A plot of their own

What happened

By 1623 Plymouth had spent its first years farming a common field for the London company that financed the voyage, and it had spent them hungry. Every hand worked the same ground and drew from the same store, and the young men resented laboring for other men's wives and children with nothing to show for it. Governor William Bradford wrote that the old way bred "much confusion and discontent." So for that year's corn the colony changed the rule. Bradford assigned every family a parcel of land, one acre a head drawn by lot, to plant for itself. The change was immediate. It made all hands industrious, Bradford wrote, and the women, who had pleaded weakness when the work was shared, now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to set corn. Far more corn was planted than ever before. Rothbard leans on this passage because of who wrote it, calling it "eloquent testimony from a governor scarcely biased a priori in favor of individualism" (CiL, p. 152). In 1627 the company's seven-year common system ran out and the land was divided among the colonists for good, which, Rothbard says, greatly benefited the colony's productivity. People work harder and better on what is their own, and Plymouth learned it the hard way.