who obviously did not own their own homes.
The first widespread weakening of primogeniture and entail began in 1737, when the British Parliament passed the “Act for the More Easy Recovery of Debts in His Majesty’s Plantations and Colonies in America.” This act made land, buildings, and other real property “equivalent to chattel property for the purpose of satisfying debts,” making it easier for people to borrow against the value of their land. Although increasing the risk to landowners, the act boosted economic growth. After the Revolution, most states, recognizing “the importance of the expansion of commerce to the creation of an American meritocracy,” followed this precedent.13
Revolutionary-era Americans clearly considered entail and primogeniture to be inappropriate for an egalitarian nation. To prevent the establishment of a landed aristocracy, they rapidly moved to abolish these customs. Thomas Jefferson persuaded the Virginia legislature to abolish entail in 1776. The preamble to Jefferson’s law claimed that entail “tends to deceive fair traders, who give a credit on the visible possession of such estates, discourages the holder thereof from taking care and improving the same, and sometimes does injury to the morals of youth, by rendering them independent of and disobedient to their parents.” The law itself immediately changed any “fee taille” land to fee simple land and prevented landowners from entailing their land to their heirs in a will.14 Years later, Jefferson listed the abolishment of entail as one of the six greatest accomplishments of his life.15
South Carolina and Delaware abolished entail shortly before Virginia, and within 10 years after 1776 all the remaining states except Massachusetts and Rhode Island had done so as well.16 Massachusetts (and by extension Maine, which was formed out of the original Massachusetts colony) and Rhode Island still allow entail today, though in a modified form: Someone may entail a property to his or her heir or heirs, which would mean the heirs cannot sell it. But the entail would disappear on the death of the heir unless the entail was included in his or her will.
Primogeniture soon followed: of the states that observed this custom, Georgia abolished it in 1777; North Carolina in 1784; Virginia (led again by Jefferson) in 1785; Maryland and New York in 1786; South Carolina in 1791; and Rhode Island in 1798.17 Landowners could still will their land to their eldest sons, but property of people who died without a will was divided equally among their male heirs or, if they had no sons, their female heirs. The abolishment of entail and primogeniture, combined with the adoption of the credit policies in the Act of 1737, led to the gradual breakup of the great landed estates and in turn increased the share of farmers who owned their own land and homes.
Abolishing primogeniture and entail eventually led to a more egalitarian nation. “No sooner was the law of primogeniture abolished than fortunes began to diminish, and all the families of the country were simultaneously reduced to a state in which labor became necessary to procure the means of subsistence,” observed Alexis de Tocqueville in the early 1830s. “Several of them have since entirely disappeared, and all of them learned to look forward to the time at which it would be necessary for everyone to provide for his own wants. Wealthy individuals are still to be met with, but they no longer constitute a compact and hereditary body.”18
The rejection of feudalism turned America into a magnet for European immigrants. As historians Doucet and Weaver note, “Nineteenth-century immigrants to North America identified property ownership with freedom from customary restrictions,” meaning feudal traditions that survived in many European nations until the beginning of the 20th century.19
One of the largest land grants in America had been Pennsylvania, granted to William Penn by King Charles II in 1681. The Penn family had sold only about one-sixth of the land by 1779, when the Pennsylvania legislature effectively confiscated the rest and sold it to settlers and speculators over the next two decades.20
Yet the transition from large estates to small landowners did not always happen overnight. As late as the 1840s, well after Tocqueville wrote, much of the Hudson River Valley remained in a few large estates granted by the Dutch in the 17th century. That land was still managed in a feudal manner, with tenant farmers who paid rents to the owners as well as taxes on their land. Just one estate, owned by the Rensselaer family, covered about three-quarters of a million acres and had some 80,000 tenants.21
One indicator of low farm-ownership or homeownership rates is voting data. Rhode Island maintained a property-ownership requirement for voting until 1844.22 Virginia did the same until 1851.23 These data make it possible to compare before- and after-voting data in national elections. The first year for which state-by-state polling data are available for most states was 1824, when the presidential election was particularly contentious, with four different candidates in the running. Yet only about 6 percent of white males in Rhode Island and Virginia voted that year.
By 1840, the last year in which Rhode Island enforced a property qualification, 16 percent of males voted for a presidential candidate. After the property qualification was removed, voting males increased to 25 percent in 1856. In Virginia, just 30 percent of white males voted in 1848, increasing to 45 percent in 1856. These data suggest that only a small share of families owned property in 1824, though the share may have increased by the 1840s. During those years, more than 40 percent of Virginians were slaves, which brings down overall homeownership rates still further.
Another source of data for overall property ownership rates is a 1798 survey of all property in America conducted by the Treasury Department for potential tax purposes. An analysis of this survey led historian Lee Soltow to estimate that the nation had about 433,000 different property owners. Since about 877,000 white males were over the age of 21 at the time, Soltow estimates that about 49 percent of households were landowners.24 Of course, when slaves are counted, that number falls to around 40 percent, and homeowner-ship rates are lower still to the extent that many properties, such as grants to military combatants, were mainly held for speculation by people who did not live on those properties.
The Trans-Appalachian West
Settlement west of the Appalachians should have increased ownership of farms and homes. However, except in grants given to military veterans, the government was very slow to make those lands available to settlers, and even slower to make them available at prices most settlers could afford.
At the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, many American colonists who had fought in the war were granted lands west of the Appalachians. George Washington, who received 20,000 acres in what would become Kentucky, considered the grant “a Lottery only” because the lands were so inaccessible and were largely under Indian domain.25 Indian treaties in 1768 and 1770 opened much of that land to settlement, but by the time of the Revolution only about 12,000 whites lived west of the mountains.26
Just having the land does not mean that the owners lived on it; instead, many held the land for speculative purposes or sold it to speculators. In the meantime, squatters often started farming lands without a title. Squatters occupied some of George Washington’s land in western Pennsylvania. He met with them in 1796, the last year of his presidency, and offered to sell the land to them. They preferred to dispute his title in court; the court decided in his favor and they had to leave.27
At the time of the Revolution, Virginia offered actual settlers 400 acres and North Carolina offered 640 acres “at the merest nominal price.” Settlers in Maine could also get 100 acres merely for clearing 16 within four years. Within three years, Virginia settlers were required to build a house, plant one acre, and keep stock for one year, or they would lose the land.28
After the Revolution, the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized the United States’ sovereignty over land as far west as the Mississippi River. The states ceded to the United States their claims to land west of the Appalachians—about 237 million acres of land that eventually became Alabama, Kentucky, Illinois,
