family farmstead” faster than in New England (Renton 1909; Dawson 1940; Lewis 1940; Greer 1993, 2012; Choquette 1997. “Norman law, particularly perhaps Norman land law, was based on concepts that were common to Latin Christendom—especially those parts of it that had once been part of the Carolingian empire” (Hagger 2010)). Nevertheless, common field agriculture continued in some New French settlements into the nineteenth-century, and these communities often utilized a village structure rather than a long lot. After the Revolution, the US Congress affirmed the long-standing commons in the villages of Cahokia, Vincennes, Cohos, and Prairie du Pont, in the Illinois country. Cahokia continued to use its common as late as the Civil War (McDermott 1949).
The Spanish colonized North America with a distinctive tradition of the commons already in place. Townsmen received grants of land for their individual use, as well as access to an extensive civic commons, the ejido, which extended far out into the countryside around the town. These Spanish outer commons were owned by the village or town and were regulated by explicit legislation that required they be extensive enough to support the livestock of the town’s settlers. This more formal and municipal approach to the outer commons thus carried with it the implicit approbation of colonial governmental apparatus (Greer 2012). Outside of the town, well-connected soldiers, governmental officials, and Franciscan missionaries received grants of indigenous homelands with the people who lived in them, in a legal vehicle known as the encomienda. The linked and complementary aims of these grants was profit and the saving of souls (Douglass and Graves 2017). The results of these approaches to colonization did not mean that the Spanish outer commons were less invasive or destructive to indigenous homes and livelihoods, for it made colonial property of both land and its inhabitants. But it did mean that the division between inner and outer commons did not carry the same exclusive and racialized qualities as with either the English or French outer commons. The implications of this for Indigenous Peoples was significant, and may account for the maintenance and longevity of agricultural traditions in indigenous communities colonized by the Spanish. As Phillip O. Leckman shows, while there was a profound disjuncture between Puebloan and Spanish understandings of land-use in New Mexico, communal space, and agriculture, there was enough similarity to allow Puebloan people to continue many of their traditional agricultural practices (Leckman 2017).
In New England and New York, intercommoning and folding continued up until the time of the Revolution, and in some places as late as the 1840s. The degree to which New English settlements utilized commons and freeholds correlated with the places and land tenure systems from which settlers had migrated (Cronon 1983). Sometimes local governments used commons to promote the economic welfare of the community. Massachusetts Bay Colony passed an ordinance that allowed farmers to pasture their sheep on any town commons to promote wool production (V.D. Anderson 2004). Regulated fishery commons were ubiquitous. The Town of Plymouth regulated alewives’ spawning over many decades so that “eich man” would have the herrings “due to them.” In Delaware a legislator argued that fish were God’s providence “for general use.” In 1675, New York’s governor forbade people “to cast dung, dirt or refuse of ye city, or anything to fill up ye harbor or among ye neighbors or neighboring shores, under penalty of forty shillings.” Plymouth colony did the same. Historical records suggest that the earliest official forest common was established in 1817, when James Madison set aside forests that “produce the live oak and red cedar,” in order to ensure an adequate supply of timber for the US navy (Town of Plymouth 1637 in Neimark and Mott 2017; Grettler 1992/1993 cited in Maddison 2010; Edmund Andros (1675) Quoted in Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act, 1972, United States Statutes at Large, Vol. 86 (1973) P4236, n.d. in Sanger n.d.; Pollution in Plymouth Colony Harbor the Compact with the Charter and Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth: Together with the Charter of the Council at Plymouth 1668; US Congress, Fourteenth Congress 1817 all in Neimark and Mott 2017). Nevertheless, unauthorized extractions from the outer forest commons certainly predated and continued after this official act.
While inner commons practices continued and evolved, settlers discovered new ways to extract resources from the colonial outer commons (Albany Argus n.d.; Godwise 1841; Allen 1981; Donahue 2004; Greer 2012). Ohio hog farmers drove their herds through a “hog commons” to Cincinnati’s slaughter houses through the early decades of the nineteenth century. Cattle ranchers on the open range allowed the mixing of herds on common pasturage which were separated at roundup time—a calf standing by a branded mother identified its owner. After the Civil War, cattle were driven, and fattened on the way, from Texas across “open range” to rail headings along the Union Pacific and then shipped to Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, and elsewhere. Ginseng foragers developed a “gathering commons” in the Appalachian highlands of Georgia and the Carolinas. Highland dwellers of the Southern Appalachians enhanced their diets with abundant chestnuts, and eventually developed a lucrative trade with urban centers, until a blight wiped them out. And Nuevo Mexicanos established and sustained “land-grant commons” before and after the establishment of the United States (Lutts 2004; Greer 2012; Manget 2012; Newfont 2012; Zallen 2014; see also Newfont 2012).
As traditional commons practices transplanted and evolved in colonial North America, so did commons culture (Griswold 1948). Raymond Williams writes that “a culture has two aspects: the known meanings … which its members are trained to; [and] the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested” (Williams 1973). Migrants to North America came “trained” in some manner or degree to the long-held customs of the commons. These “known meanings” and aspects probably conditioned settlers to see themselves as agents of the mandate found in the Book of Genesis (Williams emphasizes the perceived bounty of North America in the eighteenth century; Williams 1973). John Locke used this biblical hierarchy as the basis of his political economy. “God has given the Earth to the children of Men … given it to Mankind in common.” And he formulated his vision of the Earth’s commons with America in mind referring to the “wild common of nature” (Locke 1689). Settlers built on these “known meanings” and proceeded to “offer and test” new rationales for their resource takings. As contending groups, covetous of the common’s wealth, confronted each other, new boundaries and rules emerged reflecting the relative power of the contenders.
An expansive rather than a limited resource base brought to the fore new forms of taking. Local control and possession took on entirely new meanings when “taking” meant taking from Indigenous Peoples rather than the manor lord or one’s neighbors. Labor leading to the acquisition of property gained political significance in the settler nation when authority gave the nod of approval to settlers’ squatting, which garnered them the standing of property and national belonging (Evans 2019). The social welfare ethics of the right of remainder and judicious use receded. Locke’s charge that God’s gift of nature was “not for man to spoil and destroy” but to take “as much [of] as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils,” was rarely an ethical standard settlers took to heart (Locke 1689; Tully 1980; A. Taylor 1998). Indeed, the aspects of the commons tradition that facilitated sharing became less important than those that justified taking.
The most dramatic shift took place in the sociology of taking and sharing. As in Europe, the commons in North America denoted any shared resource over which a person felt entitled to exercise a right of extraction, based on custom. But the colonial context shifted the relationship between resources, individuals, and their communities, emphasizing the sociopolitical meaning of resources. Whereas in Europe resources reflected the class hierarchies of the manor, and later the wider emerging capitalist world, North American colonialism reflected the political identities of the claimants to resources in regions where original, non-Europeans also claimed resources. The degree to which individuals felt entitled to exercise their rights to extract resources was proportional to their identification with the larger group and its strength and ability to claim dominion over those resources.
In the case of settlers, this larger group was the nation-state. The traditional commons and the nation-state were systems for gaining access to the potential of wild nature. It was the terms for gaining access, the means used, the scope, and ultimately, the end-goal of extractions, which were different. With the commons, different classes of people locally negotiated access. The nation
