The Puritan Experiment in Common Ownership; G. North

Dr. North, economist, lecturer, author, cur rently is an associate of Chalcedon, an educa tional organization dedicated to Christian re search and writing. His latest book is An Introduction to Christian Economics, Craig Press, 1973. What is less known about this incident is how the little colony ever made such a disastrous deci sion in the first place. The. fact of the matter is that the colonists had never wanted to inaugurate a sys tem of totally common property. The group of British "adventur ers" that had supplied the Pilgrim exiles in Holland with traveling money and capital had insisted that the colony be made. a part of the joint-stock company. The as sets of the .colony therefore were the assets of the company, head quartered in Britain, and the ag ricultural products were to be shared equally among company members, both colonial and Brit ish. Governor Bradford was the chief agent of the company in New England; hence, he was com pelled to impose the common store house systetp.

In the original negotiations, it 209 210 THE FREEMAN April had been understood that profits would be shared by all members of the company~ but the colonists had not agreed to the sharing of hous es, gardens, and other improved land. They were informed of these terms only as they were about to leave for North America, and as they left, they sent back word to the merchant adventurers that their agents who had agreed to such terms had not been empow ered to do SO.1 But the continuing dependence upon the company for resources during the first year of the colony's existence compelled them to give in to the company's terms. 2 The story did not end in 1623, when necessity forced the hands of the colonists. In 1627, the bick ering British directors sold out their interests in the colony to the settlers for £ 1800. The settlers were to spend a decade and a half in paying oJtr their debt, and at times had to borrow extra time at rates of 30 per cent to 50 per cent.

Nevertheless, they persisted and finally repaid the debt, in 1642. In 1627, shortly after buying out the British directors, Gover nor Bradford supervised the divi sion of the eolony's assets among 1 George D. Langdon, Jr:, Pilgrim Col ony (New HavEm: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 9. 2 Ibid., p. 26. the settlers. First, they divided livestock. There were few animals, so the 156 people (less than 40 families) were divided into adoz en companies; each company re ceived a cow and two goats. In January of 1628, the land was divided, this time by random lot. Complaints about unequal housing were forestalled by requiring those who received better housing to make an equalizing payment to those receiving poorer housing. Peace was preserved. There was one decision, how ever, which was to prove costly. Meadow was in short supply, so it was kept in common ownership. Furthermore, fishing, fowling, and water remained "open" to all set tlers. 3 The Pilgrims were to have the same difficulties with the ad ministration of these common fields as their neighbors, the Puri tans, were to experience. Only after 1675, when the "commons"

throughout New England were in creasingly distributed to the fam ilies in each town, were these problems overcome. Varying Concepts of Ownership In order to understand the thinking of the first half century of New England settlers, we have to realize that these immigrants did not bring over from England some 3 Ibid., p. 31.

1974 THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT IN COMMON OWNERSHIP 211 universally accepted concept of land ownership. There was an ob vious tendency for groups of set tlers from one region in England to establish homogeneous town ships in Massachusetts. English towns had developed at least three major systems of land tenure: the open field system, the closed field system, and the incorporated bor ough. All three appeared in New England in the early years. The open field system stressed the community administration of land. It is this system which we generally associate with the word ((medieval," although the Middle Ages saw many systems of land tenure. Sumner Chilton Powell has described these systems in some detail in his fine study, Puritan Villl(J;ge. The open field system "re garded the advantages of the area as communal property, to be shared by all. Noone was to exclude a neighbor from such a necessity as good meadow, or the down, or the woods. And if anyone practiced such exclusion, or attempted to in crease the amount of his holding at the expense of his neighbors, all villagers reacted instantly to restore their 'rights.'''4 Needless to say, this approach did not sur vive long in the setting of New England.

4 Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor, [1963] 1966), p. 11. Extensive Trading of Land in' Berkhamsted Quite different was an English borough like Berkhamsted. In the early seventeenth century, over one thousand acres "were opened up, bought, or traded, in countless individual transactions. If the men of Berkhamsted were 'doing noth ing else, they were trading land."5 The 'legend of the Yankee trader was rooted in this sort of English inheritance. There were some en closed lands, but most of the farm ers were shifting as rapidly as possible to a system of individual farm management. A third system was a sort of combination, the' closed field sys tem of East Anglia. "There was one common pasture, but each farmer was' expected to provide a balance of arable, pasture, and hay meadow for himself. He succeeded, or failed on his own farming ability."6 One of the problems in a Massachusetts town like Sud bury' was the diversity of back grounds of its inhabitants. There was no agreement as to where the locus of economic sovereignty should be. Should it be the indi vidual farmer? Should it be the town's selectmen who controlled the resources of the town com mons?

