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Show 42 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Because of the high quitrents, owners were careful in arranging their surveys to eliminate gullies, swamps, and other undesirable land, preferring level, well-drained land close to streams. The result was that boundaries commonly took fantastic shapes, although the regulations attempted to require that they be in rectangular form. "Stringing" was the expression employed to denote the efforts of grantees to exclude poor lands. Because of the absence of prior rectangular surveys, the boundaries mentioned in the warrants were vague and, when run out, could be made to include much more than the acreage granted. The surpluses thus acquired reduced the proprietor's income both from sales and from quitrents. Efforts to compel grantees to surrender their surplus land and to take new patents for the exact amount intended were not altogether successful. Naturally, in Maryland the relatively high quitrents became a source of friction between the proprietor's representatives and the people. In most Colonies the complaint was that the local land system tended to drive immigrants to other areas. This charge was made in Maryland, although the density of its population as shown by the census of 1790 suggests that it suffered little, if at all, from this factor.27 Large Grants of New York New York's land system, if it can be called that, was in sharp contrast to that of Virginia and the southern Colonies, as well as to that of the New England Colonies. In New York, revenue and even promotion of settlement were of minor importance. Instead, the emphasis was on large grants to members of the governor's council and other favorite individuals and families, with all settlement or improvement requirements quite generally disregarded. Only one of the Dutch patroon- 17 Useful for Maryland are Clarence P. Gould, The Land System in Maryland, 1720-1765 (Baltimore, 1913); and Charles A. Barker, The Background of the Revolution in Maryland (New Haven, Conn., 1940). ships-Rensselaerswyck-with its manorial tenures, its hundreds of tenants, and its three-quarters of a million acres survived the Revolution. In its long and turbulent career, it became the object of agrarian attacks and the cause of a number of political and constitutional crises in New York State. After displacing the Dutch in control of New York, the English were not far behind them in making lavish grants on Long Island, up the Hudson, and later along the Mohawk, the Schoharie, and far north to the St. Lawrence. Among these grants were the Philipsburgh manor of 156,000 acres; the Highland patent of 205,000 acres; the Livingston manor of 160,000 acres; the Kayeraderosseras patent of 400,000 acres; the Hardenburgh patent of 1 million acres; and the Evans patent of 512,000 acres, which was forfeited.28 These were only the beginning. The land business became a profitable institution in New York, not to the Duke of York or to the Crown, but to the officers of the Colony for whom the land fees were a rich source of income. It was to the officers' advantage to speed the process of granting lands and to make the grants as large as possible because the fees were in proportion to size. The governor and members of his council also could insist on being included in many of the larger requests for grants. In this way, George Clarke was able to accumulate most of his 117,662 acres.29 The indefinite boundaries given in these early New York patents enabled the grantees to stretch their claims by many thousands of acres. Such vagueness naturally led here, as in Virginia and other southern Colonies, to a great deal of litigation. A contemporary who was looking for land for a friend in 1764 in an area where Indians still menaced and speculators were grabbing off everything, wrote that he was fearful lest "the One take your Scalp, the other your Estate in Law 28 Ruth L. Higgins, Expansion in New York (Columbus, Ohio, 1931), passim. 19 Edith M. Fox, Land Speculation in the Mohawk Country (Ithaca, N. Y., 1949), passim. |