What follows is a 1917 essay, “The Land System in Colonial New York” by Charles Worthen Spencer published in the Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association, (Vol. 16). At the time Spencer was Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada. It has been annotated by John Warren.
Adequate description, even in outline, of the land system of any community would comprise so much detail, both of governmental policy and practice and of the community’s reaction there-to, that in a paper of this compass only selected features may be referred to. It will be necessary, also, to confine the treatment mainly to the period between 1691 and the opening of the intercolonial war [the French and Indian War] in 1755.
New York’s existence as a royal province of the normal type, with a representative assembly as a permanent part of its institutions, did not begin till 1691.
And the expulsion of the French from North America, in 1763, so altered one of the fundamental conditions of New York’s position as an expanding area, that, for our purposes, the period between 1691 and 1755 may be regarded as possessing a certain unity.
A few conditions somewhat peculiar to New York as one of the continental colonies of the British Empire must be noticed. In a special sense and to an extraordinary degree, New York’s frontiers were the frontiers also of the whole region east of the Mississippi and north of the Carolinas.
The presence of the French in the interior of the continent, and the altogether singular position of the Iroquois, geographically, in their relation to the other native tribes and in their traditional hostility to the French and equally traditional friendship for the English, as successors of the Dutch – these circumstances made New York, and especially the Albany gateway, the “citadel” of English North America.
The double exposure to French and Indian attack, from the north by way of Lakes Champlain and George and the upper Hudson, and from the northwest, by way of the St. Lawrence, Lake Ontario and the Mohawk, had a blighting effect on what would otherwise have been the natural tendencies for the population to expand in those directions.
The extraordinary outburst of occupying activity which took place in the region northeast of Albany and in the upper reaches of the Susquehanna and in the upper Mohawk in the years immediately following the Peace of Paris [ending the American Revolutionary War in 1783] is significant testimony on this point.
Again, New York was not, like Massachusetts, a community where the social system was strongly coherent and self-conscious and which by a system of budding townships attempted deliberately to preserve that social system in the new country into which it expanded.
Nor, on the other hand, was its territory, as was the case with New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland, the landed estate of a subject of the Crown, a private person, who had an immediate interest in developing his property profitably and there-fore organized his land office comparatively efficiently and took pains to attract settlers and to keep them by reasonably good treatment.
In New York, matters of policy with reference to land were left to the tender mercies of the struggle between imperial officials and local provincial elements – the government and “big business” in the parlance of today.
Certain features of a quasi-feudal tendency had come down, it is true, from Dutch rule. But on the whole it was not the feudal incidents of estates like Rensselaerwyck which at this period retarded growth, so much as the policy of the great landlords in preferring leases to tenants to sales in fee to purchasers outright as a method of developing their properties.
Certain it is that by 1755 New York was far behind her competitors among the provinces in numbers of population and in extent of effectively occupied territory. Considering its start of two generations, New York’s 96,000, white and black (83,000 white) in 1756 is a sorry showing beside Pennsylvania’s 60,000 between 1682 and 1714 and 220,000 in 1756.
In accounting for this lack of expansive power on the part of New York, Professor Turner [Frederick Jackson Turner, 1861-1932], the authority on the frontier in American history, gives due weight to the peculiarities of New York’s frontier situation.
He also emphasizes the unfortunate effects of the feudal tenures and the “undemocratic restraints,” with the resultant “exploiting of settlers.” And there can be no doubt that these circumstances had profoundly fundamental effects.
I believe that with these blighting conditions are associated certain other features of the situation which can be understood only in the light of events in the political history of the province.
Matters of land policy were very much “in politics” as the phrase runs; indirectly, it is true, for a part of the time, nevertheless much more effectually than is generally represented. And there was, again as runs the phrase, “politics in” the administration of the land office.
It is to these aspects of the situation that I ask your attention today William Smith, the historian of New York, in his first edition in 1756 [of The History of the province of New-York, from the first discovery to the year 1732], said, “Most of the governors issued extravagant patents at small quit rents to such as were able to serve them in assembly. Being men of estates they have rated their lands exorbitantly high, so that very few poor persons could either purchase or lease. This has had a bad effect on the settlement of the province …. Patenting has long been and still is very expensive. ”
This quotation might serve as a text for a more or less systematic attempt to follow developments in the political history of New York as they affected land matters. Here again limitations of time forbid such an attempt and compel a selection of certain features at the expense of others.
