“In the U.S. system, land itself — not just what was produced from the land, such as agriculture, mining, logging, grazing, and so on — was the most important exchange commodity for the accumulation of capital and building the natural treasury. In order to comprehend the apparently irrational genocidal policy of the U.S. Government toward the presence of Native nations on the land, the centrality of land sales in building the economic base of the U.S. Capitalist system must be the frame of reference.” – Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Not a Nation of Immigrants
Four hundred years ago this summer — in the year 1626 — at the rocky mouth of a brackish estuary at 42 degrees latitude on the North Atlantic coast of soon-to-be-New England, a small group of Englishmen, my ancestor Roger Conant among them, established a settlement called Salem Colony. Salem would shortly join Plymouth to form Massachusetts Bay Colony, the very embryo of the political project that became the United States of America.
Roger Conant was the governor of Salem before Salem was a town; so, aside from being my ancestor, Roger is a figure of some historical import. One January day, with dirty snow piles lining the streets outside, I spent some hours in the historic archives of the Salem Public Library searching for answers to particular questions about his life and times, and was rewarded with many choice details, like this:
“Roger Conant (founder of Salem) arrived in New England with his wife Sarah and at least one son, Caleb, who had been born in England. After the family settled in Salem, a son named Roger Conant Jr. was born there. Several historical and genealogical sources state that Roger Jr. was the first white child born in Salem. The town reportedly recognized this distinction by granting him thirty acres of land.” (Phillips, Salem in the 17th Century.)
As the 10th generation descendant of this white child, I didn’t get a piece of those thirty acres. I have, though, inherited just enough privilege and earned just enough wealth to afford a mortgage on a small house and an acre of boggy land elsewhere in Massachusetts. (Call me a swamp yankee if you must.)
I’ve written previously about the statue of Conant perched on a massive boulder in the heart of the town he founded, and wrestled with the questions that monument raises: how white history erases other histories; how simple stories of our nation’s origins can blind us to the complex realities of where we truly come from; of who earns the right to be represented in public spaces. On this January research expedition I intended to deepen my inquiry by asking an additional very specific question: what role did my ancestor play in turning the territory of the dawnland People — the people known then as the Massachusett — into private property — private property that benefited himself and his fellow colonists then, and that went on to provide wealth to a dozen generations of white people since?
*
Most accounts of the pilgrimages that established the Massachusetts Bay Colony center on the Puritans’ flight to religious freedom, but that’s only part of the story. Another part of the story is the economic transformation led by the early mercantilists — known then as merchant adventurers — who created joint stock companies to invest in the new world journeys and reap returns for their shareholders in the form of codfish, timber, beaver pelts and other new world riches.
Yet another part of the story has to do with the economics of land. Conant and the English settlers who came to Massachusetts in the 1620s and 1630s arrived during a period when England was undergoing a profound change in how land was understood and managed. “The Great Transformation,” as this centuries’-long trend was called in the book of the same name by ecocomic historian Karl Polanyi, was a shift from collectively managed landholding toward privately bounded property. The enclosures movement that began in 17th century England was a philosophical and administrative upheaval, enforced through violence, in which land that had once been collectively managed for subsistence began to be seized and privatized for commercial agriculture and sheep farming.
Understanding the implications of the enclosures requires recognizing that private ownership of land, and particularly absolute, individual ownership, was virtually unknown across the countryside of Europe until the modern era. During the centuries of feudalism that predated this period, royalty and aristocracy may have owned the estates and held sway over vast tracts of land, but the peasants enjoyed a wide range of rights to make use of the land and her gifts: to graze livestock, cut wood or peat, to draw water, to grow crops.
