Pricing the Land

Book excerpt: Pricing the Land reconstructs the complicated history of buying and selling land along the New York frontier after the American Revolution. Scott W. Anderson focuses on the prices bid for lots in central New York that had been set aside for veterans of the war (the New Military Tract) and within the Cayuga Reservation created by treaty in 1789, comprising a hundred square miles of land on both shores of the northern end of Cayuga Lake. He considers several factors that affected the value of this land: the scarcity of money in early America; the role that Alexander Hamilton's assumption policy played in encouraging debt speculation; the sale of huge tracts by New York and Massachusetts to investment syndicates; and the struggles of settlers across the New York frontier to escape debt, bondage, and poverty. Anderson, who served as an expert witness in the Cayuga Land Claim trials of 1999 to 2001 that awarded the Cayuga Nation $247.9 million in compensation and damages (a judgment overturned in 2005), developed new methodological tools for determining a better estimate of the value of this land. In Pricing the Land, he concludes that the only accurate measure of worth lay in the settlers' ability to pay their rents or debts, which was only possible once the Market Revolution reached central New York. As a result of his historical recovery, Anderson finds that the Cayuga Nation might have been entitled to twice the amount they were awarded in their lawsuit.