Bring back the good old days?

Real Estate Issues, Dec 1994 by Parker, Frank J

During the autumn of 1992, the then sitting governor of Arkansas was able to convince 43% of the voting American public that the previous 12 years under the Republican stewardship had been saturated with greed and pilfery. What this nation needed was a return to the more ethical days of the past. For real estate, it would be hard to prove this statement. In fact, savings and loan crises, the Keating Five and even Whitewater, notwithstanding, it can be documented that in earlier times ethics in real estate were less existent than in present day.

Generation after generation of American school children have learned about the Pilgrim's arrival, the Revolutionary War, the Louisiana Purchase and the country's westward expansion to the Pacific Ocean. However, often the reality of these events has been obscured, if not completely misrepresented. Certainly this is true regarding the accumulation of wealth in real estate by the great American fortunes of Astor, Field and others. The society scions and business capitalists carrying these names today, often had ancestors who were considered by many to be ruthless and unforgiving. Ethics in real estate, indeed!

17TH AND 18TH CENTURY REAL ESTATE SEIZURES

To hear Thomas Jefferson tell the story, America always was the land of opportunity and equality for all. Witness this famous passage from his first presidential inaugural address:

Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations--entangling alliances with none; the support of the state governments in all their rights as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns, and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the general government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad;... freedom of religion; freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected--these principles from the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.

If as Jefferson did, you were fortunate enough to be born into the landed aristocracy, life held all the promise that he outlined. Otherwise, rhetoric often outstripped reality. Such a trend clearly existed from the earliest days of this country, even before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

Land Acquisition Virginia

In Virginia, the London Company, profiting from generous grants of land from a pliant king and Parliament, established a virtual monopoly over soil suitable for the production of tobacco. The workers for this enterprise were indentured servants, purchased in England and sold to the highest bidder in Virginia. Even before 1620, land in this colony was separated between those who could and could not afford to own it. When this source of labor proved to be inadequate, the English court system sentenced many convicts to labor on the tobacco plantations. Still the demand exceeded the supply and, in 1619, the first slave ships arrived from Guinea in west Africa. Slavery had begun and the chasm between those who owned land and those who lived on it already reached a polarity extending from extreme wealth to extreme poverty and suffering. Other southern colonies carried out similar practices. After the London Company was disbanded in 1620, individual landed proprietors extended their holdings by negotiation with King and Parliament.

New England, New Netherlands (New York)

Similar patterns of land acquisition were found in New England and New Netherlands and later in New York. Farther north there was less need for an intensive supply of labor to produce crops usable in international commerce. Nevertheless, as in the south, the evolution evolved quickly from all powerful trading companies, e.g., the Plymouth Company and the Dutch West India Company, to its extension in the hands of former land owners under the trading companies. Now the land owners were free to bribe local government officials to extend their holdings, sometimes to an astonishing degree. Witness that in 1635, when the directors of the Plymouth Company assigned the land it owned to themselves, one man by lot received title to all of what is now the state of New Hampshire.

Maine

A similar saga died stillborn in Maine. What is now the state of Maine was ceded by Queen Elizabeth I to Sir Fernando Gorges, a character of questionable integrity. Ownership of Maine evolved through his family to his grandson who, eventually, in 1677 sold the land to a Boston merchant, John Usher, for 1250L. Usher deeded his entire holding to the governor and colony of Massachusetts, where it remained until Maine became an independent state of its own in 1820.

New Netherlands

This pattern of land distribution also developed in New Netherlands, later to be named New York. Under Dutch sponsorship of its West Indian Trading Company, land in plentiful quantities was distributed to patrons who established a colony of 48 or more adults within six years. Feudal rights of succession were granted in perpetuity to the heirs and assignees of these patrons. Everyone else on the property was to be left in tenant status. Once established on their landed estate, almost to a man, these newly enriched patrons moved immediately and ruthlessly to swindle the local Indian tribes out of their adjacent holdings. According to historians, duffel bags, knives, axes and wampum, or, in other words, nothing of value, were exchanged for legally binding grants of land many square miles in duration.