I will therefore only remind you of that with which you are doubtless familiar, the extravagant grants made by Governor Fletcher [Benjamin Fletcher] from 1692 to 1698, and the act of assembly passed in Governor Bellomont’s administration [Richard Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont, The Lord Coote, 1636-1700/01] vacating certain of these grants. Fletcher’s grants certainly bear out Smith’s description.
Take, for instance, the one to Captain Evans [Capt. John Evans], who was Fletcher’s right-hand man in carrying assembly elections in the governor’s interest. This grant covered anywhere from 350,000 to 600,000 acres and the quit rent was only twenty shillings per annum. Evans afterwards alleged he was offered in England ten thousand pounds for this estate.
This, and other grants made by Fletcher to gain the support of the “principal inhabitants,” endangered Indian relations and operated as a discouragement to actual and immediate settlement.
Bellomont, Fletcher’s successor, pounced upon these grants as further evidence of a many-sided villainy on the part of his predecessor, of which he was already convinced. He asserted that three-fourths of the province had thus been brought into the hands of about thirty persons, many of whom bore character from which little good for the interest of the empire could be expected; “Jacobites” was the mildest epithet he could employ.
He succeeded in obtaining directions from the lords of trade to “use such methods as are allowed by law” to break and annul these “exorbitant, irregular and unconditioned” grants. These directions he interpreted as authorizing him to persuade the assembly to pass an act in 1699, vacating by legislative rather than judicial procedure, some half dozen of the more conspicuous grants.
The act was marred by gross partisanship in the selection of grants for attack, and as a remedy for monopoly, it was merely an installment of what needed to be done. There were plenty of other vulnerable points about the act, and it soon became the storm center of a most virulent campaign, both in New York and London, against the earl and his policy.
Bellomont’s “interest” at court was strong enough to keep him in office until his death in March 1701. But it did not avail to secure approval of this vacating act. Possibly because the “exorbitant grants” of King William III, in Ireland, were at that time matters of controversy in English politics, the Lords of Trade handled this matter of the New York vacating act very gingerly, and as a matter of fact took no decisive action until 1708.
Whatever the intentions of its promoter, the vacating act practically added only uncertainty and confusion to the evils in the land situation in New York which had been created by the abuses in Fletcher’s time.
After this perspective view of the period from 1692 to 1702, I propose to give a little more attention, proportionally, to the extravagant grants of Governor Cornbury [Viscount Cornbury, Edward Hyde, 3rd Earl of Clarendon, 1661-1723], governor from 1702 to 1708, partly because their significance has received little attention from historians and because their extravagance was of a peculiar nature and had exceptionally serious consequences.
It will be necessary to follow three things: first, the gradual evolution of administrative practices as to land by the provincial and imperial governments; second, the methods of dealing pursued by citizens interested in land transactions; and third, the general conditions amid which these developments went on. Naturally, in a brief paper like this, hardly more than reference by way of allusion to chief points is possible.
As to developments in administration, the abuses in Fletcher’s time had at least called attention to the need for more careful regulation of the process of land-granting. Acting on the suggestion of Bellomont, the Lords of Trade had in 1698 issued additional instructions, which, on paper at least, were calculated to prevent such excesses in the future.
The quantity of land to be granted to one person was limited to two thousand acres; and the quit rent was established at the rate of two shillings six-
pence for each one hundred acres. And a covenant by the grantee to settle some part of the land within three years was made a condition of the grant. So much for restrictions on the governor’s discretion.
We shall shortly see that those interested in land transactions on a large scale found little difficulty in evading these regulations. The political conditions in Cornbury ‘s time were peculiar and important for our purpose. His arrival in New York in May 1702 cut short a carnival of revenge and spoliation of their enemies in which the Leislerian party [adherents of Jacob Leisler’s Rebellion] had been indulging since the death of Bellomont fourteen months before.
Cornbury promptly espoused the cause of the Anti-Leislerians, with whom he struck a bargain. The assembly passed an act extending the period for which the support of the provincial government was provided until 1709, and the governor used the powers of his office in favor of the Anti-Leislerians and assented to the repeal of a number of acts obnoxious to them, among them the vacating act, already referred to.
The assembly thus attained certain darling objects, but this was at the price of that weapon whose strokes alone a governor like Cornbury was capable
of fearing. With the support of government provided for seven years in advance, the assembly had deprived itself of the means wherewith to exercise pressure, should the governor or his plans prove dangerous to the province.
