Property in Land in the Early United States

Abstract

Claire Priest’s impressive book emphasizes the lack of legal restrictions on the remedies of creditors in what would become the United States. She stresses Parliament’s passage of the Debt Recovery Act in 1732, a distinctly pro-creditor enactment. An important part of her narrative addresses security interests in slaves. By 1785, South Carolina had established a county system for the voluntary recording of mortgages on slaves. The focus of this essay, by contrast, is entirely on property in land, including mortgages on land. Priest’s book cites Alice Hanson Jones’s finding, based on an examination of probate records at the time of the Revolution, that real estate, not slaves, constituted a solid majority of personal wealth, even in Southern States. Priest asserts that Jones found that “land constituted 81.1% of wealth in New England, 68.5% in the mid-Atlantic region, and 48.6% of wealth in the South, with slaves constituting 35.6%.” There is a small literature on real estate transactions in early America. Standouts include John Frederick Martin’s Profits in the Wilderness (1991), on town formation in seventeenth-century New England, and Elizabeth Blackmar’s Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 (1989). Nonetheless, much remains to be done. Land records, rarely explored by historians, provide potential troves of information. In this brief essay, I comment on two topics related to real estate: the role of land speculators in the eighteenth century and the development of Manhattan real estate during the lifetime of John Jacob Astor, who at this death in 1848, was one of the richest men in the world.