I haven’t written anything here lately, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy. You know how sometimes you need to stretch? I’ve been stretching.
By which I mean that I’ve been working in another form. Something different. Something historic.
If you’ve read anything I’ve written here on Daily Kos outside of this series, you’ve probably run into my pieces for Saturday Home Repair, where I wrote a bit about restoration work at my old house, which is now truly my old house, since we sold it to my son and his partner and we moved into a nice passive solar much smaller house on the other side of the farm.
For about 20 years I researched the history of the house and its inhabitants, first out of curiosity, then for an application to the Department of Historic Resources for a Historic House nomination, and then, because I wanted to. I had an idea that I would write a book about 1) the history, 2) the restoration work and 3) a memoir about what it takes to live in an unrestored and largely intact historic house (without heat). But it was a tough gig — between lack of sources and the fact that I was still living the story, I found it almost impossible to get started. At intervals I would try to make a start, get a couple of thousand words in, and the whole enterprise would tip over and lie there, twitching.
Disheartening.
But now, with court records and deeds digitized and searchable through the Library of Virginia and my County Circuit Court respectively, the work has gotten easier. The families who lived in the house were generous with stories and photos, but there are very few papers, letters, etc., that survived. It’s been a scavenger hunt.
The biggest change, though, is in me. My part of the house story is over; we’ve handed the place over to the next generation. Now I can write about it.
And that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m buried in research and resources and, although I’ve read some great fantasy over this break, I don’t have the mental resources today to pull out of this historic track and write anything genre-related and coherent.
But I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful for our relationships, or the conversations we’ve carved out of this space. Despite the fact that I’m tapped out, fantasy-wise, I thought I’d offer an inside view of some of what I’ve been working on. So here goes.
How To Buy Land
They did things differently back then. At least here in Virginia, from the time this area was frontier and the county extended all the way to the Mississippi River, if you wanted property you applied to the county magistrate for a patent, which you paid for by the acre, you told the county surveyor generally where you wanted your land and, when the surveyor got around to it, he and his crew would make your survey. It would be registered in the county court house, and you got a deed.
That worked as long as there was vacant land (“vacant” by white settler standards not being the same as being vacant in reality)*. But once the “vacant” land was all claimed, and that happened fast, how do you get land? Land is wealth — on the frontier, and on into the antebellum era, there’s not a lot of use for cash. No, in the history of the Shenandoah, real wealth was measured by the acre.
If you wanted land, you could work hard and industriously as a tenant on someone else’s plantation or farm (and if you were not white, you were already working hard and industriously without hope of ever getting anything out of it except poverty and heartbreak, since your social role was to build someone else’s wealth). But even if you were white, your chances of ever earning enough money to buy an acre of land were vanishingly scarce.
This is the age of the planter class, the time between 1780 and 1830, when the gentry solidified. All the right people married each other, making for some seriously tangled family trees.
Landed families usually had lots of children, partly because of a lack of birth control, partly as a hedge against infant and child mortality, partly because they could. Those children grew up and needed places of their own. And land would come up for sale.
So, say you were an ambitious newly-married son of a landed family and a farm you wanted came up for sale. How would you buy it? There was no financial instrument you could use, such as a mortgage from a bank (banks didn’t start offering mortgages until around 1920), so if you didn’t have the purchase price saved up — and who did? — you had to find two friends who already owned land. They would stand as your sureties, guaranteeing your ability to pay the bonds you would sign and give to the seller. If you went bankrupt and defaulted on the debt, the court would auction the land and your sureties would be responsible for any remaining debt. Typically the sale terms were: 25% down and 25% every two years until paid, with an annual interest rate of 6%.
Today, land almost always appreciates, or gains in value. That wasn’t true back then — land values fluctuated, sometimes wildly, so the sureties had to trust that you were good for the debt, or they would be paying the bill. And they would get nothing from the arrangement, it being a gesture of friendship and/or a matter of honor.
Now, about that 25% down….
Rarely could someone starting out get their hands on that kind of money. Here’s where bonds come in again. If you had some money to lend, you could lend it out privately at interest, the rate usually being around 6%, although in some circumstances it could be much higher. Lending money was an opportunity to make 6% a year, and often disposable income (inheritance, dowries, etc.) would be handled that way.
There’s a catch, of course. Say that A borrows a chunk of money from B and executes a bond for it, with the debt coming due in two years. If B runs into debt (speculating, crop failure, family illness, death, etc.) and ends up owing money to C, A’s bond is a tangible asset, and can be given to C in full or partial payment. Now B doesn’t get the outstanding interest — C does, so C will be inclined to accept the bond, since he’ll make more on it than B owes. Now, instead of the debt being ended at a fixed time, suppose that the bond could be made payable on demand. If C holds the bond and is not feeling charitable, he can call the debt, and A (or his sureties) has to pay.
Bonds were routinely traded around, since banks didn’t make personal loans and this was the way that (white) men got credit. A chance to make some money, but still a risk. When a depression hit and everyone’s debts came due, the entire enterprise becomes a game of hot potato.
And debt becomes very much a risk in the aftermath of the Civil War, when there was nothing but debt, except maybe hunger. The days of plantations were done, although in reality little changed for the emancipated enslaved. Everything for white property owners changed, and holding onto a farm became a cut-throat proposition.
*For reasons that are still in contention, there were no First Nations tribes in the Shenandoah Valley when white people showed up. The only Native Americans the settlers encountered were groups, usually war bands, passing through.
I’ll try to put something more literary together for next week. No promises, though. I’m working on the role of the surveyor in colonial frontier government this week.
Thank you for putting up with me.