Describing how the English tiller had been expropriated from the soil Wallace says: "The ingenuity of lawyers and direct landlord legislation steadily increased the powers of great landowners and encroached upon the rights of the people, till at length the monstrous doctrine arose that a landless Englishman has no right whatever to enjoyment even of the unenclosed commons and heaths and the mountain and forest wastes of his native country, but is everywhere in the eye of the law a trespasser whenever he ventures off a public road or pathway."[9] By the sixteenth century the English peasantry had been evicted even from the commons, which were turned into sheep walks by the impoverished barons to make money from the Flemish wool market. The land at home wrenched from them, the poor English immigrants ardently expected that in America land would be plentiful. They were bitterly disappointed. The various English companies, chartered by royal command with all-inclusive powers, despite the frequent opposition of Parliament, held the trade and land of the greater part of the colonies as a rigid monopoly. In the case of the New England Company severe punishment was threatened to all who should encroach upon its rights. It also was freed from payment for twenty-one years and was relieved from taxes forever.
THE COLONIES CARVED INTO GREAT ESTATES.
The New England colonies were carved out into a few colossal private estates. The example of the British nobility was emulated; but the chartered companies did not have to resort to the adroit, disingenuous, subterranean methods which the English land magnates used in perpetuating their seizure, as so graphically described by S. W. Thackery in his work, "The Land and the Community". The land in New England was taken over boldly and arbitrarily by the directors of the Plymouth Company, the most powerful of all the companies which exploited New England. The handful of men who participated in this division, sustained with a high hand their claims and pretensions, and augmented and fortified them by every device. Quite regardless of who the changing monarch was, or what country ruled, these colonial magnates generally contrived to keep the power strong in their own hands. There might be a superficial show of changed conditions, an apparent infusion of democracy, but, in reality, the substance remained the same.
This was nowhere more lucidly or strikingly illustrated than after New Netherlands passed into the control of the English and was renamed New York. Laws were decreed which seemed to bear the impress of justice and democracy. Monopoly was abolished, every man was given the much-prized right of trading in furs and pelts, and the burgher right was extended and its acquisition made easier.
However well-intentioned these altered laws were, they turned out to be shallow delusions. Under English rule, the gifts of vast estates in New York were even greater than under Dutch rule and beyond doubt were granted corruptly or by favoritism. Miles upon miles of land in New York which had not been preëmpted were brazenly given away by the royal Governor Fletcher for bribes; and it was suspected, although not clearly proved, that he trafficked in estates in Pennsylvania during the time when, by royal order, he supplanted William Penn in the government of that province. From the evidence which has come down it would appear that any one who offered Fletcher his price could be transformed into a great vested land owner. But still the people imagined that they had a real democratic government. Had not England established representative assemblies? These, with certain restrictions, alone had the power of law-making for the provinces. These representative bodies were supposed to rest upon the vote of the people, which vote, however, was determined by a strict property qualification.
THE LANDED PROPRIETORS THE POLITICAL RULERS.
What really happened was that, apparently deprived of direct feudal power, the landed interests had no difficulty in retaining their law-making ascendancy by getting control of the various provincial assemblies. Bodies supposedly representative of the whole people were, in fact, composed of great landowners, of a quota of merchants who were subservient to the landowners, and a sprinkling of farmers. In Virginia this state was long-continuing, while in New York province it became such an intolerable abuse and resulted in such oppressions to the body of the people, that on Sept. 20, 1764, Lieutenant-Governor Cadwallader Colden, writing from New York to the Lords of Trade at London, strongly expostulated. He described how the land magnates had devised to set themselves up as the law-making class. Three of the large land grants contained provisions guaranteeing to each owner the privilege of sending a representative to the General Assembly. These landed proprietors, therefore, became hereditary legislators. "The owners of other great Patents," Colden continued, "being men of the greatest opulence in the several American counties where these Tracts are, have sufficient influence to be perpetually elected for those counties. The General Assembly, then, of this Province consists of the owners of these extravagant Grants, the merchants of New York, the principal of them strongly connected with the owners of these Great Tracts by Family interest, and of Common Farmers, which last are men easily deluded and led away with popular arguments of Liberty and Privileges. The Proprietors of the great tracts are not only freed from the quit rents which the other landholders in the Provinces pay, but by their influences in the Assembly are freed from every other public Tax on their lands."[10]
What Colden wrote of the landed class of New York was substantially true of all the other provinces. The small, powerful clique of great landowners had cunningly taken over to themselves the functions of government and diverted them to their own ends. First the land was seized and then it was declared exempt of taxation.
Inevitably there was but one sequel. Everywhere, but especially so in New York and Virginia, the landed proprietors became richer and more arrogant, while poverty, even in new country with extraordinary resources, took root and continued to grow. The burden of taxation fell entirely upon the farming and laboring classes; although the merchants were nominally taxed they easily shifted their obligations upon those two classes by indirect means of trade. Usurious loans and mortgages became prevalent.
It was now seen what meaningless tinsel the unrestricted right to trade in furs was. To get the furs access to the land was necessary; and the land was monopolized. In the South, where tobacco and corn were the important staples, the worker was likewise denied the soil except as a laborer or tenant, and in Massachusetts colony, where fortunes were being made from timber, furs and fisheries, the poor man had practically no chance against the superior advantages of the landed and privileged class. These conditions led to severe reprisals. Several uprisings in New York, Bacon's rebellion in Virginia, after the restoration of Charles II, when that king granted large tracts of land belonging to the colony to his favorites, and subsequently, in 1734, a ferment in Georgia, even under the mild proprietary rule of the philanthropist Oglethorpe, were all really outbursts of popular discontent largely against the oppressive form in which land was held and against discriminative taxation, although each uprising had its local issues differing from those elsewhere.