Headright System

3 Key excerpts on "Headright System"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Mother Earth

  Land Grants in Virginia, 1607-1699

  • Walter Stitt Robinson(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  The combined variations in the operation of the Headright System resulted in the distortion, if not destruction, of its original concepts. The system continued to bring immigrants into the colony which had been a very important purpose when inaugurated. But the abuses threw out of balance the relation between patented land and the number of people in the colony; and furthermore through perversion of the system, speculation in land was not prevented and there resulted large areas of wholly uncultivated and uninhabited lands to which title had been granted. The headright was also originally intended to apply to inhabitants of the British Isles, but by the middle of the seventeenth century the names of persons imported from Africa appeared occasionally as the basis for headright, and by the last decade of the century they were frequently found.

  The distortion of the Headright System was done with considerable public approval and in some ways reflected the evolution of economic development that seemed to demand a more convenient and less expensive method for obtaining title to large areas of unoccupied land. As the population of the colony increased and as the labor supply became more plentiful, there was a rather widespread demand to be able to obtain additional land, particularly adjacent undeveloped tracts, without having to import an additional person for every fifty acres. Partly through this demand, impetus was given to the custom, which was not at first sanctioned by law, to permit the granting of patents by simply paying a fee in the secretary's office.

  While the Headright System was designed to maintain some proportion between the population of the colony and the amount of land patented, it was also designed to stimulate the migration of immigrants to the colony. Therefore, under the system it was possible for individuals who would engage in transporting or financing the transportation of immigrants to obtain large areas of land. This trend was started under the company; and in the four years prior to 1623, forty-four patents of 5,000 acres each were awarded to persons who were to transport at least 100 immigrants to the colony. In 1621, for example, 5,000 acres were granted to Arthur Swain and Nathaniel Basse and a similar grant to Rowland Truelove and "divers other patentees" each grant to be based on the transportation of 100 persons; 15,000 acres were to go to Sir George Yeardley for engaging to transport 300 persons.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Jefferson's Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion

  • Christopher Michael Curtis(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In return, the settlers received a headright for which they were required to pay an annual quitrent of one shilling. In addition to providing a stable labor force for the production of tobacco, the system allowed for the relatively easy acquisition of land and thereby encouraged the consolidation of estates by the colonial landed elite. 22 The Headright System emerged in the heady, speculative days of the colony’s first decades but, like the tobacco crop that it supported, it quickly took root as a colonial institution. In 1634, it survived Governor John Harvey’s challenge to its legal authority when the Lords Commissioners of Foreign Plantations – headed by Archbishop William Laud – resolved a local dispute between the governor and his council by endorsing the Headright System as a legitimate form of grant. Harvey’s subsequent ouster by the colonial landholders on the coun- cil inaugurated a period that historian Anthony Parent has accurately styled as a “land grab.” In the four decades following Harvey’s expulsion, more than 2 million acres of Virginia land was patented by filing approximately 2,000 headright claims a year. The crisis of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 – an agrar- ian uprising against the colonial government by a group of landless settlers – brought an end to these permissive practices and ushered in a transformation in the colony’s land and labor policies. 23 21 TB, 5: 439 and 3: 76–77. Donald Veall, The Popular Movement for Law Reform 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Christopher Hill, “Feudal Tenures” in Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 318–326; Robert Willman, “Blackstone and the ‘Theoretical Perfection’ of English Law in the Reign of Charles II,” Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 39–70. 22 Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1896) 1: 487–571.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Understanding Long-Run Economic Growth

  Geography, Institutions, and the Knowledge Economy

  • Dora L. Costa, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Dora L. Costa, Naomi R. Lamoreaux(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  But the experience in the colonies on the North American mainland sometimes went well beyond that, with provincial authorities making obvious use of land grants to attract migrants. In the British colonies, the distribution of land was left to the individual colonies, once the land was transferred from the Crown to proprietors or the government of the crown colonies. Over time, some quite di ff erent, but persistent, regional patterns emerged. The New En-gland colonies made grants, generally of small plots, to individuals, but land grants were not directly used to attract indentured servants (as they were elsewhere)—perhaps because of the relatively small number of immigrants who came or were needed to come to the region. 31 It was in the Southern colonies (states), where staple crops such as tobacco and rice were grown and the demand for European field labor may have been especially high, that land grants were most targeted as attracting inden-tured servants and other migrants. During the seventeenth century, Virginia introduced the Headright System (grants of land to settlers, or to those who enticed others to settle) to stimulate in- migration, with the only requirement a three- year period of settlement. Indentured servant laborers who came to Virginia were generally to be granted fifty acres when their term had expired. Variants of the Headright System were adopted in Maryland and the Carolinas. The Middle Atlantic colonies of New Jersey and Pennsylvania also employed variants of the Headright System, but, in both, the grants of land were subsidized, rather than free. Late in the eighteenth century, after independence, a number of what were now state governments extended their liberal land policies to include preemption for squatters. 32 It is perhaps worth highlighting how di ff erent the attention to, and preva-lence of, land ownership was in the northern part of North America as com-pared to Europe.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book