As the British Empire expanded and increased its wealth and power through colonial adventures overseas, common lands were fenced off and made into privately owned sheep pasture to produce textiles for trade to further enrich the owning classes. By 1700, virtually all the land in the West Country of England — Cornwall and Devon, from where my ancestor hailed — had been enclosed. In the process, multitudes of working people were forced from the land and into the crowded, sickly cities. In the foremost history of the enclosures, The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson describes how wealthy landowners used the legal system to extinguish customary rights such as grazing, foraging, and gleaning in favor of absolute, individual private property. Thompson, like Polanyi before him, describes this process as a violent reshaping of the social structure of rural England that concentrated wealth in the upper classes and immiserated everybody else. Thompson also chronicles the very broad and widespread uprisings against the enclosures, most famously documented through the revolts of the Diggers, and encapsulated in the popular rhyme:
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
Roger Conant, a freeman from south Devon, may or may not have been aware of and directly affected by the enclosures movement — he came from Yeoman farmers, who ranked above peasants but below the Lords and aristocrats who made the laws — but from what I can tell, the worldview represented by the enclosures came with him to the new world.
The English enclosure movement was not simply about putting up fences and forcing the peasantry off the land. It was a profound experiment in social engineering that required new technical innovations — methods to survey, map and measure land, new forms of legal administration to establish jurisprudence and record ownership in legal documents, and the establishment of a system of claims that allowed for allocating specific parcels to individuals while extinguishing overlapping customary rights. Hard as it may be for us imagine today, all of this was new — and all of it served to bring about an intellectual or epistemological shift — a shift in worldview — where land came to be viewed not as a common good but as a commodity that could be measured, divided, owned, improved and transferred between individuals as a matter of legal and administrative practice.
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Roger Conant arrived in the area that became Salem in 1626 leading a group of settlers after the failure of a fishing settlement at Cape Ann to the north. Before the arrival of the larger Puritan migration under John Endecott and later John Winthrop, Conant served as the leader of the settlement. As the first Englishmen to settle the area, Conant and his associates became known in the earliest written accounts as “the old planters.” In Salem in the 17th Century, written in 1933, James Duncan Phillips describes the establishment of land grants among the old planters:
“When Salem was settled, it had no boundaries. It might spread as it saw fit since it was simply shut in by the interminable forest where no one lived except the Indians, and precious few of them after the plague of 1616 and the smallpox epidemic of 1633.”
“No attempt was made to regulate land grants outside the immediate village before [John] Winthrop arrived in 1630 and not much was done for at least 3 years afterward.”
“The reason there were few grants before 1632 was probably because the few settlers were so hard pressed for food that everybody went where he could live, and property began to increase and then the early settlers sought to establish their rights. The Salem Book of Grants …. starts with Oct 1 1634 and on August 22 1635 in order to clear up the land titles afresh start ‘all the Inhabitants of this town of Salem, yt have formed greater or lesser or any quantity of land granted to them or any ten acre lott medoes or marshes be they more or less in quantity shall repair to men appoynted to lay our bounds…Captain Trask, John Woodbury, Mr. Conant, Jeffrey Massy and John Balshe are appoynted overseer and layers out of Lotts.”
It is this observation, that Mr. Conant was appointed a “layer out of Lotts” — that is, a surveyor of land — that drives me back to the English enclosures to ask, were the newly established techniques, assumptions, and legal ideas developed during the early English enclosures carried across the Atlantic by the early settler colonists and applied to Indigenous land? And was my ancestor, then, instrumental in this process?
The answer to both questions appears to be yes.
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Among the first lands to be granted, I discovered, was 1000 acres granted by my ancestor and his group of old planters, reasonably enough, to themselves: “On the 25th of the 11th month of 1635, five of the old planters were provided with a thousand-acre grant on the headwaters of Bass River, well up toward Wenham Lake, which for some years they managed in common, and there Roger Conant, Capt. Trask, Balch, Woodbury and Peter Palfry took up their farms. Roger Conant lived there till his death in 1679.”
