MAN AND LAND IN THE UNITED STATES

There is another relation of man to land, however, which shall be the focus of our book: under what social arrangements, laws, and customs has man been allowed to use the land, and how has he in fact used it. This is more properly a man-man relationship than it is a man-land one. Men, acting through the tribe, or the family, or the government, have set up rules under which other men are allowed to own, sell, buy, lease, inherit, and otherwise use land for their benefit.

Sometimes these arrangements are specific and written, perhaps highly complex and detailed; sometimes they are less definite, subject to interpretation by the stronger for their own ends. In their totality, these various arrangements constitute a system of land tenure for that time and place.

And, following the success of the American Revolution:

Some specific consequences for land flowed rather immediately out of the victory. Tory estates were confiscated, subdivided, and sold to farmers, to help raise money to repay the costs of the war. Some, but by no means all, large landowners had been Tories, and subdivision of their estates meant a further strengthening of the landowning farmer. As we have noted, quitrents and certain restrictions on land inheritance were abolished, thus moving further in the direction of freedom in land ownership. During and after the war, grants of land were made to soldiers as a reward for their military service. In many cases, these soldiers sold their land rights, thus setting the stage for extensive land speculation and for the building of new large landholdings.

The indirect consequences of the Revolution, as far as land was concerned, were greater and more enduring. The whole pattern of public land ownership and disposal, and of private land ownership and use, which we shall describe in more detail in later chapters, grew naturally and more or less inevitably out of the attitudes toward land that had evolved during the colonial period and which were strengthened—one may almost say solidified—as a result of the Revolution.