THE SOUTH AMERICAN WAY 319living and land of their own. Meanwhile industry had to find its own
workers.* Some branches and enterprises sent recruiters to beat the
European boondocks and buy indentured labor. Not a hard task:
famines, business crises, boundary changes, and persecutions gave Eu
ropean emigrants ample reason to leave.
Things might have gone otherwise. Nothing in material circum
stances compelled the North American colonists to prefer home-
steading to ranching. What mattered was culture and social purpose.
Thus the New England colonies were divided from the start into
family holdings, because these people had come as a community of
families. The proprietary colonies of the Mid-Atlantic (New York,
Pennsylvania) saw the sale of larger tracts, but here too the tendency
was then to divide the land and sell it in homestead bites. While spe
cial reserves of colonial origin lasted, some very large purchases oc
curred—as always, linked to insider trading and graft. In the 1790s, for
example, Massachusetts sold 3 million acres in Maine to Henry Knox,
secretary of war, and William Duer, assistant secretary of the treasury,
at 21 cents an acre. That was expensive. Massachusetts also sold the 6
million acres it had retained in western New York to Oliver Phelps and
Nathaniel Gorham for $100,000—less than 2 cents an acre; but then,
those lands were far away And so on.^15 Here too, however, the pro
prietors saw their profit and salvation in resale to farmers; or to smaller
speculators who resold to farmers. The puffery told the story: William
Duer had his agent in Europe talking up the fabulous possibilities of
these new territories: wheat at 60 to 80 bushels an acre; eighty-pound
fish for the taking. Foreign investors were assured that population
would double every twenty-five years (it almost did, at first); that fifty
thousand young people were heading west every year.
Once these large tracts were gone, the holder of frontier land was the
federal government, which made it policy to promote family-size units.
No clearer evidence of this than the squatter dilemma. Since auction
sales made acquisition uncertain, people chose to occupy first and buy
later. The authorities tried to prevent this. Not only did it violate the
norms of property and procedure; it also reduced prices and thwarted
the intentions of rich, acquisitive people. In vain: when those squatter
farmers gathered for an auction sale, rifles in hand, it took a foolhardy
agent to flout their interests. So Congress passed in 1830 a law that just
* This was the theme of H. J. Habakkuk's classic American and British Technology: the
high cost of unskilled labor pushed the Americans to pursue technological innovation;
but then, how explain rapid growth? The answer: immigration.