How did the English divide up property after arrival in 1607?
- From Virginia Places: How Colonists Acquired Title to Land in Virginia.
The English who settled in Virginia starting in 1607 asserted that they owned the land. During the colonial period, individual colonist acquired real property primarily through grants from the Virginia Company, headrights, treasury rights, and military warrants.
The pre-existing ownership rights of the Native Americans, the current occupants, were dismissed. At various times the English stated simply that they owned the land through "right of discovery" and "right of conquest." Treaties were negotiated with different tribes in the 1600's and 1700's to extinguish Native American claims, but land was seized rather than purchased from the original inhabitants. The chain of title for parcels in Virginia starts with colonial records created by the English.
Charters issued by James I did acknowledge the land claims of the Spanish in the New World, based on prior settlement. The first charter issued to the Virginia Company in 1606 authorized the investors "to make Habitation, Plantation, and to deduce a colony of sundry of our People into that part of America commonly called VIRGINIA, but settlement was allowed only on territory "not now actually possessed by any Christian Prince or People."
The Europeans who settled first at Jamestown were employees of the Virginia Company. The investors in that company controlled all the initial English land claims in the colony. That lasted less than a decade, after which land titles for individuals were established by company land grants to individuals and "particular plantations." After King James I revoked the Virginia Company's charter in 1624, land was privatized by treasury rights, headrights, militia rights, and land grants awarded by the governor and his Council of State.
The Virginia Company was not a successful business before it expired in 1624. The Spanish had found gold in the Caribbean, then seized vast wealth from organized Native American societies in Mexico and Peru - but there was no gold on the Coastal Plain of Virginia, and the paramount chiefdom led by Powhatan offered no stores of mineral wealth to exploit.
After John Rolfe made a profit from shipping Nicotiana tabacum tobacco in 1614, the Virginia Company recognized that it might generate a positive return on investment from agriculture. If farming was the answer, then the company certainly had one of the key requirements: land. The Third Charter in 1612 had granted the company all lands between 34-41 degrees, and in the Second Charter issued in 1609 it obtained all the land "from Sea to Sea West and North-west."2
Tobacco farming required large amounts of land because the plant exhausted key nutrients in the soil, parrticularly nitrogen, in just 2-3 years. New fields had to be cleared and planted regularly, so growing tobacco required owning large tracts of land.
Farming requires people to do the actual farming. At the same time as tobacco revealed a basis for profit in Virginia, the company was struggling to find new workers willing to be transported across the Atlantic Ocean. Negative reports from returning colonists discouraged even the poor in England from choosing to go to Virginia. After the Starving Time of 1609-1610, Lord de la Warre (as governor) and Sir Thomas Gates (as first marshal) had turned Jamestown into an armed camp with military discipline. They issued Laws Divine, Moral, and Martiall to control the behavior of the company's employees and soldiers.
Growing tobacco was a labor-intensive operation; large numbers of workers were needed to plant, weed, and harvest the crop. Owning a massive block of land in Virginia generated no profit for the investors unless there were farmers growing tobacco on that land. The Virginia Company needed to increase immigration to Virginia, and to decrease emigration of servants who had completed their time of required service.
The company adapted. Investors retained dreams of finding valuable minerals or generating profits from manufacturing items in Virginia such as glass, but the revised business plan took advantage of the company's greatest asset - its ownership of a vast amount of fertile land.
Related Concepts:
- Wikipedia: Headrights.
A headright refers to a legal grant of land given to settlers during the period of European colonization in the Americas. Headrights are most notable for their role in the expansion of the Thirteen Colonies; the Virginia Company gave headrights to settlers, and the Plymouth Company followed suit. The headright system was used in several colonies, including Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Most headrights were for 1 to 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) of land, and were granted to those who were willing to cross the Atlantic and help populate the colonies. Headrights were granted to anyone who would pay for the transportation costs of an indentured laborer. These land grants consisted of 50 acres (0.20 km2) for someone newly moving to the area and 100 acres (0.40 km2) for people previously living in the area. By ensuring the landowning masters had legal ownership of all land acquired, the indentured laborers after their indenture period had passed had little opportunity to procure their own land. This kept a large portion of the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies poor and led to tensions between the laborers and the landowners.
- Treasury Rights.
- Land Patents.
- Military Warrants.
- Wikipedia: Discovery doctrine.
The discovery doctrine, or doctrine of discovery, is a disputed interpretation of international law during the Age of Discovery, introduced into United States municipal law by the US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823). In Marshall's formulation of the doctrine, discovery of territory previously unknown to Europeans gave the discovering nation title to that territory against all other European nations, and this title could be perfected by possession. A number of legal scholars have criticized Marshall's interpretation of the relevant international law. In recent decades, advocates for Indigenous rights have campaigned against the doctrine. In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the doctrine.
- LII: doctrine of discovery.
The doctrine of discovery refers to a principle in public international law under which, when a nation “discovers” land, it directly acquires rights on that land. This doctrine arose when the European nations discovered non-European lands, and therefore acquired special rights, such as property and sovereignty rights, on those lands. This principle disregards the fact that the land oftentimes is already inhabited by another nation. In fact, this doctrine was used in order to legitimize the colonization of lands outside of Europe.
More broadly, the doctrine of discovery can be described as an international law doctrine giving authorization to explorers to claim terra nullius – i.e. said inhabited land – in the name of their sovereign when the land was not populated by Christians.
Nowadays, the world as viewed by international law is considered to be a finite world, because no land is open to state occupation (no terra nullius left), so this question no longer arises today. However, in 1792 Thomas Jefferson asserted that the doctrine of discovery was international, and therefore was applicable to the U.S. government. Today, the doctrine of discovery is still mentioned in American Imperialism and in regards to the treatment of indigenous people.
- Right of Conquest.
The right of conquest is a right of ownership to land after immediate possession via force of arms. It was recognized as a principle of international law that gradually deteriorated in significance until its proscription in the aftermath of World War II following the concept of crimes against peace introduced in the Nuremberg Principles. The interdiction of territorial conquests was confirmed and broadened by the UN Charter, which provides in article 2, paragraph 4, that "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." Although civil wars continued, wars between established states have been rare since 1945. Nations that have resorted to the use of force since the Charter came into effect have typically invoked self-defense or the right of collective defense.
