Primogeniture and entail

Primogeniture and entail were ancient feudal rights transplanted to the colonies from England and designed to support and maintain a landed aristocracy of large estates. Primogeniture and entail of estates were found throughout the English colonies in North America but were most common in the Middle and Southern colonies. Primogeniture is the legal right of the first-born son to be the sole inheritor of an entire estate. The process of primogeniture was designed to keep a fiefdom intact and its owner responsible for the feudal services owed to a lord. Entail is the legal restriction of an estate to a grantee (owner) and certain of his direct descendants. An entailed estate could not be removed from the family or sold so long as lineal heirs meeting the proper requirements of the original grant were alive.

During the European Middle Ages and early modern period primogeniture, or the practice of willing all of a family’s immovable goods to the eldest son, was the most common form of property inheritance. The popularity of primogeniture was in large part due to the problems inherent in partible inheritance, the system by which landed property was divided among all eligible heirs, resulting in diminution of patrimony over the course of a few generations. Because noble families worked to consolidate their power, they embraced the concept of primogeniture. The

British so loved the concept that they applied it to noble titles as well as land. The impact of the system on the British peerage was considerable; younger sons of British peers became de facto commoners, thus preventing the type of rapid growth of the nobility that had taken place in other western European lands.

Among the New England colonies, only Rhode Island continued the practice of primogeniture. The other colonies actively opposed the process of primogeniture, although in Massachusetts the eldest son was required to be willed a double share of an inheritance. The lasting effect of this practice was the continued division of lands and farms in New England until, by the 18th century, many sons could not support a family on the tiny plot of land they inherited. The difficulty of farming the poor lands in New England (except for the Connecticut River valley) coupled with smaller and smaller estates made these colonies unprofitable for large-scale agriculture. Consequently, many New Englanders engaged in other trades, such as shipbuilding, eishing, and mercantile trade.

Cultural and historical factors in the Middle and Southern colonies made the practice of primogeniture and entail more acceptable. New York had a tradition of large manors established by Dutch settlers. Large plantations in the Chesapeake area and Tidewater regions of the South favored the practice of maintaining a large estate rather than dividing it among heirs. The lifestyles of the southern aristocracy, made possible by the labor of thousands of slaves, were possible and profitable only when a plantation was left intact through successive generations. While large plantation owners like the Byrd and Carter families in Virginia were few, their influence over colonial society was enormous.

The general opinion in the colonies, however, was that primogeniture and entail were not compatible with the growth of viable communities; also, they were viewed as unnecessary because there was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of “vacant” land. By the third generation in New England, those who faced unprofitable farms because of their small size sometimes saw the large frontier areas as an area of opportunity. This intensified the westward movement of colonists as they spread into the interior lands occupied by Native Americans. A similar phenomenon occurred in the Tidewater region when the soil of smaller farms was exhausted, forcing colonists to move toward the interior of the Carolinas and Virginia. By the time of the Revolution, sentiment was so against the use of primogeniture that it was generally abolished, while entail continued in some areas under limited circumstances.

Further reading: Kermit Hall, The Magic Mirror: Law in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, and Michel

Dahlin, Inheritance in America: From Colonial Ti-mes to the Present (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

—Stephen C. O’Neill

Prince, Lucy Terry (1730-1821) poet Lucy Terry Prince was probably the first black American poet. She holds this distinction for her only known poem, “Bars Fight,” written in 1746, when she was 16 years old. It was occasioned by the death of two white families during a hostile encounter with Native Americans in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her description is the fullest contemporary account of that struggle.

Lucy Terry was a victim of the slave trade. While we do not know where on the African continent she was born, she first appears in the historical record as Lucy Terry, slave of Ensign Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield. She was five when baptized during the Great Awakening, and she was admitted to the “fellowship of the church” at age 14.

Lucy Terry thrived in part because of New England’s “benign paternalism.” She was literate and a renowned storyteller. In 1756 she married a free black man twice her age, Abijah Prince. Although Prince owned land in a nearby town, they continued to live at Deerfield in a house near a place still known as Bijah’s Brook. They began raising a family that eventually included six children. Meanwhile, Abijah Prince had been bequeathed 100 acres in Guilford, Vermont. In the 1760s the family moved to the village of 2,000 inhabitants.

Lucy Terry Prince flourished in Vermont. She attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Williams College board of trustees to admit her son, barred because of his color. On another occasion she brought a lawsuit against Colonel Eli Bronson, her neighbor, for falsely claiming part of her family’s land. In extreme old age she rode horseback between Guilford and Bennington, 18 miles away. Lucy Terry Prince died in 1821 at the age of 91.

—Leslie Patrick