June 14, 2005
Land Grants
 | Martha's discussion of land tenure has got me thinking about Fatal Shore again. While the assignment system was in a sense the lineal descendant of seventeenth-century indentured servitude in the New World, there were some important differences. |
The thing that surprised me most about the assignment system was the notion of a "ticket-of-leave." These were paroles granted around four years into a seven-year sentence, or six years into a fourteen. Hughes writes of cruel masters provoking servants into punishable acts in order to get an extra year's labor out of them by delaying the grant of the ticket. In Virginia, remissions of sentence were rare, since masters had a property right in the full term of their servants' labor. This didn't quite sate their appetite for labor, however, and the laws reflected that. Morgan writes: "The penalty for killing a hog was 1000 pounds of tobacco or a year's service to the owner and 1000 pounds or a year's service to the informer". Similarly, the penalty to a maidservant for childbirth was an additional two years added to her service, presumably to reimburse her master for labor lost.
Hughes paints a picture of the rise of an Emancipist party in Australia, fighting for the rights of freedmen. I suppose the same could be said of the dynamics behind Bacon's Rebellion, except that the control over land was essential there. What value does owning land have if you neither cultivate it nor rent it? According to Morgan, it pays by depriving other people of its use:
[A nominal planting] sufficed to establish a man's claim to a tract, however large. As a result, the land still appeared to visitors to be "one continued wood." John Clayton in 1684 observed that "every one covets so much and there is such vast extent of land that they spread so far they cannot manage well a hundredth part of what they have"Managed or not, the acres were owned. And the servants who became free after 1660 found it increasingly difficult to locate workable land that was not already claimed.
. . .
Perhaps more important than the actual rent obtained by Virginia's landlords was the effect of the artificial scarcity of land in keeping freedmen available for hire. If a man could not get land without paying rent for it, he might be obliged to go back to work for another man simply to stay alive.
The Victorian bureaucracy regulating land grants in Australia isn't described in detail by Hughes. I gather that the system of political patronage responsible for assigning "government men" was also responsible for land grants, with all the arbitrariness and cronyism that entails. Given the alternative, that might have been a good thing.
Posted by Ben Brumfield at June 14, 2005 08:32 PM