What Is Land Speculation?

Land speculation is the act of taking land as the object of purchase and obtaining high profits or huge profits through the difference between the rise and fall in land prices in the short term.

Land speculation

Right!

Take land as a trading object and pass in a short time

Subjectively, the U.S. government and its western push

Land speculators are mainly special merchant groups formed in the 18th century. They come from different social classes, and many of them are military officers, parliamentarians or officials, including famous revolutionary leaders such as Washington and Franklin. According to a study by Charles A. Beard, of the 55 delegates attending the 1787 Constituent Assembly, there were 14 land speculators. Their combination of political and economic power has a significant impact. After independence, land speculators have become more closely integrated with official agencies. Many government-owned "land bureaus" are controlled by land companies, thus "most of the work of land bureaus has been run by private land companies for many years." . This combination of government and business makes land speculation itself uncontrollable. When the westward movement was about to rise or was just beginning, the public land in the west had already been preempted by land speculators. Take Mississippi as an example. According to Paul W. Gates, 1.4 million acres of land were purchased by a 62-person speculative group, and another 1.3 million acres were owned by a 57-person speculative group, with 2.6 million acres. The land is divided up by other speculative groups. Starting from President Washington until the American Civil War, politicians in the United States and those without speculation in the western land speculation market were almost rare. President George Washington himself has a close relationship with the Ohio Partnership. He bought 32,373 acres of land in the Ohio area at one time, and appointed the company's chief representative Rufus Putman as the first federal surveyor. Other founding fathers, such as Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Robert Morris, George Morgan, etc. have among the ranks of large land speculators. A passage from Washington illustrates the mentality of these people at the time: "Anyone who ignores this good opportunity to chase high-quality land will lose it." By the 1830s, cross-profit between government and business in the western land market was more common. Washington's top officials and Wall Street's nobles use each other, and the integration of government and business has made the government's land policy more conducive to land speculation.