By contrast, European men who migrated to the colonies escaped many traditional constraints, including the curse of landlessness. “The hope of having land of their own & becoming independent of Landlords is what chiefly induces people into America,” an official noted in the 1730s. Owning property gave formerly dependent peasants a new social identity.

Unlike the adventurers seeking riches in other parts of the Americas, most New England migrants wanted farms that would provide a living for themselves and ample land for their children. In this way, they hoped to secure a competency for their families: the ability to keep their households solvent and independent and to pass that ability on to the next generation. Parents who could not give their offspring land placed these children as indentured servants in more prosperous households. When the indentures ended at age eighteen or twenty-one, propertyless sons faced a decades-long climb up the agricultural ladder, from laborer to tenant and finally to freeholder.

Sons and daughters in well-to-do farm families were luckier: they received a marriage portion when they were in their early twenties. That portion — land, livestock, or farm equipment — repaid them for their past labor and allowed parents to choose their marriage partners. Parents’ security during old age depended on a wise choice of son- or daughter-in-law. Although the young people could refuse an unacceptable match, they did not have the luxury of falling in love with and marrying whomever they pleased.

Marriage under eighteenth-century English common law was not a contract between equals. A bride relinquished to her husband the legal ownership of all her property. After his death, she received a dower right, the right to use (though not sell) one-third of the family’s property. On the widow’s death or remarriage, her portion was divided among the children. Thus the widow’s property rights were subordinate to those of the family line, which stretched across the generations.

A father’s duty was to provide inheritances for his children so that one day they could “be for themselves.” Men who failed to do so lost status in the community. Some fathers willed the family farm to a single son and provided other children with money, an apprenticeship, or uncleared frontier tracts. Other yeomen moved their families to the frontier, where life was hard but land was cheap and abundant. “The Squire’s House stands on the Bank of the Susquehannah,” traveler Philip Fithian reported from the Pennsylvania backcountry in the early 1760s. “He tells me that he will be able to settle all his sons and his fair Daughter Betsy on the Fat of the Earth.”