American Nightmare. Randal O'Toole

Kentish system allowed vassals to buy land from the king or lord with one “simple fee” (the word fee being derived from fief), which became known as fee simple ownership. Kentish tenure generally relied on gavelkind, but landowners could specify a different division in their will and could also entail land when willing it to their children. In contrast to fee simple land that could be sold, entailed land was known as fee tail.

      Colonial Homeownership

      In 1629, King Charles I granted land to Massachusetts colonists “as of our manor of Eastgreenewich, in the County of Kent, in free and common Socage, and not in Capite, nor by knightes service.” Colonists interpreted that to mean they could use Kentish rules rather than feudalistic (“knightes service,” meaning military service) rules. “Socage” nominally meant the land recipients would pay rent to the king, but the charter specified that the only rent to be paid was one-fifth of all gold and silver mined from the land—which, since Massachusetts has insignificant amounts of gold and silver, meant no rent at all.²⁰

      Later English grants specified that socage meant the land was “to be held forever in fee without any incumbrance forever.” “The holding of land in free and common socage implied the retention of all produce,” observe historians Michael Doucet and John Weaver. “Ownership by freehold meant the independence to devise and to alienate, and consequently fed a trust in the worth of improving one’s land. It also meant living without the practices of deference toward landlords.” ²¹

      In 1618, Virginia offered 50 acres to every family who moved from England to the colony. Other provinces were even more generous: Maryland initially offered 100 acres for every head of family, 100 for his wife, and 50 for every child under the age of 16. In 1663, Carolina Province offered 100 acres for every man plus 50 acres for his male servants and 30 acres for female servants. Pennsylvania offered 50 acres for every servant, and the servant received another 50 acres when his or her term of service expired.²² ,

      Similar charters were granted for most of the other colonies or provinces, as some were known at the time. As applied by the trustees for each province, primogeniture ruled in seven colonies—Georgia, Maryland, New York, North and South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia—and gavelkind in the rest.²³ However, Pennsylvania and most New England states tended to follow Mosaic law in giving the eldest son twice the land of other sons.²⁴

      All the provinces allowed landowners to entail their properties in their wills, and many of them required entail in their original land grants to settlers. The trustees for the Province of Georgia, for example, gave land to settlers, but added an entail requirement out of the fear that, if settlers were allowed to sell their land, a few people would accumulate most of the land.²⁵ Entail discouraged people from borrowing money against the value of their land. Creditors could not take a debtor’s land unless the debtor had specifically pledged the land as collateral, and even then only after going through a tedious and costly legal process.

      Despite what the Georgia trustees believed, these customs kept much of the land concentrated in a few hands. Although colonists could theoretically circumvent primogeniture by preparing a will, many had no desire to do so and, especially near the end of the colonial period, the cost of doing so was increasingly high.²⁶ What all these measures meant was that the great majority of colonists did not own their own homes.

      Lack of ownership did not prevent thousands of people from simply farming land they found. From Massachusetts to South Carolina, squatters occupied some 100,000 acres of land as early as 1725. “Both [German and Scotch-Irish immigrants] sitt frequently down on any spott of vacant Land they can find, without asking questions,” learned John Penn—the only son of William Penn born in America— from his business secretary John Logan in 1727. “They say the Proprietor [meaning William Penn] invited People to come and settle his Country, that they are come for that end and must live; both they and the Palatines pretend they would buy but not one in twenty has anything to pay with.” Two years later, Logan again mentioned that “the settlement of those vast nos. of poor but presumptuous People who, without any License, have entered on your Lands, and neither have nor are likely to have anything to purchase with.”²⁷

      Although the vast majority of colonials were rural farmers, a small percentage lived in cities. In this preindustrial time, most city dwellers were middle-class traders, and some scholars believe that urban homeownership rates were very high during the colonial era. Most city residents were involved in either trade or politics, giving them incomes that were well above the subsistence levels experienced by many rural residents. One study found that 72 percent of New York City taxpayers owned their homes in 1703, but that home-ownership rates declined after 1730.²⁸ In any case, urban residents were such a small percentage of the nation’s population that their homeownership rates have little influence on the totals.

      At the time of the Revolution, it is likely that roughly half of American families owned their homes, the land they farmed, or both— though this number might be lower if all were asked to provide a legal title to their lands. Conflicts over squatters and the disposal of large land grants presaged debates over home- and landownership in post–Revolutionary America. Although many of the young nation’s leaders had an egalitarian spirit and wished to increase the share of Americans who owned their own farms and homes, the nation was slow to make government-owned lands available for such ownership. The result was homeownership rates that fell below 50 percent soon after the Revolution and remained there until after World War II.

       2. The Agrarian Dream

      Thomas Jefferson may have been the first to express what has become known as the American dream of homeownership. “It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land,” he wrote to James Madison in 1785. “The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”¹ At that time, Jefferson’s ideal was near-universal farm ownership, rather than what we think of as urban homeownership, but the sentiment remains the same.

      The Agrarian Myth

      Many historians and popular writers make much of the fact that Jefferson, in the 1780s, believed that the United States should be a nation of farmers. They have built this belief up into a mythical “agrarian movement” that somehow stood up against Alexander Hamilton and others who would turn America into a nation of mercenary bankers and filthy industrialists—with an unwritten and sometimes written regret that the agrarians lost.

      Jefferson did express a preference for farmers in 1785. “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens,” Jefferson wrote to John Jay in that year. “They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.”² Widespread farm ownership, Jefferson thought, would lead to better government. “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural,” he wrote to Madison in 1787. “When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”³

      In the 1780s, Jefferson apparently believed that subsistence farmers were more self-sufficient than office or factory workers, and thereby more inclined to liberty. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” Jefferson wrote in the early 1780s, while “dependence begets subservience and venality.”⁴ “Jefferson is saying that it is impossible to corrupt an entire nation so long as the majority of its citizens are small landowners, dispersed across the landscape, dependent on no one but themselves for their livelihood,” comments environmental historian Donald Worster.⁵

      Jefferson himself was a farmer, but the fact that he romanticized that occupation does not mean that there was a significant anti-industrial, pro-agrarian movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. “Jefferson was not an agrarian fundamentalist,” says one historian. “He did move with his times.”⁶ The myth of Jeffersonian agrarianism sprang up around 1943, the bicentennial of Jefferson’s birth, and was probably influenced by the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers featured in a 1930 book titled I’ll Take My Stand: The South