Comments Elsewhere

Lawrence: Even using your definition of homesteading – which, as I pointed out, wasn’t the understood basis of property in those times and places – …

If this is what you were trying to point out, I don’t know what its relevance is supposed to be. People have had lots of wacky ideas about property rights. For example, in the American South ca. 1850 most large planters believed that they could own other human beings; and even further that if they owned any one human being they would also own all of her or his descendents. But they were wrong; the people whom they enslaved were not actually their property, but rather free and independent human beings. The moral of this story is that the proper question is what property rights people actually had, not what property rights some set of people thought that they had.

Lawrence: the plantation owners did apply their own labour to the land. You’ll see a literary example of it in Scarlett O’Hara’s father setting up Tara in “Gone with the Wind” (she later applies her own labour to it).

The fact that you have to resort to fiction — a rather notorious example of wistful apologia for slavery, incidentally — in order to bolster your historical point doesn’t speak well for it. That said, there are certainly plenty of historical examples of white planters who spent a bit of time doing some work on the farm. But so what? I’d be glad to see a land reform plan on which former slaves were recognized as the owners of parcels of land proportionate to the amount of their labor that was spent in cultivating and maintaining it, and in which the planters retained control over parcels of land proportionate to the amount of their labor that was spent in cultivating and maintaining it. I doubt the planters would have been very happy with the results, but it’s not their happiness that I am, or that you should be, concerned with.

Lawrence: But in any case, the slaves were only part of setting up the plantations – the actual “planting”.

This is a plain lie. Slaves ploughed, planted, tended, and harvested. They also cleared land, worked on roads and structures, tended to animals, built and maintained their own houses, built and maintained the master’s manor, cooked, cleaned, cared for children and adults, greeted and entertained guests, ran errands in town, and did any number of other tasks which were set for them by the slave-driver, his family, and his overseers. Slave-drivers also extracted more money from their slaves by forcing them to work on other plantations or in towns or on public works projects, and taking their wages; and by “selling” them and their children. (Even if “all” that slaves were doing was tilling the soil, I can’t imagine why in the world you wouldn’t think that they are doing a substantial and essential part of the labor necessary for running a bloody farm.)

Lawrence: You get a better insight bu looking at the Dutch Patroons of upper New York state

A better insight on what? Why would it offer a better insight on the question of land ownership ca. 1866 in the American South than … considering facts about the American South ca. 1866?

I don’t think that the arbitrary grants of the Dutch West India Company conferred any more right to the estates that the Patroons claimed than the Southern slave-drivers had over the land they claimed. But I think there’s an open question in the theory of property whether you can homestead land by voluntarily arranging for others to cultivate it. If you can, then the Patroons had a legitimate right to as much of their land as was worked by either themselves or by free tenants. (I don’t know how many of their tenants actually were free, and how many were held to illegitimate forms of servitude which were quite common in early modern Europe. Whatever the proportion of free to unfree was, that’s the proportion of land you could say they rightly held.) If you can’t homestead land by voluntarily arranging for others to cultivate it, then the Patroons had only a leigitimate right to as much of their land as they personally worked. I don’t think either of these answers is obviously wrong. (I suspect Kevin has more fixed beliefs than I do on the question.) There is, on the other hand, no open question as towhether you can homestead land by coercing other people to labor on it. The reason that working unowned land is a means to owning is that the labor is yours. If the labor was never yours to begin with, then neither is the land. Conflating this latter case with the former case, where exchange is voluntary, is not an insight into the issue; it’s merely changing the subject.