Tin Horns and Calico: A Decisive Episode in the Emergence of American Democracy

By Henry Christman and Carl Carmer

A stirring tale of the antirent agitation in the Catskills, Hudson Valley and up-state New York in the 1840’s.

“As the somewhat cryptic title suggests, this book is concerned primarily with one aspect of a many-sided theme in the economic and social history of New York state, and it deals with that topic in its final stage of popular protest and legal liquidation. During the first two centuries of New York's history the dominant form of landholding in the Hudson Valley was the large estate occupied by tenants on the quasi-feudal terms of annual rentals in kind or equivalent cash and the reservation of rights to share in land sales. Inaugurated by the Dutch and continued under English rule, this system of landholding was extended and reinvigorated after the Revolution in the guise of a permanent leasehold, mainly devised by Alexander Hamilton, the brother-in-law of Stephen Van Rensselaer, the last of the patroons and the principal landlord in the state.

The rising tide of political democracy, coupled with economic distress and the accumulation of arrears, produced an inevitable popular reaction against the burdens of tenancy. The spark of revolt was struck in 1839, on the death of Stephen Van Rensselaer, when his heirs attempted to collect arrears by legal process. The result was an antirent agitation between 1839 and 1845, which flared up into sporadic violence and resistance to the sheriffs of several upstate counties by bands of farmers, summoned to the call of tin horns and disguised in calico robes and Indian masks. This in turn provoked collision with the state authorities upholding law and order.”-Journal of Economic History

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: Oct 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839745867

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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TIN HORNS AND CALICO

