cient
importation rights, the Henderson Company rights, etc." See Marshall,
I., 82.] The Virginia Legislature now ratified all titles to regularly
surveyed ground claimed under charter, military bounty, and old treasury
rights, to the extent of four hundred acres each. Tracts of land were
reserved as bounties for the Virginia troops, both Continentals and
militia. Each family of actual settlers was allowed a settlement right
to four hundred acres for the small sum of nine dollars, and, if very
poor, the land was given them on credit. Every such settler also
acquired a preemptive right to purchase a thousand acres adjoining, at
the regulation State price, which was forty pounds, paper money, or
forty dollars in specie, for every hundred acres. One peculiar provision
was made necessary by the system of settling in forted villages. Every
such village was allowed six hundred and forty acres, which no outsider
could have surveyed or claim, for it was considered, the property of the
townsmen, to be held in common until an equitable division could be
made; while each family likewise had a settlement right to four hundred
acres adjoining the village. The vacant lands were sold, warrants for a
hundred acres costing forty dollars in specie; but later on, towards the
close of the war, Virginia tried to buoy up her mass of depreciated
paper currency by accepting it nearly at par for land warrants, thereby
reducing the cost of these to less than fifty cents for a hundred acres.
No warrant applied to a particular spot; it was surveyed on any vacant
or presumably vacant ground. Each individual had the surveying done
wherever he pleased, the county surveyor usually appointing some skilled
woodsman to act as his deputy.

In the end the natural result of all this was to involve half the people
of Kentucky in lawsuits over their land, as there were often two or
three titles to each patch, [Footnote: McAfee MSS.] and the surveys
crossed each other in hopeless tangles. Immediately, the system gave a
great stimulus to immigration, for it made it easy for any incoming
settler to get title to his farm, and it also strongly attracted all
land speculators. Many well-to-do merchants or planters of the seaboard
sent agents out to buy lands in Kentucky; and these agents either hired
the old pioneers, such as Boon and Kenton, to locate and survey the
lands, or else purchased their claims from them outright. The advantages
of following the latter pla