America at 1750 by Richard Hofstadter

Author:Richard Hofstadter [Hofstadter, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80965-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

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The Hudson River was like a dagger cutting a swath of land monopoly and aristocratic domination between New England and the colonies to the south and west. The Dutch had attempted to import into New York a quasi-feudal system of ownership and control in the huge patroonships of the Hudson Valley, and the early English governors had not only confirmed the patroons’ titles but had outdone the Dutch in showing favoritism to land monopolists. Near the end of the seventeenth century, after a short interval during which grants of moderate size were common, Governor Benjamin Fletcher had handed out to favorites grants of such insolent and flamboyant extravagance that his successor, the Earl of Bellomont, found it was now all but impossible to settle the country with inhabitants, “there being no land but what must be purchased from his few grantees.” “This whole Province,” he complained, “is given away to about thirty persons in effect,” and he was not surprised to find settlers flowing out of New York when men could “buy the fee-simple lands in the Jerseys for £5 per hundred acres, and I believe as cheaply in Pennsylvania.”4 Hence, along the eastern and southern borders of New York, there were carved out in a helter-skelter fashion great blocks of land whose boundaries were drawn by fraud and maladministration as much as by design, the region along the Hudson of Pelham Manor, Scarsdale Manor, Fordham Manor, Morrisania, Cortlandt Manor, Livingston Manor, and others; and, between the Hudson and the east branch of the Delaware, another series of patents running up to as much as 300,000 acres in size. The Hardenburgh Patent in Ulster County was estimated in 1749 at over one million acres. Livingston Manor, one of the best managed of the Hudson estates, had almost 160,000.

New York landlords preferred renting to selling, and tried to hold land prices up to artificial levels which were highly unrealistic by American standards. They were sustained in this practice by the tax policies of the province, which, by not taxing unimproved lands, made it possible to hold on to large tracts for long periods without prohibitive cost. Richard Peters, the Secretary of Pennsylvania, was appalled at the contrasting policy that prevailed beyond his colony’s northern border: “I’m vastly surprised that this monstrous monopoly has never been taken notice of when the remedy appears so plain and effectual, nothing more than a tax upon each 100 acres of unimproved land which would render it impracticable for any single man to hold a very large tract, and would very soon divide these vast bodies into more useful parts.”5

But the manor lords had little difficulty in dominating the Assembly, and, counting tenants, hired laborers, indentured servants, and slaves, New York developed a numerous landless and relatively poor population. Since word had gone out that this colony was no place for a poor man, New York shared but lightly in the population boom of the post-Utrecht period, until about 1750 when it began to attract settlers, many of whom were squatters, from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

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