The written records of Conant and his time are fragmentary and leave an incomplete picture. The picture that does emerge, of a tolerant man devoted to peace, is literally inscribed in history on a plaque in Gloucester, Massachusetts memorializing a moment when he averted bloodshed between two factions, — “a notable exemplification of arbitration in early New England.” Due largely to this historical incident — the resolution of a conflict between colonial interests — Roger Conant has been given a reputation as a peacemaker. The peacemaker image is further affirmed by his role in governing the colony. Various sources celebrate the man for negotiating the survival and relocation of Salem colony, helping establish the initial pattern of settlement, and maintaining local order during the colony’s precarious early years. Even after he was unseated as provisional governor (by the more religious John Endecott), Conant served in many positions in government:
“On 3d September 1634, the General Court appointed a Committee consisting of 9 members to set out the bounds of the towns … Conant sat on the General Court (as Deputy).” … The men assigned to this role had many duties, including “inspector of canoes,” “refree in disputes,” “witness to deeds,”“administrator of estates,” and Phillips informs us, “they were appointed to survey bounds and highways, not only within the limits of Salem, but even as far distant as Dorchester and Roxbury.” A different source notes that the committee Conant sat on assigned families 10-acre lots. (Perley, History of Salem, Mass. Vol. 1 1622-1637)
It’s in these roles that we can see how the settlement at Salem Colony was informed by the new social technologies developed through the enclosures. The surveying of territory, assigning of house lots, granting of planting fields, defining town boundaries and recording grants in written records all would have been familiar to English surveyors and magistrates who had experience with enclosure and estate management — but all were, again, fairly recent innovations.
The project of converting land into legally bounded property units was very different from how these lands had been treated at any time in the prior millennia of human habitation. Where Indigenous systems of land use generally involved overlapping seasonal, kinship-based, and territorial rights within a worldview of mutual relations with a living world, the colonists sought clear, exclusive ownership and employed a sophisticated set of administrative techniques to express and impose it.
Before the colonizer, land was relation — among the humans as well as among the bears, foxes, beavers and all the ones that walk, swim, and fly. The colonizer made it property. In the colonizers’ view, the land would belong to them, not they to the land. What was to the English a matter of administration — parceling out the land like pieces of eight — came, in a very short space of time, to change the land in ways never before seen. Not in this place, certainly.
While it’s not clear whether or not Conant himself performed land surveys, surveying was perhaps the most important link between enclosures in England and colonization in the new world. In England, enclosure commissioners and landlords relied on surveys to transform commons into private property. The survey made land “legible” to the state and the community. In Salem, surveyors performed a similar function, measuring lots, establishing boundaries, creating records of ownership, and resolving disputes through mapped lines rather than customary use. A settler’s claim became valid because it was documented, measured, and recognized by colonial authorities. Essentially, surveying turned territory into a grid of alienable parcels. It was the technology that alienated the land from her stewards, and established the ethos of private property that has been the defining feature of U.S. land law ever since.
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In another foundational book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England, historian William Cronon took a pioneering look at the environmental history of the region. Cronon dispels the old fraught notion that the lands where the English colonists arrived was in any way “virgin,” let alone that New England’s landscapes — or any lands — are ever in any sense static or pristine. The colonists, beholden to their religious views of man’s dominion over the earth, dressed the land in myth. Cronon writes, “As early as 1635, the historian Edward Johnson could count it as one of God’s providences that a ‘remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness’ had been transformed in a generation into ‘a second England for fertileness.’
“In this vision,” Cronon continues, “the transformation of wilderness betokened the planting of a garden, not the fall from one; any change in the New England environment was [viewed as] divinely ordained and wholly positive.”
In another passage, Cronon writes, “It is tempting to believe that when Europeans arrived in the New World they confronted Virgin Land, the Forest Primeval, a wilderness which had existed for eons uninfluenced by human hands. Nothing could be further from the truth. The land,” he writes, “was less virgin than it was widowed. Indians had lived on the continent for thousands of years, and had to a significant extent modified its environment to their purposes. The destruction of Indian communities in fact brought some of the most important ecological changes which followed the Europeans’ arrival in America. The choice is not between two landscapes, one with and one without a human influence; it is between two human ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem.”
This “Great Transformation” from ways of belonging to an ecosystem that humans had practiced for millennia to a way of being in which the ecosystem itself belongs to humans in the form of property — mapped, measured, bounded, registered, deeded and privatized — occurred precisely through the intervention of the General Court of Salem Colony in which my ancestor played a foundational role.
