Same here. I've reviewed thousands of Colonial Virginia correspondence and legal documents and have never come across arbitration as a method of setting a sale price between two arms-length buyers (i.e., not under some kind of compulsion, such as an order in chancery, to buy or sell).

Since Mr. Wills cited it, I'm sure he had a source, but I can say with some confidence it wasn't a widespread practice. 

Among larger estates, some sellers attempted to dispose of their property by lottery, but of course that only worked if there were enough ticket buyers. The Virginia Gazette is full of examples. 

The most common aspect of selling real property in Colonial Virginia was that the seller was compelled in practice to accept a promissory note for some or all of the purchase price, because few buyers had ready money. 

One of the most salient features of Colonial Virginia, along with other British American colonies, was the extreme scarcity of cash, about which much more needs to researched and written. 

Aside from slavery, in my view nothing else retarded economic development more in Colonial Virginia. 

Thomas Katheder 

> On Jul 6, 2017, at 10:43 AM, Harold Gill <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Jon, I have never run into anything like this in my years of research in Colonial Virginia history.
> Harold
> 
>> On July 5, 2017 at 11:19 AM Jon Kukla <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> In an essay on the Constitution published in Sunday's NYT, Garry Wills
>> explains James Madison's thinking about factions and the common good by
>> suggesting that Madison's ideas reflected "a common practice" that Will
>> describes as follows:
>> 
>> "When a landowner in Virginia wished to sell property, neither he nor his
>> potential buyer was allowed to set the price. That would be acting as
>> judges in their own case. Instead, each chose a reputable arbiter, one
>> likely to be respected by each of them and by others; those representatives
>> chose a third person, who would, with them, set a price that all could
>> accept as 'disinterested.'"
>> 
>> Sounds like a form of arbitration, but I'm not familiar with it in 18th-c
>> Virginia land transactions.
>> I'm especially skeptical about Wills's assertion that parties to a private
>> land sale would not have been "allowed to set the price."
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Jon Kukla                            www.jonkukla.com
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