Work Argument<\/strong><\/p>\nA rift opened between those who thought it an injustice that a hard worker should receive no more food than a feeble one and those, like Cushman, who denounced anyone who worshipped the \u2018\u2018belly-god\u2019\u2019 of selfishness instead of seeking \u2018\u2018the good, the wealthe, the profit, of others.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
This was not anticipated by the merchants of London and Plymouth who invested in the company. They had expected the settlement to operate as a trading post, acquiring salt cod and beaver skins for sale in Britain. The desire for religious freedom was what drove the tiny band of separatist Puritans to accept the contract to be shipped across the Atlantic. Neither side thought the ownership of land to be of any importance.<\/p>\n
Beset by quarrels and threatened by starvation, the colony struggled on until the spring of 1623. With a new planting season at hand, the majority decided to change the company rules. They persuaded the governor that \u2018\u2018they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves,\u2019\u2019 Bradford noted in his history of the Plymouth colony. And so each family was assigned a parcel of land \u2018\u2018according to the proportion of their number.\u2019\u2019
\nThis decision, Bradford added, \u2018\u2018had very good success for it made all hands very industrious.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Smaller matters had been debated and resolved before, but that this, the first major democratic decision taken on American soil, should have been in favor of individual ownership carried a symbolism that echoes down the centuries.<\/p>\n
The failed experiment in communal ownership convinced Bradford that it was contrary to human nature. Yet he found that the new regime came at a cost. \u2018\u2018And no man now thought he could live except he had catle and a great deale of ground to keep them all,\u2019\u2019 he observed sadly, \u2018\u2018all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scattered all over the bay quickly and the towne in which they lived compactly till now was left very thinne.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Ownership Impossible<\/strong><\/p>\nAmong many settled animist cultures, including the Wampanaog people on whose land the Pilgrims had come to live, parcels of ground could be used and occupied by individual families, even passed on to the next generation, often from mothers to daughters, but exclusive ownership was impossible. Massasoit, a Wampanaog leader who befriended later settlers, used an analogy common in such cultures to explain why: \u2018\u2018The land is our mother,\u2019\u2019 he said, \u2018\u2018nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
A similar belief that people could use but not possess the earth held good under Judaic law, springing from Yahweh\u2019s commandment in the book of Leviticus that \u2018\u2018the land is mine\u2019\u2019 and that mortals, as mere \u2018\u2018strangers and sojourners,\u2019\u2019 were unable to own it. Islam adopted the same view, incorporating it into Shariah. Even in cultures where land could be owned in secular terms, it belonged to the human ruler, the monarch, emperor or khan, who represented divine power on earth.<\/p>\n
The feudal system in Christian Europe understood the contract between lord and tenant to be part of a chain of mutual obligation leading through the chief barons to the king, who granted them use of the territory he ruled by the grace of God.<\/p>\n
Thus a relationship with the earth that began as a spiritual connection ended as a contract on which constitutional authority ultimately rested.<\/p>\n
The experience of the Plymouth colony played heavily on the minds of the 700 Puritans who assembled in Southampton in March 1630 to take ship to Massachusetts Bay. Many, including their governor, John Winthrop, had left comfortable homes that were furnished with fireplaces and private bedrooms and surrounded by enclosed fields. They were under no illusions about the hard conditions ahead.<\/p>\n
The original Pilgrims had had nothing to lose, but those in the second wave were giving up security and worldly achievement. They had a pressing need to know that braving the dangers and harsh climate would win them the freedom not only to worship as Puritans but also to live in a new English society where land could be individually owned. The question was whether a concept recognized by English common law could exist in the American wilderness.<\/p>\n
Natural Right<\/strong><\/p>\nTo reassure them, Winthrop put forward a revolutionary proposal, usually ascribed to John Locke half a century later. In a pamphlet published in 1629, he argued that private ownership of the earth did not depend upon the law, but was created by human toil. He constructed this novel explanation by weaving together Puritan doctrines and the pragmatic outlook of the enclosers. \u2018\u2018God has given to the sonnes of men a double right to the earth,\u2019\u2019 Winthrop declared, \u2018\u2018a natural right, and a Civill Right.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Winthrop was breaking new ground when he asserted that the purely English civil or legal right to own land as private property came about when men enclosed and improved that land. The natural right was established by use and occupancy.