BY

HENRY CHRISTMAN

Cover photograph by Daniel Case, courtesy of wikimedia

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

Acknowledgments 6

Introduction 8

MAP 10

Chapter 1—A Landed Aristocracy 11

2 12

3 15

4 18

5 20

6 22

Chapter 2—Call to Rebellion 23

2 25

3 27

4 28

5 30

Chapter 3—Seward Takes the Helderbergs 34

2 37

3 40

4 43

5 44

6 47

Chapter 4—They Could Not Stand Idle 50

2 52

3 54

4 57

Chapter 5—Justice for Sale 60

2 61

3 63

Chapter 6—Storms and Tempests 65

2 66

3 67

4 68

5 70

Chapter 7—Big Thunder 72

2 74

3 76

4 78

5 80

6 82

7 84

8 85

9 87

Chapter 8—Political Infiltration 89

2 90

3 92

4 93

Chapter 9—A Price on His Head 94

2 96

3 98

4 101

5 103

Chapter 10—Law and Order 107

2 110

3 113

4 115

5 117

Chapter 11—King Silas 120

2 122

3 124

Chapter 12—The Bastard War 125

2 126

3 128

4 131

5 136

6 138

Chapter 13—In the Good Cause 139

2 141

3 142

4 146

5 148

6 153

Chapter 14—For the Land Is Mine 155

2 156

Chapter 15—Lead Penetrates Steele 161

2 162

3 167

4 169

5 171

6 174

7 176

8 178

9 180

Chapter 16—Brimful of Wrath and Cabbage 181

Chapter 17—Packed Court 186

2 189

3 192

4 195

5 197

6 199

Chapter 18—Delhi Justice 200

2 204

3 206

4 208

5 209

6 210

7 213

Chapter 19—November Ides 220

2 222

3 222

4 222

5 222

6 222

Chapter 20—The Goose Is Plucked 222

2 222

3 222

4 222

5 222

6 222

7 222

Chapter 21—The Prisoners! They Come! 222

2 222

3 222

4 222

Chapter 22—The End of Manor Aristocracy 222

2 222

3 222

4 222

5 222

6 222

Chapter 23—Deep in the Land 222

2 222

3 222

4 222

5 222

6 222

7 222

Songs and Ballads 222

A GREAT REVOLUTION 222

THE LANDLORD’S LAMENT 222

THE END OF BILL SNYDER 222

THE BRAVE INDIAN 222

THE SPRING CAMPAIGN, OR, THE TORY EXPLOITS 222

WE WILL BE FREE 222

THE UP-RENT MAJOR 222

THE HELDERBERG WAR 222

AT TWO DOLLARS PER DAY 222

THE PRISONERS IN JAIL 222

COME ALL TRUE ANTI-RENTERS 222

LAY DOWN THE MUSKET 222

Bibliography 222

Newspapers 222

Periodicals 222

Official Reports 222

Court Records 222

Letters, Manuscripts, etc. 222

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 222

DEDICATION

For Zoë

Let it be transmitted to posterity that a free people dared to rise and vindicate their rights.—DR. SMITH A. BOUGHTON

Acknowledgments

AS FAR AS POSSIBLE, I have tried to make the Anti-Rent farmers live and tell their own story in their own words and actions. I wish I could have put into this book all the others who had a part in telling it—the descendants of Anti-Renters still living on the Hudson, in the Catskills, the Helderbergs, and the Taconics, and in the hill towns of Schoharie and Rensselaer counties. The stories they told have been recorded here, but not the people themselves.

There were the grandchildren of Dr. Smith A. Boughton. I shall never forget his granddaughter, reading aloud until near midnight one August night from a long autobiographical letter written by Dr. Boughton when he was an old man and begging excuse for mistakes in orthography and composition because, as he explained, age had impaired his mental and physical faculties. The letter had lain in his desk untouched since his death years before. When she had finished reading Bough ton’s own story of his part in the Anti-Rent struggle, she said, embarrassed at rebellion she had never understood, I wish he had stuck to doctoring. And there were the two grandsons, George and Charles, both proud of the blood of Smith Boughton, living in Alps, Rensselaer County, on intimate terms with the scenes familiar to Big Thunder.

On a September afternoon when the first colors of autumn were striking the hills, I drove up a Catskill valley and turned in at a farm. Pastures and fields ran up the side of the hills, and down in a valley field the grandsons of Edward O’Connor were at work. At the barnyard gate, the widow of Edward O’Connor’s only son was bringing the cows in for milking. She was a gray wisp of a woman and her face was lined and tired. She took me into the house, and after she had seated me before a window looking out upon the Catskills, she disappeared into another room. In a few minutes she returned with a tin box in her aged and gnarled hands. In it were yellowed clippings and papers about Edward O’Connor, verses he wrote to Janet Scott, and the powder horn he carried as a calico Indian. The dullness left her eyes as she searched her memory. For a long time she talked about Edward and Anti-Rent, about her own father who had worn calico, and her mother who sewed Indian costumes and carried food to the Indians when they were in hiding after the Moses Earle riot.

There was a whole summer and autumn of such people. Walter Liddle down the valley below the Moses Earle farm, who sat by the fire one cold autumn night and pieced together with bit by bit recollection the songs and ballads of the Anti-Renters, songs familiar to many ears when he had been a boy, but no longer heard in the western Catskills. Descendants of Anti-Renters walked with me over scenes of riot in Columbia County, Rensselaer County, Albany County, Schoharie County, and the Catskills. Sons of Anti-Renters proudly showed swords, muskets, tin horns, and fragments of calico costumes carried or worn by Grandfather So-and-so in the down-rent war. Women rummaged in their attics and brought forth boxes of letters, carefully preserved for years, in an effort to aid in this reconstruction of their ancestors’ struggle against oppression. There were descendants of Mayham, Peaslee, Slingerland, Devyr, Gallup, Bouton, and others. There was the late William Quay, who first roused my interest in the Indians when a newspaper sent me to get his story as the last of the Anti-Renters. Quay was arrested in 1865 when Church sent troops on their last expedition to the Helderbergs. I shall never forget his vivid word picture of the Hell we raised on the mountain.

The stories these people told are interwoven here with facts dug from newspapers, court records, affidavits, legislative records, letters, books, and so on.

I want to thank the following people who have taken time from their busy lives to give me valuable help:

John D. Monroe of Kortright, Delaware County, for material on the Delaware phase of the down-rent agitation; