Henry George and the shakers: evolution of communal attitudes towards land ownership

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  April, 1996  by John E. Murray

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The late 1840s were years of great growth and promise for National Reform. At the New York State constitutional convention of 1846, George Henry Evans in vain proposed making his land reform program part of state law: one 160 acre farm per person, alienable only to a landless person. National Reform activity in support of homestead exemptions from debt execution resulted in a limited exemption law in New York in 1850. An 1847 legislative committee considered 160 acre ownership limitation for natural law reasons similar to those given previously by George Henry Evans. Attacks on land monopoly and recommendations for quantitative ownership limitations were included in an 1851 report of the legislature's public lands committee. The movement's historian writes: "Evans himself might have written these reports. The reasoning, the remedies, and the hopes are his, expressed almost in his words" (Zahler, 1941, 83-91).

As large landowners, the Shakers were not immune to this wave of land reform activity. Organized efforts to limit New York Shaker land ownership were encouraged by a reprinting in Albany of Tilden's "Considerations." The legislature appointed a committee to investigate whether the Shakers were, in their words, "buying land so fast that, they were forming a dangerous monopoly of the lands of the State." The "Report of the Select Committee on the subject of the Shakers" was very favorable to the Society. Its authors leaned heavily on Shaker sources in describing the history and doctrine of the Society. The legislators found that the New York Shakers owned some 10,000 acres, which was only about 10 acres per person. The Shakers, as a religious society, deserved to enjoy "the free exercise of their religious devotions" and presented "no cause for legislative interference." A skeptical Senate nonetheless required the Shakers to itemize their real estate wealth and annual additions to it since 1839. The Shaker response reported that in the period since the 1839 Trust Act, they had acquired 3000 more acres in New York, 122 of which had been purchased, ironically, by the New Lebanon Shakers from the heirs of Elam Tilden, Samuel Tilden's father.(5)

Legislative attacks on Shaker wealth slowly diminished. In 1852 the legislature received petitions from both the Shakers asking to loosen reporting requirements and, on the other side, from their New Lebanon neighbors claiming such exemption would further expose their farms to Shaker encroachment (Andrews, 1963). The Assembly responded by quintupling the Shaker real estate income allowance. An 1855 attempt to regulate religious land holding that was considered to be an "annoyance" by the Society died in the Senate (Richmond, 1977). But what had been an annoyance to the Shakers in 1855, became, properly translated, an enthusiasm two decades later.(6)

III

Shaker Land Policies under Frederick Evans

In the Eastern States land reform was gradually displaced on the political stage by issues of nativism, abolition, and labor organizing. Land policy remained an important issue, of course, in the west, with speculative activity peaking in the mid-1850s. Increasingly, however, land reform became subject to nativist concerns that flows of immigrants into the United States would end in the east unless more western land were opened up. Easterners who were competing with cheap immigrant labor, on the one hand, and even cheaper slave labor in the south, began to emphasize the abolition of slavery and restriction of immigration as beneficial. Land reform became one cause among many (Fogel 1989).