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When I learned through the course of this research that this man with my name, ten generations ago, was on the very committee that flipped the ontological switch which ruptured the nature of human relations with the land that had held sway for countless millennia, it struck me as significant. More to the point, it struck me as an act of violence, a violation of a very old agreement. But I’m also aware that it takes a fairly unique perspective and a lifetime of study to see it this way. From the dominant perspective of a society to whom private property is as fundamental as air, the shift I am observing could easily seem subtle to the point of nit-picking.
But I believe it matters.
In most of the historical records, and today, in the efforts of his descendents in the U.S. and supporters from his home village in Devon, England, Conant the colonial governor and administrator has been given the image of a peacemaker. Within the small community of his descendants he is honored as an individual who embodied “the virtues that became the bedrock of our great democratic experiment: Patience, Humility, Tolerance, Compromise and Civil Discourse.” From what we know of the man’s handling of affairs within the colonial project, this all may well be true. But other truths may pertain as well.
Scholar David Hinton, discussing his recent book Wild Earth, Wild Mind, examines how the clash of cultural assumptions — the native and the European — bore out in the neighboring state of Vermont. “The peoples native to the place lived for over ten thousand years with an ethic of reciprocity and care built into their fundamental cultural assumptions. When the Europeans arrived with their unthought assumptions they clear cut the whole state within a century.” Hinton points out that “those two outcomes — one, an intact ecosystem after ten thousand years and the other, a completely devastated ecosystem after less than a century — those are philosophical differences, differences in cultural assumptions.”
From a certain perspective, one could make the case that the administrative shift my ancestor helped to institute was, like the enclosures movement in England, itself a form of violence. If the act of administering the allotment and privatization of land is not violent in the immediate physical sense, at the very least it represents an ontological shift that established a regime of ownership and control and an environmental footprint that was, and continues to be, destructive to both the land and the peoples who once belonged to the land. If we revisit Dunbar Ortiz’s point in the epigraph above, that “the centrality of land sales in building the economic base of the U.S. Capitalist system” is key to comprehending ”the apparently irrational genocidal policy of the U.S. Government” — it puts a fine point on the argument, making the violence apparent.
To the colonists of course, the act of allotting land would not have appeared remotely “violent.” To the contrary, Roger Conant and his peers adhered to the notion that they were not taking the land from those who had previously stewarded it, but were, rather, being given the land by God in order to “improve” it. This Godly mission, a version of the Church’s Doctrine of Discovery, is implicit in the commanding gaze of Roger Conant who still stands, cast in bronze atop a high boulder, surveying Salem common.
Just as the English landlords did in the enclosures, colonists in New England justified taking land by improving it according to English agricultural standards and claiming that Indigenous peoples had neither the custom nor the ability to improve it themselves. Everywhere the English colonized they regarded Indigenous land as vacant or underused even when it was actively occupied and managed.
It does seem to be the case that the native population of coastal Massachusetts had been decimated by epidemics, so it may be true that the lands around Salem were occupied by “precious few … after the plague of 1616 and the smallpox epidemic of 1633.” But accounts of the period also show that the signs of the native die-off were widely evident. And, while the records, typically, say more about native absence than about native presence, it is clear that there were natives present, and that the old planters interacted with them.We know from the historical record, for example, that Conant and the old planters grew corn, beans, squash and tobacco. Indeed, if you visit the reenacted Salem Colony today in a public park a few miles from the original settlement, you will see small plots of these native crops and be told how the old planters adopted the Indigenous mode of agriculture.
Who taught them these methods, and what does this say of the English concept of “improvement”?
The concept of improvement was not merely about productive agriculture, but was specifically signified by enclosed fields, permanent settlements, fences, intensive cropping, and, ultimately, private ownership. The belief in improvement satisfied both an economic and a moral imperative: by upholding the biblical “Creation Mandate,” where God makes humans in His image and commands them to “have dominion” over the fish, birds, and every living thing (Genesis 1:26-28), the colonists believed they were enacting God’s will on earth. By enacting God’s will on earth, they were also enriching themselves, the act of which, according to Protestant theology, was itself proof that God was pleased.