The towns and colonial govern5 Ibid., p. 26. 6 Ibid., p. 72.

212 THE FREEMAN April ments of seventeenth..;century New England were not strictly theoc racies; ordained ministers could not be elected to political office. But they were important as ad visers. Furthermore, the laymen of that era were very often more theologically motivated than min isters of this century. Most of the towns were regarded as tightly knit Christian commonwealths by their inhabitants, and during the first fifty years of their existence, they imposed restrictions on im migration into the local commun ity. They were concerned that newcomers might not meet the religious and· moral standards of the present inhabitants. As late as 1678, the records of Plymouth Colony offered the hope that "the Court will be careful, that whom they accept are persons orthodox in their judgments." The' ·Puritan towns of Boston,. Cambridge, Ded ham, and probably many others all included the' requirement that outsiders be cleared by town 'offi cials before they were allowed to buy land locally. Braintree even included a restriction' on land sales (though not explicitly religious in intent) that ···local.residents would have the right to bid first on all property offered for sale to out siders.

It is significant that in the final quarter of the century, these religious restrictions were generally dropped. Instead,a new re quirement - in fact,a new empha sis on an old requirement - ap peared: restrictions on· immi grants who might become a bur den on the welfare rolls. The towns had steadily become more pluralistic theologically, but the fear of an increase in tax rates was a truly ecumenical device.' By offering economic support to local indigents, the townspeople were afraid that outsiders might take advantage of this legal charity. Barriers to entry followed in the wake of "free" goods, however modest - and they were very mod est - the size of the public welfare allotments. 7 Pressure on the Commons The fear of increased welfare burdens was not the only economic issue confronting established com munities every time a stranger sought admission as a resident of some town. In the early years of settlement, each town had con siderable land - six to eight miles square - and relatively few inhab itants. Each resident· had legal access to the common pasturage and to any .future divisions of land from .the huge blocs owned 7 On the size of local town charities, see Stephen Foster, Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (Yale University Press, 1971), p. 137.

1974 THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT IN COMMON OWNERSHIP 213 by the town. But as the number of inhabitants increased,·· and as more and more distributions of town land reduced the available source of unowned land, the per capita supply of land began to shrink. Those inhahitants who had a share in the common pasture and the common lands sought· to protect .their control over furthe]~ use and distributions of such prop,· erty. In town after town, a neVlT rule was imposed: outsiders had to purchase access to rights in the common property from local inhabitants. The result was a neVlT appreciation of private ownership and private control of property, even among men who had grown up in English communities that had used the open field system of farming. The land hunger of Ne,,' England after 1650 created new incentives to gain and exercise personal sovereignty over the chief economic resource, land.

There was another incentive to reduce the size of the community·· owned property :burea ucra tie wrangling. Page after page of thE~ Massachusetts town records, year after year: how to restrain acceS8 to the common meadow? How to keep midnight visitors from cut·· ting down choice trees for fire-· wood or other uses? How to keep the meadow's fences in repair?' Statute followed statute, to no avail. Fines were imposed, equally to no avail. "Free" land meant strong demand for its productiv ity, and town leaders never were able to find a rational, efficient means of restricting uneconomic uses of the town property. Men had a· strong incentive to further their personal economic ends, and far less incentive to consider the public's position. The commons served as incentives to waste, for without a free market and private ownership, it was impossible to calculate accurately the costs and benefits associated with the use of .the land. This is the chief eco nomic flaw of all socialist' systems, and the early settlers of New England· were unable to solve it.

The Eternal Problems of Supply and Demand Someone who has only a super ficial· knowledge of the history of the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony tends to see them as men obsessed with imposing re ligious restraints or moral re straints on private activities. They were concerned with such ques tions, as the records indicate, but from the bulk of the ·legislation, two problems were eternal, un solvable, and endlessly bothersome to Puritan leaders: pigs without rings in their noses running through the town, and midnight tree cutters on the commons. The tree cutters, like the pigs, insisted 214 THE FREEMAN April on sticking their noses into other people's property. The commoners - those who had legal access to the common fields and meadows - were too often in volved in what today is known as "free riding." They planted crops in the common property, but ne glected to keep their portion of the commons properly fenced. It was almost impossible to keep track of who was responsible for which plot. Towns had to inter vene and assign plots, thus creat ing opportunities for local politi cal dissension. Animals that wandered around the fenced land often broke down unrepaired fenc ing between plots, .getting into someone else's crops. Tension here was continual.

