One very interesting and little known fact of the colonial period is that land speculators played a very important part in attracting population to North America. One hears a great deal about the Puritan, Quaker, and other religious movements as important factors in bringing cohesive groups of settlers to America. Also the idea of "cavaliers" coming to Virginia also gets a fair amount of mention, although more often in honor theories of the antebellum South than in writing about the colonial period.
The very character of the North American landscape including the nature of the previous land use by the Indians made land speculation a veritable certainty. In the early days the land being sold was often originally granted to those with influence at court by the British Crown, but later on there were various individuals who acquired land outright either by purchasing large tracts from the Indians, or those with a direct knowledge of the lay of the land could make very good profits by buying small tracts of choice land from absentee land owners.
Once in ownership of a parcel of undeveloped land the speculators would seek to attract settlers to their either as renters or as buyers. Some very interesting primary source materials are the advertisements put out by the land speculators in an attempt to draw settlers to their lands. This often included European agents ship captains to transport the settlers, and was sometimes a very lucrative enterprise on several levels. However, absentee landowners rarely did as well as those who dealt in land from the location itself.
The most successful land speculators were often willing to take a loss and offer free land or very low rents until a settlement was established which created a demand for the land which was their "product", so to speak. Those who set out initially hoping to reap huge profits on wild lands from the very start often failed. There were of course many factors which encouraged or discouraged settlements such as transportation routes, the nationality of nearby communities, and similar factors, but the speculator who bought a good tract and patiently developed it could hope to reap huge profits from such an enterprise.
So were many early American fortunes accumulated, and the same process continued to be an important part of the American Landscape after the Revolution. Such names in American History as George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and very many more were land speculators, and the nation we know to in a large part was drawn on the map as in now lays by the efforts of speculators to develop settlements and attract settlers. This is only one of several very interesting concepts that can be gleaned by a reading of Bernard Bailyn’s The Peopling of British North America.