By this same logic, generations of colonists were driven to the civilizing mission of “improving” the natives themselves. In this theology, the missionary project of “civilizing the savages,” “improving the land,” and enriching ones’ self are, essentially, one and the same.
A further aspect of agricultural improvement that would have had an immense impact on the land, and which proved a flashpoint in what became King Philip’s War (1675-1676) was the rapid import of livestock. According to one historical source, in 1625, twelve cows were delivered to the Old Planters at Cape Anne, during Conant’s time there, and a dozen more, with an unknown number of bulls for breeding, in 1626. Sixty more cattle arrived at Salem in 1633. Describing the rapid and decentralized growth of settlements across what became Massachusetts Bay, J.W. Thompson (not to be confused with E.P. Thompson), writes, “It was to find pasturage for their cattle that the settlers scattered so widely. This helps to explain why the early New England towns were so rambling and sprawling, and why so many new towns were founded.” One observer calculated that in 1633 “there being as is supposed in this Colony about fifteen thousand acres in tillage and of cattle about twelve thousand neat, and about three thousand sheep.”
Livestock were penned in against wolf attacks by night, requiring what must have been a significant amount of land — land that would have been allotted, in Salem, by the commission on which my ancestor Conant sat. The population of livestock grew faster than the population of colonists, even as the numbers of native people diminished under the pressures of colonial violence, epidemic illness and dispossession. According to some accounts, the total number of native people in the Massachusetts Bay region around 1670 was no more than twelve thousand — far less than the population of colonial livestock. The ecological damage wrought by cattle across the region was a major grievance of the native people; native attacks on colonial livestock preceded the open warfare between the natives and the English that began in 1675, which came to be known as King Philip’s War — essentially the first act of open and widespread genocide on the continent.
Whether subtle or coercive, whether through warfare or administrative means, the project of turning common or customarily-held territories into measurable, bounded, properties; converting use rights into ownership rights; promoting agricultural “improvement;” and expanding markets to buy and sell land — all are characteristic of both enclosure and colonization.
Another common characteristic of enclosure and colonization is an implicit violence against the people who belonged to the land when the colonizer came.
Four hundred years later, in an era of ecological breakdown, how should we view these early efforts at “improvement”? How did the colonization of New England continue the violent erasure of older English land practices centered on the commons? Is it fair to regard any of the colonizers as peacemakers, given the acts of enclosure and the slaughter that followed — or does this view blind us to a deeper philosophical and ecological violence that is so fundamental as to be almost imperceptible? If so, how can we honor an ancestor who may have been patient, humble and tolerant, while acknowledging the harms to which he may have inadvertently contributed?
These are not now and never have been easy questions; even asking them can be jarring. Nor are they questions with easy answers. But I would argue that, if we are to seek an ongoing peace with the land and the histories of the land, every effort to celebrate the legacy of the colonial settlers like my ancestor should be accompanied by questions that unsettle this legacy, and that ultimately unsettle us.
Works Referenced
Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation. Various editions.1856.
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. Hill&Wang. 2003
Dunbar Ortiz, Roxanne. Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion. Beacon Press. 2021
Hinton, David, Wild Earth, Wild Mind: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction. Shambhala. 2022.
Lapham, Alice Gertrude. The Old Planters of Beverly in Massachusetts and The Thousand Acre Grant of 1635. Higginson Book Company. 1930
Mandell, Daniel R. King Philip’s War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010.
Perley, Sydney. The History of Salem Massachusetts.Vol. 1 1622-1637. University of Virgina Press.1924
Phillips, James Duncan. Salem in the 17th Century. Riverside Press Cambridge. 1933
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Farar and Rinehart. 1944
Shallop, Benjamim. The Founding of Salem, City of Peace. The History Press.2022
Shipton, Clifford. Roger Conant: A Founder of Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.1944
Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage Books.1966
Thompson, James Westfall, A History of Livestock Raising in the United States, 1607-1860. US Department of Agriculture. 1942
Winslow, Edward. Mourt’s Relation. Various editions.1622.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins, The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View. Verso Books.2002
Wood, James Playsted. Colonial Massachusetts.Thomas Nelson, Inc. 1969
The Watering Hole :: Jeff Conant 