Fencing inspectors were im portant officials in every town. Conflicts over responsibility were endless. Without private plots pri vately repaired, such conflicts were inevitable. In the early decades of Massachusetts, no single public policy prevailed long. First, the colony's General Court - the chief legislative agency - placed the re sponsibility for fencing on the local town; then it placed the responsibility on the local indi vidual citizen; next it switched back to its original position of town control. The statutes did not function well in practice. Differ ent communities had different problems, and the central govern ment had difficulty in dealing with all of them through the use of any single administrative policy.8 The problem facing every select man in every New England village was "the tragedy of the commons," as the biologist Garrett H,ardin has called it. Each person who has access to the benefits of public property for use in his own per sonal business has a positive in centive to drain additional re sources from the commons, and he has a very, low or even negative incentive to restrain him. The cost of his actions are borne by all the "owners," while· the bene fits are strictly individual. One more cow or sheep or goat grazing on the town commons will register no noticeable increase in the com munally assessed economic burden which rests on any single individ ual. Yet such grazing is immedi ately beneficial to the owner of the animal. High benefits, low costs: "Each man is locked into a system that compels him to in crease his herd without limit - in a world that is limited."9 It is not 8 William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620 1789 (2 vols., 1890), I, pp. 59-60.

9 Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Com mons," Science (13 Dec., 1968); reprint ed in Garrett de Bell (ed.), The Environ mental Handbook (New York: Ballan tine, 1970), p. 37.

1974 THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT IN COMMON OWNERSHIP 215 surprising that selectmen would find themselves burdened with endless disputes concerning the: size of the local herds and the proper - "fair" -- assessments of the economic costs of running those herds on the commons. There is an answer to the trag edy of the commons, at least where it is inexpensive to assign prop erty rights. As C. R. Batten has argued, the transfer of ownership from an amorphous common group to individual citizens provides an incentive to reduce the demands made on the land. Private owners have to assess both costs and benefits of any activity, seeing to it that costs do not outrun bene fits. By the end of the seventeenth century, Puritan leaders - or at least leaders who were the de scendants of Pu1ritans - reached a similar conclusion. 1o With each piece of legislation, another problem or set of prob lems appeared. First, only actual town commoners could run their animals in the common meadow or in the outlying common lands.

Only local residents could cut the trees. Later, the selectmen had to impose limits on the number of cattle that could be run, frequently on a "one cow per man" rule. Each man was assessed a few shillings 10 C. R. Batten, "The Tragedy of the Commons," THE FREEMAN (Oct., 1970) . per year for this right. Some peo ple brought in horses; Boston banned them on Sundays. Sheep had to be supervised by a sheep .. herder. As more animals required full-time supervision, towns hired herdsmen. To keep the cost-per beust low, each town resident was required by law to run his animal with the herd. Cambridge, for ex ample, imposed a fine of one shil ling on anyone whose cow was found on his land after 8 a.m. Since the driver left at 6 a.m., anyone who had not yet delivered his animal to the herd had to escort his cow to the driver, eat ing up scarce time. A similar law for goats was passed two years later, in 1639. 11 People naturally attempted to evade the law, and by 1648 the revenues supporting the town's herdsman were not meeting his salary. Consequently, in typical interventionist fashion, the selectmen decided to assess all men a certain amount, whether or not they ran cattle on the com mons. 12 A similar rule was estab lished in Watertown in 1665, and the massive evasions encouraged the selectmen to pass an even stiffer law in 1670.13 11 The Records of the Town of Cam bridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1703 (1901), pp. 28, 39.

12 Ibid., p. 72. 13 Watertown Records (1894), I, pp. 92, 94-95.

216 THE FREEMAN April Corrected Over Time The confusion reigned for dec ades. As the Watertown records report so eloquently, "there being many complaints made concerning the disorderliness of cattle and swine and the multitudes of sheep in the town, it was voted that the matter above mentioned is left with the selectmen. to consider something that may tend to refor mation and to present what they shall do to the town to be con firmed."14 Needless to say, the selectmen could not do anything about it, any more .than half a century of Puritan town govern ments before them. The only solu tion was the distribution of the commons to local inhabitants - the demise of the commons. Traditional patterns of life do not die out overnight. Men are usually unwilling to change their way of life unless forced to do so, either by economic circumstances or by direct political pressure. The little town of Sudbury was a case in question. Its inhabitants clung to the old English system of com munal property management. The access .to the commons was re stricted, in 1655, and at least thirty younger men received no meadow grants for their animals.

