All the settlers found it easy to get land in the West. In eighteen sixty-two, Congress had passed the Homestead Act. This law gave every citizen, and every foreigner who asked for citizenship, the right to claim government land. Without trees, settlers had no wood to build houses.

They found it in the headright system, through which the company promised fifty acres of land for each person who paid his or her own passage or any other person’s passage to Virginia.

The headright system began in the colony of Jamestown in 1618 as an attempt to solve labor shortages due to the advent of the tobacco economy, which required large plots of land with many workers.

The colony, rather than the private comany, collected the annual quitrents of 2 shillings/100 acres. The award of 50 acres for everyone imported into Virginia incentivized people in England to sign indentures and spurred wealthy individuals to find and transport indentured servants to Virginia.

The headright system

Among these laws was a provision that any person who settled in Virginia or paid for the transportation expenses of another person who settled in Virginia should be entitled to receive fifty acres of land for each immigrant. The right to receive fifty acres per person, or per head, was called a headright.

The Land Lottery System of Land Allocation replaced the Headright System. Explanation: This system of land allocation held sway in Georgia between 1805 to 1833.

Plantation owners benefited from the headright system when they paid for the transportation of imported slaves. This, along with the increase in the amount of money required to bring indentured servants to the colonies, contributed to the shift towards slavery in the colonies.

In order to attract additional settlers, the Virginia Company started the headright system, which offered land grants. Many of these settlers ended up being indentured servants who worked the land for wealthy sponsors in exchange for their passage across the Atlantic.

After Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, planters began to prefer permanent African slavery to the headright system that had previously enabled them to prosper. It’s hard to believe, but the practice of indentured servitude in American did not end in the United States until the early 1900s.

Servants typically worked four to seven years in exchange for passage, room, board, lodging and freedom dues. While the life of an indentured servant was harsh and restrictive, it wasn’t slavery. There were laws that protected some of their rights.

tobacco

Tobacco

Early sugar plantations made extensive use of slaves because sugar was considered a cash crop that exhibited economies of scale in cultivation; it was most efficiently grown on large plantations with many workers. Over the decades, the sugar plantations began expanding as the transatlantic trade continued to prosper.

A “luxury crop” is a crop that is grown to serve some purpose other than sustaining human life. All of these crops are consumed for reasons other than nutrition and so are called “luxury crops.”

Cash crop is an agricultural crop which is grown for sale, for profit. It is typically purchased by parties separate from a farm. The term is used to differentiate marketed crops from subsistence crops, which are those fed to the producer’s own livestock or grown as food for the producer’s family. …

Wasabi

According to a book released this week, gardeners may wind up saving more money by purchasing commonly grown produce from the grocery store instead of planting them at home.