Cornbury did, as we know, make himself universally detested, and after his first session with the assembly his relations with that body were of the worst. Amid growing indignation, lie permitted a group of favorites, some members of the council and others, merchants and officials, to exploit an alliance between business and politics whose proceedings were worthy of the exertions of the descriptive powers of a modern muckraker.
His use of the land-granting power did a much harm to the province as his personal meanness, the extravagancies of his ecclesiastical policy and the financial mismanagement of his corrupt favorites did to his personal popularity Colden [Cadwallader Colden, 1688-1776, acting Governor 1760-1765] said that Cornbury’s extravagant grants equaled that of all his predecessors put together.
One matter of scandal was his grant to Lieutenant Syms of all lands on Staten Island which should be discovered to be unpatented, by which, as a petition to the assembly stated, “a number of poor persons were threatened with dispossession.”
Popular rumor had it that a scheme was on foot for a grant to two persons of all lands in the province remaining undisposed of, but that the just apprehensions of popular clamor had prevented any attempt to put the design in practice.
Technicalities were used to void the patent to the town Newtown [now in Queens], and some of the land thus obtained was granted to one of the creditors of his lordship for the expenses of his lady funeral!
But besides these eccentric performances, the serious damage to the welfare of the province in the long run lay in the numerous grants to companies of speculators of practically all the desirable vacant lands, which were far enough from the dangerous frontiers to offer a scene for immediate occupation by settlers.
Such patents as those for Wawayanda (356,000 acres), Minisink, Cheescocks in Orange County, the Little Nine Partners (90,900 acres in Dutchess County), and the Great Hardenbergh patent (two million acres in Ulster and Sullivan counties) are typical examples.
They covered the great stretches lying behind the banks of the Hudson and accessible therefrom by the tributaries of that highway. Two characteristics of these grants are important: they were made to companies of from six to ten or more, rather than to single individuals; and the amounts granted were
expressed in loose and uncertain terms, both as to quantity a bounds.
The patents were issued without actual survey. Under color, then, of such vague terms used in description, as “be more or less,” or ” profitable land besides woodland,” very much – twice, ten or a hundred times – more might be later claimed, and usually was, than was literally expressed in the patent.
Colden instances one patent in which apparently three hundred acres were granted, but under which, later, sixty thousand acres were claimed! Streams apparently relied on as boundaries in the description might be discovered to flow finally in quite different directions than supposed, but the result of the error was usually the enlargement of the claim of the grantees.
Most serious was the use of Indian names of places, streams, hills, etc., in locating boundary lines or in describing land as “near the land of” a certain Indian.
For example, in the patent for Wawayand we find the following description: “all those tracts or parcels of vacant and unappropriated land in the county of Orange known by the name of Wawayanda, and also all those other small tract of like land there, bounded to the eastward by the high hills of the [Hudson] Highlands and the patent lands of Evans; to the northward by the county line, to the westward, by the high hills to the eastward of Minisink; to the southward by the province line.”
The unreliability of Indian nomenclature, and indeed the whole character of Indian ideas about land, made such devices hardly even a transparent fraud. Material for disputes and lawsuits between holders of such patents and either the Crown or the holder of other and better-described patents was thus infallibly and profusely provided.
The uncertainty and confusion of titles resulting from such descriptions and from the fact that the lands were held by the grantees as joint tenants or tenants in common constituted an obstruction to immediate occupation by actual settlers which can not be measured and hardly needs emphasis.
It is equally plain that these same conditions constituted a withering influence upon any revenue which might have accrued to the Crown from quit rents.
This brings us to a matter equal in importance to the threatening situation which has just been described. Throughout the whole administration of Cornbury there appears a disposition, growing in strength and aggressiveness, to fix by legislative action the whole set of conditions as to land in the shape which they were then assuming.
The holders of the great tracts left untouched by the vacating act were naturally not displeased by the tabling of that legislation by the Lords of Trade. Besides, the very numerous holders of smaller tracts, granted in the infancy of the colony, with vague and frequent trifling provisions for quit rents, had, as a body, neglected the payment of this acknowledgment.
The income to the government from quit rents amounted to hardly more than one hundred pounds per annum, whereas if properly laid and collected it should have amounted to three thousand pounds a year. But all attempts by the new collector and receiver general, who came from England in 1703, to make collections, or even to form a rent-roll, were fruitless.
Bills for facilitating these attempts were introduced in the council but received no encouragement in the assembly. To these two class of maintainers of the status quo the grants by Cornbury to companies, with uncertain bounds, added another and speculative class, which included all kinds of social elements.