They went out of th~ selectmen's meeting ready· to fight. Fight they 14 Ibid., p. 142. did, until the town was split. They formed a new community down the road, Marlborough. Not gain ing access to the .10cal commons, they were perfectly .willing to settle for a. 24,000 acre plot a few miles away.15 Factional strife was not a part of the original goals of the found ers of New England. Factionalism was a blight to be avoided; this opinion remained a touchstone of American political thought until James Madison wrote Federalist #10. Yet the quarreling oyer the commons was incessant, in direct opposition to the political and communal ideal of the peaceable kingdom. "Togetherness" The town of Sudbury was not to be the only Puritan village un able to cope successfully with the centrifugal forces created by the presence of socialized property within the town limits. The crea tion of Marlborough, despite the fact that the young founders also established a town commons, testi fied to the difficulty of preserving both the old common field tenure system and social peace in the midst of vast stretches of unoc cupied land. It was too easy to move out, and this feature of New England was to erode the medi15 Powell, Puritan Village, chap. 9.

197J" THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT IN COMMON OWNERSHIP 217 evalism of early Puritan thought. The centralized social control nec essary to enforce such a system of common land required the exist ... ence of widespread land scarcity. Ironically, it was in the final quarter of the seventeenth century that such land scarcity appeared - scarcity of the most productive lands - but by that· time the hag gling over the administration of the commons and increasing land values had already provided the incentives necessary to convince both leaders and average citizens that the commons should be dis tributed permanently. One of the original goals of the founders ofN ew· England was that of social cohesion. The life of each community was to bereli giously based. The church was the center of the town, both sym bolically and very often physically. Men were to Iive close to each other, share in each other's bur dens, pray together,and construct God's kingdom on earth. But there was a strong economic incentive to consolidate land holdings.

Even before the market of Boston created demand for agri cultural products, men in the vil lages had begun to barter their land allotments. A man might live in the town with five or six acres of garden and meadow, and he might also have been given some forty-or fifty-acre plots in the common lands scattered around the town. Obviously, it was to the advantage of some men to con solidate their holdings, trading with others who also wanted to cut down on the time spent to travelin mud, in snow, in dust - from one plot to another. Then, family by family, an exodus began from the central town. Artisans tended to come into the town's center; farmers, especially those affected by Boston's market (those in the immediate Boston area or close to water transport to Bos ton), needed to consolidate in order to rationalize production. Despite the efforts of ministers and local selectmen, the popula tion spread out; decentralization, when not political, was at least social. You could not examine your neighbor's intimate affairs when he was three miles aWray.

The market for land was an agent of social decentralization. The Urge for Privacy The· experience of the isolated little town of Dedham is illustra tive of the effect of market free dom on traditional patterns of social and economic control. Pro fessor Kenneth Lockridge de scribes the process: If· the corporate unity of the vil lage was slowly eroding, so was its physical coherence. The common field system began disintegrating almost 218 THE FREEMAN April from the day of its inception. Al ready in the 1640's the town permit ted men to "fence their lots in par ticular" and presumably to grow in these lots whichever crops they wished. By the 1670's it had become usual for men to take up both special "convenience grants" and their usual shares of each new dividend in loca tions as close as possible to their ex isting lots, practices which aided the consolidation of individual holdings.

The process encouraged by public policy was completed by private transactions, for an active market in small parcels soon emerged, a mar ket in which most farmers sought to sell distant lands and buy lands closer to their main holdings. The net result was the coalescence of pri vate farms. From here, it would be but two short steps for farmers whose holdings were centered in out lying areas to move their barns and then their houses from the village out to their lands. As of 1686 few seem to have taken these steps, but the way had been prepared and the days of a society totally enclosed by the village were numbered. In any event the common-field system was gone, taking with it the common de cisions and the frequent encounters of every farmer with his fellows which it entailed.l 6 The closer to Boston, the faster these changes occurred, for if transport was cheap enough16 Kenneth Lockridge, ANew Eng land Town (New York: Norton, 1970), p.82.

within 10 miles or so along a well traveled road - the effects of the free market were felt far more all uring ly. It paid to become more efficient. A Typical Development The demise of the commons in Cambridge seems typical. The first division took place in 1662. A second followed in 1665. Two small divisions were made in 1707 and 1724. Various methods were used to determine who got what parcels of land: lots were drawn, or acres were distributed in terms of the number of cows a family was allowed to graze on the common Jueadow, or a committee was formed to consider other methods. In some towns there was consid erable strife; in others, the distri butions were relatively peaceful. The effects on Cambridge were significant, and in retrospect they seem quite predictable. After 1691, it was no longer necessary to pass new laws against the cutting of timber from the commons. Men owned their, own land, and they cut or refused to cut as they saw fit. It was no longer necessary to pass laws against selling timber to men from other towns, a com mon feature of mid-seventeenth century legislation in the towns.

