property law for several centuries after the fall of Rome. That law, which became known as the Anglo-Saxon common law, gave landowners the right to sell their land and to will it to whomever they wished. When William the Conqueror successfully invaded England in 1066, however, he overturned those laws and declared that all land in the kingdom belonged to him.¹⁹ He thereby introduced the feudal system to Britain in which he as king would grant lands to his lords. They in turn would divide lands among their vassals who would each manage a piece of land known as a fief. The vassals and lords paid rents, promised military service, or provided other services to their lord or king.

      Feudal land grants came with reservations, two of which were primogeniture and entail. Primogeniture required that only the eldest son could inherit the land (in some countries, but not England, the eldest daughter could inherit if there were no sons). Entail prohibited landowners from selling their land. In effect, the land grants were to families, not individuals, and these reservations kept most land in the hands of a few aristocrats.

      One alternative to primogeniture is known as gavelkind, in which land was equally divided among all the children (or, at least, all the male children). Gavel meant “payment” in Middle English, and English land courts typically accompanied a decision about payments by striking a rock. Today, gavel has come to mean the hammer doing the striking. In any case, although gavelkind might seem more just than primogeniture, it also meant that properties became more and more chopped up into smaller pieces. Primogeniture prevailed in England for any estates where the owner died without a will until 1926, whereas Wales relied on gavelkind, which some say is one reason why England was able to conquer Wales in the late 13th century.

      The strongest resistance to William’s changes came from the county of Kent. To avoid bloodshed, William agreed to allow Kent to keep the Anglo-Saxon rules (leading the county to adopt the motto invicta, meaning “undefeated”). Thus, the Anglo-Saxon rules allowing individual ownership are sometimes known as “Kentish tenure.” Rather than deal with annual rents or military obligations, the Kentish system allowed vassals to buy land from the king or lord with one “simple fee” (the word fee being derived from fief), which became known as fee simple ownership. Kentish tenure generally relied on gavelkind, but landowners could specify a different division in their will and could also entail land when willing it to their children. In contrast to fee simple land that could be sold, entailed land was known as fee tail.

      Colonial Homeownership

      In 1629, King Charles I granted land to Massachusetts colonists “as of our manor of Eastgreenewich, in the County of Kent, in free and common Socage, and not in Capite, nor by knightes service.” Colonists interpreted that to mean they could use Kentish rules rather than feudalistic (“knightes service,” meaning military service) rules. “Socage” nominally meant the land recipients would pay rent to the king, but the charter specified that the only rent to be paid was one-fifth of all gold and silver mined from the land—which, since Massachusetts has insignificant amounts of gold and silver, meant no rent at all.²⁰

      Later English grants specified that socage meant the land was “to be held forever in fee without any incumbrance forever.” “The holding of land in free and common socage implied the retention of all produce,” observe historians Michael Doucet and John Weaver. “Ownership by freehold meant the independence to devise and to alienate, and consequently fed a trust in the worth of improving one’s land. It also meant living without the practices of deference toward landlords.” ²¹

      In 1618, Virginia offered 50 acres to every family who moved from England to the colony. Other provinces were even more generous: Maryland initially offered 100 acres for every head of family, 100 for his wife, and 50 for every child under the age of 16. In 1663, Carolina Province offered 100 acres for every man plus 50 acres for his male servants and 30 acres for female servants. Pennsylvania offered 50 acres for every servant, and the servant received another 50 acres when his or her term of service expired.²² ,

      Similar charters were granted for most of the other colonies or provinces, as some were known at the time. As applied by the trustees for each province, primogeniture ruled in seven colonies—Georgia, Maryland, New York, North and South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia—and gavelkind in the rest.²³ However, Pennsylvania and most New England states tended to follow Mosaic law in giving the eldest son twice the land of other sons.²⁴

      All the provinces allowed landowners to entail their properties in their wills, and many of them required entail in their original land grants to settlers. The trustees for the Province of Georgia, for example, gave land to settlers, but added an entail requirement out of the fear that, if settlers were allowed to sell their land, a few people would accumulate most of the land.²⁵ Entail discouraged people from borrowing money against the value of their land. Creditors could not take a debtor’s land unless the debtor had specifically pledged the land as collateral, and even then only after going through a tedious and costly legal process.

      Despite what the Georgia trustees believed, these customs kept much of the land concentrated in a few hands. Although colonists could theoretically circumvent primogeniture by preparing a will, many had no desire to do so and, especially near the end of the colonial period, the cost of doing so was increasingly high.²⁶ What all these measures meant was that the great majority of colonists did not own their own homes.

      Lack of ownership did not prevent thousands of people from simply farming land they found. From Massachusetts to South Carolina, squatters occupied some 100,000 acres of land as early as 1725. “Both [German and Scotch-Irish immigrants] sitt frequently down on any spott of vacant Land they can find, without asking questions,” learned John Penn—the only son of William Penn born in America— from his business secretary John Logan in 1727. “They say the Proprietor [meaning William Penn] invited People to come and settle his Country, that they are come for that end and must live; both they and the Palatines pretend they would buy but not one in twenty has anything to pay with.” Two years later, Logan again mentioned that “the settlement of those vast nos. of poor but presumptuous People who, without any License, have entered on your Lands, and neither have nor are likely to have anything to purchase with.”²⁷

      Although the vast majority of colonials were rural farmers, a small percentage lived in cities. In this preindustrial time, most city dwellers were middle-class traders, and some scholars believe that urban homeownership rates were very high during the colonial era. Most city residents were involved in either trade or politics, giving them incomes that were well above the subsistence levels experienced by many rural residents. One study found that 72 percent of New York City taxpayers owned their homes in 1703, but that home-ownership rates declined after 1730.²⁸ In any case, urban residents were such a small percentage of the nation’s population that their homeownership rates have little influence on the totals.

      At the time of the Revolution, it is likely that roughly half of American families owned their homes, the land they farmed, or both— though this number СКАЧАТЬ