Fletcher’s extravagant grants had been made mainly to individuals, member of families already powerful in the province and beginning to intermarry in such a way as to create a compact landed and mercantile aristocracy.
The members of these companies in Cornbury ‘s time added to such people later arrivals among the rank of the “principal inhabitants,” and also adventurers from England who were using their official status in the province to advance their personal fortunes.
Persons interested in these speculative companies in land scrip were able, in 1708, to obtain the passage of an act of assembly which peculiarly facilitated their ofttimes fraudulent purposes. We have already observed that these grants were to companies and that the lands were held by the grantees as joint tenants, or as tenants in common.
Under guise of providing a method of division into severalty holding which should be less tedious and expensive than the regular writ of partition of ordinary court procedure, this partition act of 1708 made possible a method of division which practically ensured that all the uncertainties of boundaries already referred to should be resolved in favor of the grantees, and against the Crown.
Thus the restrictions on the quantity to be granted to a single person and the requirements as to quit rents, embodied in the additional instructions of 1698, were effectually nullified.
Finally, all three classes defending the status quo must have united in support of a bill in 1709 which was characterized by the chief justice of the province as intended to “confirm all illegal grants and usurpations on the queen’s land.”
An amendment to the bill containing a proviso saving the queen’s right, was restricted by the assembly and the bill was dropped. It is symptomatic, however, of the general disposition on the part of the forces of local initiative in the province, as against the guardians of the empire, to ignore the view of welfare in the long run and to preserve a situation in which the control of developments for the future should at least remain in their own hands.
Such a feeling on the part of those forces in the province must have been strengthened by the news from England early in 1708, that the vacating act of 1699 had at last been confirmed, and by the receipt of new instructions to the governor concerning land granting.
These elaborated the instructions of 1698 as to quantity to be granted to single persons and as to quit rents; stiffened the administrative process in land transactions and imposed additional restrictions and conditions on grantees for the benefit of the imperial policy of using the “Queen ‘s Woods” for the production of naval stores.
The purpose of the Crown’s land policy was thus made more clear. It was to give all encouragement to the process of occupying new land by a pioneering class and to relate this process to a feature of policy intended to benefit every portion of the empire.
In the eyes of the provincial American, however, land, especially that of his own province, was the great object of speculative investment presented for the exercise of his business faculties.
Whatever the announced purpose of the imperial government might be with regard to this object of his investment, he feared and distrusted it, as compared with what he and his fellows could make out of it if suffered to handle it in their own way and on the spot.
Such was the situation with reference to land policy when New York entered upon a critical phase of its political and constitutional history as a province. The controversy over the grant of a revenue for the support of the provincial government, and especially over the manner of its expenditure, which lasted from 1709 to 1715, may be said on the whole to have fixed the character of New York’s political development in pre-revolutionary times.
It was distinctly a struggle between popular forces represented in the assembly and the royal prerogative represented by the governor. In the course of the struggle a great variety of other issues became involved and the settlement in 1715-18 was of the nature of a compromise of a most complex character – a compromise, however, in which the balance of strategic advantage lay with the assembly.
How did this situation with reference to matters of land policy figure in this critical struggle and settlement? I regret that the before-mentioned limitations of space and time compel me to do hardly more than state boldly my conclusion.
The governor, Robert Hunter (ca. 1666-1734, Governor of New York 1710-1719), was certainly the ablest in New York’s line of colonial governors, and he stands well up, to say the least, among the ablest of all American colonial governors. There can be no doubt that he appreciated the critical importance of the land situation in New York for provincial welfare in the long run.
If, as seems to be the case, he “side-stepped” on the whole, this problem, it must have been because the problem of a revenue for the support of government was in his judgment at the time more important. “One thing at a time and the biggest thing first” was probably his motto.
Then, too, he was, in political theory, a disciple of Harrington [English political theorist of classical republicanism James Harrington, 1611-1677] and placed a very high estimate on the importance of the landed interest in a community, and on the necessity of a close alliance between that interest and the cause of government.
At all events, during Hunter’s administration, from 1710 to 1719, we find him assenting to an act continuing the partition act of 1708. Nor did he make any change in the administration of the office of provincial surveyor general.
The significance of this latter feature may be best appreciated when we remember that lack of due survey had made possible the extravagant and dangerous patents of Fletcher’s and Cornbury’s administrations.
The office was held by Augustus Graham from 1691 at least, till 1719. Graham had been pronounced by the council in Bellomont’s time as “a man not to be relied upon”; and Cadwallader Colden on taking that office in 1720 found no materials in his inefficient predecessor’s papers on which to base a rent roll of the Crown’s domain!
