of labor to free
lands meant that higher wages must be paid to those who remained. The
use of the town lands by the established classes to promote an approved
form of society naturally must have had some effect on migration.

But a more effective source of disputes was with respect to the relation
of the town proprietors to the public domain of the town in contrast
with the non-proprietors as a class. The need of keeping the town
meeting and the proprietors' meeting separate in the old towns in
earlier years was not so great as it was when the new-comers became
numerous. In an increasing degree these new-comers were either not
granted lands at all, or were not admitted to the body of proprietors
with rights in the possession of the undivided town lands. Contentions
on the part of the town meeting that it had the right of dealing with
the town lands occasionally appear, significantly, in the frontier towns
of Haverhill, Massachusetts, Simsbury, Connecticut, and in the towns of
the Connecticut Valley.[63:1] Jonathan Edwards, in 1751, declared that
there had been in Northampton for forty or fifty years "two parties
somewhat like the court and country parties of England. . . . The first
party embraced the great proprietors of land, and the parties concerned
about land and other matters."[63:2] The tendency to divide up the
common lands among the proprietors in individual possession did not
become marked until the eighteenth century; but the exclusion of some
from possession of the town lands and the "equality" in allotment
favoring men with already large estates must have attracted ambitious
men who were not of the favored class to join in the movement to new
towns. Religious dissensions would combine to make frontier society as
it formed early in the eighteenth century more and more democratic,
dissatisfied with the existing order, and less respectful of authority.
We shall not understand the relative radicalism of parts of the
Berkshires, Vermont and interior New Hampshire without enquiry into the
degree in which the control over the lands by a proprietary monopoly
affected the men who settled on the frontier.

The final aspect of this frontier to be examined, is the attitude of the
conservatives of the older sections towards this movement of westward
advance. President Dwight in the era of the War of 1812 was very
critical of the "foresters," but saw in such a movement a safety valve
to the institutions of New England