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Show 46 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT the least attractive to emigrants. This was not the case, however. From the outset these Colonies, with 19 percent of the land in the Original States, had the densest population and throughout the colonial period they maintained their lead. Various geographic, economic, and religious factors have to be taken into account in explaining the steady growth of New England. Not the least in importance was her land policy. Her township grants, given free to proprietors, made for compact, orderly settlement accompanied by the growth of towns that provided a market for the surplus products of her farms. Though speculation in proprietors' rights became common in the 18th century and some land was sold, on the whole the New England land system encouraged small family-owned farms, few large estates, and little tenancy. Not to be neglected are the grants for higher education. In 1619 the Virginia Company had set aside 10,000 acres on the James River for a university and sent servants as tenants to develop the property and produce revenue. One-tenth of the land was to be used to aid in the conversion of infidels. Later, King William and Queen Mary gave 20,000 acres for the institution which was named after them and the Colony voted to allot one-sixth of the surveyors' fees to it. In New England, Harvard College received an endowment of 3,300 acres from Massachusetts. New Hampshire gave Dartmouth College 40,960 acres and Pennsylvania, after 1786, made a series of grants of 5,000 to 10,000 acres to Dickinson College, Franklin College, and Reading Academy.41 41 Joseph Shafer, "The Origins of the System of Land Grants for Education," Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, History Series, I (Madison, Wis., 1908), 5 ff.; Akagi, op. cit., p. 208; Benjamin H. Hibbard, History of the Public Land Policies (New York, 1924), p. 308; Harris, op. cit., pp. 270-71; Matthias Nordberg Orfield, Federal Land Grants to the States with Special Reference to Minnesota {University of Minnesota Studies in the Social Sciences, No. 2; Minneapolis, Minn., 1915), pp. 7-21; Hening, Statutes, XI, 310. Period of Diverse Policies Characteristic features of the colonial land policies were: proprietors' township grants in New England; large grants to favorites to be developed by tenants in New York; sales in large and small tracts in Pennsylvania; and headrights that permitted large accumulations of land in the South. Prescribed limitations on acreage and early requirements of "seating" or settlement were disregarded, resulting in extensive, slightly developed estates and a thin, widely dispersed population. At the same time, there were many small holdings, partly the result of the fragmentation of speculative holdings and partly the result of headrights. Only in the proprietary Colonies was there any reluctance to dispose of land as fast as there was a demand for it. Some historians who have speculated about the reasons why the United States disposed of its landed resources with a lavish hand seem unaware of the fact that, during the century and a half preceding 1776, colonial administrators seemed bent on getting land into private ownership as speedily as possible. Residents of New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were certain that the economic development of these states had been retarded by the land policies of the proprietors and governing authorities. Thousands of land-hungry Scotch-Irish immigrants who might have settled in these states moved down the valley of Virginia to North Carolina and later to Kentucky and Tennessee, thereby pushing the frontier westward into a great bulge in this middle region. Behind them were the courts of Virginia, cluttered with land cases, ejectment suits, and mortgage foreclosures, the product of speculative holdings and of overlapping grants. Dispersion of the population produced frequent Indian uprisings and massacres, especially where the title of aborigines had not been secured before the whites penetrated into their grounds. Many settlers on the frontier were practically isolated, out of touch with settled communities, |