It was in fact due to the Colden appointment that the consequences es of Cornbury’s grants became more generally known and figured in subsequent provincial politics. Colden, unlike his predecessor, was a very active surveyor. He actually executed the warrants of survey issued to his office in his own time.
More than that, he began surveying some of these former grants, and in his successful opposition to provincial legislation continuing the partition act of 1708, he addressed valuable memorials to the governor and to the Lords of Trade, exposing the whole situation created by the grants of Fletcher and Cornbury.
The fact was, that as far as concerned the vacant lands which were practicable for settlement prior to the expulsion of the French from Canada, the mischief of preemption by short-sighted and greedy speculators had been already accomplished.
The uncertainty and confusion in titles resulting from proceedings before 1709 were a fatal bar to occupation by the kind of people who alone were ready to undertake the settlement of a new country. These people wanted secure titles in fee simple to small tracts, whose improvements would descend surely to their posterity.
Uncertain tenancies to grasping landlords, with heavy fines upon descent or alienation, had no attraction for them. Unless the parliament of England could be brought to take the most radical kind of action – a supposition contrary to fact – the bringing of order into the confusion of land titles in New York province would have to wait, and it did wait for the slow and patient untangling of test cases by the ordinary courts of justice.
It is interesting to note in this connection that according to an article by Mr. R. S. Spears [conservationist Raymond Smiley Spears, 1876–1950] in a recent number of the New York Evening Post, this very process of judicial clearing up of confused land titles is at the present time [1917] going on in the Adirondacks.
Much of this later confusion is the result of features of state policy since the Revolution. At a matter of fact the resolution of these earlier uncertainties, resulting from Cornbury’s grants, was by no means completed when the province became a state of the Union.
It is in this connection that matters of land policy furnished one of the issues which burned fiercely, though not always brightly, throughout New York political life in the early eighteenth century.
In default of action by parliament, the only method available for the provincial government to increase its revenue from the Crown lands was to proceed by suits in Chancery again the patent-holders for recovery of the debts due the Crown account of quit rents.
The “pretty general clamor” (Burnet’s quaint phrase) [William Burnet, 1687/88-1729, Governor 1720-1728] occasioned by the use of this weapon was largely accountable for the heated language of the assembly’s resolutions against that court. This in turn raised the whole question of Crown or popular control of the judiciary, which was an especially prominent issue in provincial politics.
This struggle was bitter – the issues in the Zenger trial [Crown v. John Peter Zenger, 1735, a free press case which highlighted the independence of the professional Bar and reinforced the role of the jury as a curb on executive power] were tangled up with it – and the story is too long and involved to permit us to go into it here.
But its significance may be appreciated when we remember that the two most powerful and successful party leaders in the first half of the eighteenth century in New York politics were also an at the same time chief justices of the province. I refer to Lewis Morris [1671-1746, NJ Governor 1738-1746] and James DeLancey [1703-1760, NY Governor 1753-1755 and 1758-1760].
Enough must by now have been said to substantiate the statement made earlier in this paper that matters of land policy were “in polities” in New York in a rather special manner from very early days. I must content myself with a very few illustrations of the important fact that there was “politics in” the administration of what corresponds to a land office.
There were several steps in the process of “taking out land.” The Indian claims must be satisfied and for this purpose a license from the governor to make the purchase was required – with its attendant fees, of course.
The next step was the obtaining of a warrant, from the governor again, directing the survey of the tract desired. And on return of this warrant to the office of the secretary, another warrant was required, this time to the attorney general, to prepare the draft of the patent. The advice of the council to the governor at each of these three steps was necessary.
The opportunities in this whole process for the exercise of “pressure,” political and financial, were not few, and in many cases they were abundantly improved. An assemblyman who was “refractory” might expect to find the necessary action on his petition for a license to purchase, for example, held up until either he had himself seen the light, or some one else had tampered with his [sic] Indians.
Indian character being what it was [ie., their methods of dealing with colonial administrations being what they were], this was not an unlikely occurrence; in which case, either the price to the original negotiator was incontinently enhanced [without due or reasonable consideration] or the chaffering [haggling] over the bargain suffered to drag along unfinished till the time named in the license had expired.
I pass over the opportunities for frauds on the Indians themselves. The assistance of officials in a position to help or hinder the process of patenting was not infrequently secured by including in the company of applicants one who, on the completion of the patent, deeded his share for a moderate compensation to the complaisant officer.