A thoroughly individualistic sys tem of land tenure evolved. The final impetus to private own1974 THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT IN COMMON OWNERSHIP 219 ership came in the 1680's. James II" after coming to the throne in 1685, sent Sir Edmund Andros, the former Royal governor of New York, to take over as governor gen eral of New England. The king meant to consolidate the political structure of the colonies, making them all purely royal colonies. An dros met with instant opposition. He began to hit too close to a cru cial legal weakness of New Eng land's towns. By 1685, there were four New England colonies, New Haven hav ing been absorbed into Connecti cut in 1662: Massachusetts, Ply mouth, Connecticut, and Rhode Is land. (Plymouth became a part of Massachusetts in 1692). The right of these colonial governments to create valid, legal townships was in question ; the right of the towns to act as if they were incorporated entities in giving legal title to land was not 'in doubt: it was illegal.

The king's seal was not present in the towns, and this was an invita tion for the king's newly appointed bureaucracy - a growing horde to intervene to their own advan tage. In 1686, the Andros regime im posed a 2.5 shilling quit-rent per annum on all 100-acre lots not. oc cupied or occupied by means of de fective titles. Andros called for a reexamination of the land patents. Whether or not this represented a true threat to the majority of land owners, they certainly were con vinced that his intentions were the worst, and that a major land-grab was about to be inaugurated. In the various political pamphlets issued in 1688-90 by outraged crit ics of his administration (later as sembled as the Andros Tracts), this criticism was made over and over. It was a major reason cited as a justification for his overthrow in 1688. "Henceforward, the colo nies took absolute control of the land .... "17 Men desired, as never before, to gain clear-cut title to their lands. It intensified a pressure that was five decades old or moreJ8 The Market Process Step by step, individual men as serted their sovereignty over land; the proprietors of the commons steadily transferred the unoccu pied land surrounding the village, as well as the land in the more central common fields, to the citi zens of the town. While they did not ask for competitive bidding as a means of distributing this land, the officials did effect a continuous 17 Roy H. Akagi, The Town Propri etors of the New England Colonies (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, [1924] 1963), p. 124.

18 Philip J. Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 61.

220 THE FREEMAN April transformation of ownership. In doing so, they established a break from the historical inheritance of many towns, the old medieval open field system of common ownership. The continual bickering over the allocation of timber, fallen logs, tree cutting by moonlight, town herds, . herdsmen's salaries, fence mending, planting in the. common fields, and policing everyone to see that these Jaws were obeyed, finally broke the will of the town officials. It was easier to give the land away; it was also more profitable for to;wn residents, in most cases. The tradition of the independent yeoman farmer so impressed Jef ferson that he built an entire polit ical philosophy around it. The idea that individual men are more re sponsible for the administration of property than boards. of political appointees or even elected officials became a fundamental principle of eighteenth and nineteenth century American life. The concepts of personal responsibility and per sonal authority became interlocked, and the great symbol of this fusio~ was the family farm. The endless quest for land by American fam ilies is one of the most impressive tales in American history. It began as soon as the Pilgrims .stepped off the Mayflower and their Puritan neighbors stepped off the Arabella a decade later. The experiment in common ownership in village after village over half a century con vinced ministers, laymen, and polit ical leaders that the private own ership of the means of production was not only the most efficient way to get Christian goals accom plished, but also that such a form of ownership was economically profitable as well. They saw, almost from the start, that social peace is best achieved by means of the private ownership of the tools of production, especially that most crucial of tools, land. The lessons of that first half-century of New England Puritan life is one of the most important heritages of American life. Without it, indeed, American life would be impossible to interpret correctly. ~ IDEAS ON LIBERTY That Vital Spark THE SPARK of liberty in the mind and spirit of man cannot be long extinguished; it will break into flames that will destroy every coercion which seems to limit it.

HERBERT HOOVER Best Housing Hope BERNARD H. SIEGAN MOST people with incomes below the national average cannot afford to buy or rent new housing. This is not a condition solely of modern times nor of high inflation. It has probably existed throughout his tory. There never has been· a time or a civilization, and probably never will be one, in which all people had equal access to mate rial goods. Moreover, in the case of ,housing, the new products are not always preferred to the old at least this must be concluded from the many wealthy people who willingly pay huge amounts for old houses. However, there are many people who feel that those of lesser means are entitled to new housing, almost Copyright 1973 Bernard H. Siegan Mr. Siegan is .the author of Land Use Without ZoninA and many articles on the subject. He praCticed law for 20. years in Chicago before moving in 1973 to La Jol1a, California where he is' an .adjunct professor of law at the Uni versity of San Diego Law School.