\nIt must have seemed a convincing argument to readers who had heard from their grandparents firsthand accounts of the way enclosure had enabled common ground to be converted into legally recognized property. And few would have quarreled with Winthrop\u2019s conclusion: \u2018\u2018As for the Natives of New England they inclose noe land neither have any settled habitation nor any tame cattle to improve the land by, & soe have noe other but a natural right to those countries. Soe as if we leave them sufficient for their use wee may lawfully take the rest, ther being more than enough for them & us.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Yet because Puritans were guided by conscience in such matters, they sought their ultimate authority not in the law but in the Bible. As they waited in Southampton before sailing to America, they heard a sermon from the Reverend John Cotton that gave private property the biblical backing they needed to hear.
\nCotton\u2019s sermon was based on a passage in the book of Genesis about Abraham\u2019s search for a place to settle among the Philistines. When he was prevented from using a well he had dug in the dry land of Beersheba, Abraham appealed to the Philistine king, Abimelech, claiming that he had the right to draw water because he was the person who had sunk the well. In Cotton\u2019s sermon, however, Abraham also made a specific claim of individual ownership, based on \u2018\u2018his owne industry and culture in digging the well.\u201d In other words, there was biblical evidence to reassure the new Americans that their right to individually owned, landed property depended on their own efforts in improving the ground, and not on English law.<\/p>\n
If property was created by individual effort, and not just by the king\u2019s \u201cmere motion,\u201d then there was another authority in the land whose power rivaled that of the royal prerogative. And it was one that everyone possessed.<\/p>\n
Measurement Change<\/strong><\/p>\nIn every country where the concept of individually owned landed property has taken hold, one unmistakable indicator of its arrival has been provided by a change in the way land is measured.<\/p>\n
In a localized, peasant economy where the earth was valued primarily for its ability to support people, measurements that varied according to the fertility of the soil provided the most useful indication of what a farmer needed to know. Around the world, the amount of seed that had to be sown to feed a family from the harvest provided a basic and perhaps primeval unit of measurement of the earth. Even in the 20th century, fields in Guangdong Province next to Hong Kong continued to be measured in \u201cdou,\u201d roughly equivalent to a quarter of a bushel of rice, while up the mid-19th century land in New Mexico was computed by the \u201cfanega,\u201d approximately two bushels of wheat.<\/p>\n
But in a market involving buyers with no local knowledge, an objective, unchanging quality such as area allowed strangers to compare the value of different commodities. Thus one unmistakable indicator that a true market in land had developed was the appearance of exact, invariable measurement in place of local, organic units.<\/p>\n
The need for accurate measurement was met by a new breed of surveyor, not the old feudal \u201coverseer\u201d who ensured that rents were in line with the productivity of the land, but \u201cmeasurers\u201d equipped with instruments akin to theodolites and compasses, and employing mathematical innovations such as trigonometry.<\/p>\n
As surveyors gave shape to property, a subtle change in mortgage law allowed it to be translated into financial muscle. In its old use, a mortgage meant \u201cdead pledge,\u201d signifying that a borrower automatically forfeited his land if he failed to repay the money in full on the specified date. As Thomas Lyttleton, the leading legal authority of the 16th century, put it, \u201cIf he doth not pay, then the land which is put in pledge upon condition for the payment of the money, is taken from him for ever, and so is dead to him.\u201d<\/p>\n
The forfeiture of an entire property as a penalty for failing to repay every penny that had been borrowed naturally struck the new landowners as inequitable. Sympathetic judges began to interpret the law so that failure to repay the debt at the required date did not totally extinguish an owner\u2019s title to the land. Instead, under the principle known as \u201cthe equity of redemption,\u201d the courts ruled that so long as a borrower paid off the mortgage, even years late, he could reclaim his property.<\/p>\n
Modern mortgage law grew out of this interpretation, but so too did modern finance. To regain his money, the lender now had to get a writ to foreclose, forcing the borrower to sell the land. Once the debt was paid, however, the remainder of the proceeds belonged to the former landowner. This was his equity in the land. As the new idea took hold during the 17th century, equity, meaning fairness, would gradually morph into equity, meaning capital.<\/p>\n
(Andro Linklater is the author of \u201cMeasuring America,\u201d \u201cThe Fabric of America\u201d and \u201cWhy Spencer Perceval Had to Die.\u201d This is an excerpt from his latest book, \u201cOwning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership,\u201d which will be published Nov. 12 by Bloomsbury. Linklater died on Nov. 3.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Article: When Pilgrims Privatized America by Andro Linklater in Bloomberg. The Text: The 102 Pilgrims who sailed to the New World in 1620 were destined to be communists. Under the terms of their agreement with the Plymouth company, they were to work communally for the first seven years, \u2018\u2018during which time, all profits & […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n