There is now on record in the office of the secretary of state such a deed to George Clarke, provincial secretary for over thirty years, from the eight original patentees for a tract of ninety thousand acres in Dutchess county. It was thus, by the way, that the tract got its name – The Little Nine Partners.
The “presents” made to the governors in connection with these transactions formed a part of the “perquisites” of the office, in addition to the regularly established fees. And these perquisites were made the subject of precise calculation when assigning the “spoils” of political activity in England.
Captain Evans said he paid Governor Fletcher 500 pounds for his patent in 1694. Governor Montgomerie (1728-31) [John Montgomerie] was said to have received 750 pounds for his consent to the patent for the so-called Oblong, or Equivalent Lands, on the Connecticut border.
The practice ascribed to Governor Cosby, 1732-35, of requiring the transfer to himself in the indirect manner already described, of one-third of all patents granted by him, was condemned as greedy. Logically, however, it was only an abusive development of a practice expected and tolerated.
These are but convenient illustrations, taken at random, of “politics in” land administration, and that only in the coarse, grafting sense of the term “politics” as colloquially used.
There was a result of these and similar influences which, in combination with the entanglement of land questions in political life, had a serious effect on the expansion of New York’s settled area.
Lewis Morris in 1733 expressed it in these words: “the consequence of all this is, first, the engrossing great tracts into few hands; second, rendering it very difficult if not impracticable for any but a certain class of men to come at them; third, rendering them so dear that… it will not be worth the while even of those few that can come at them to meddle with them, there being g better lands and much cheaper to be purchased in Jersie or Pennsylvania.”
It is his “second” that is especially interesting for our purposes. As a result of the extravagant patents of the early governors, of the practices of government officials and of the attitude of the provincial population, the control of the land policy was in the hands of a class having wealth and political influence, and dominated by entirely selfish and short-sighted views as to their own and the province’s advantage. With this class the pioneering settler would not deal if he could help it; he went to Jersey or Pennsylvania instead.
Of this preference of Pennsylvania over New York by actual settlers, there was a special and, as it turned out, crucial, instance which belongs to this period. We are familiar with the episode in New York history connected with the “Palatines,” so-called [they were not all from the Palatinate, see here].
The enterprise which they were brought over in 1710 to prosecute was designed to furnish a screen of protective settlement on the frontier as well as to produce naval stores for the empire.
It’s failure, due, by the way, to the twists and turns of “politics” in England, gave New York such a bad name among the compatriots of “poor, distressed Palatines” in Europe, that the benefit of this very large and important migration in the early middle eighteenth century fell to Pennsylvania, rather than New York.
A few “Palatines” did, it is true, move into the Schoharie and Mohawk valleys and did yeoman service at Oriskany in the Revolution. But with due appreciation of this achievement, it can not be said that these “Mohawk Dutch” have figured in the history of New York State in anything like the important way that the “Pennsylvania Dutch” have figured in the annals of our neighbor state.
I have “left undone things which I ought to have done” if I had attempted to give a full description of the land system of colonial New York. What I have tried to do is to indicate some of the working relations between dealers and dealings in land and active politicians and politics in colonial times.
I would not go so far as to say that the features I have tried to indicate were absolutely peculiar to New York. But I am inclined to think that New York was rather especially distinguished by the degree and extent to which such conditions existed, and by the form which they took.
What we think of today as “ideals of conservation of natural resources for the common good” were evidently far from being potent with the dominant figures in New York colonial business and politics.
We ourselves are not, perhaps, in this day sufficiently near to the realization of these ideals, on either a state or national scale, to justify any attitude of Pharisaical self-satisfaction toward our forefathers in colonial times.
We may at least, however, congratulate ourselves that such ideals are intelligently conceived and now consciously cherished in the public mind to a degree which was certainly absent from New York in the early eighteenth century.
Illustrations, from above: Henry Popple’s map of 1733 showing what is now Saratoga, Albany Schenectady and surroundings, including the disputed territory north of Fort Anne, between King Anne’s War (1702–1713) and King George’s War (1744–1748); “Map of the tracts, patents and land grants of northern New York,” 1894 (New York Public Library); Hardenbergh Patent Map 1795; Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776) physician, natural scientist, lieutenant governor and acting Governor for the Province of New York; 1897 reprint of a 1744 map showing division of the Little Nine Partners Patent in Dutchess County into lots; and a map of the Palatine settlements showing Hoosick Road Palatines near Brunswick, Rensselaer County NY.
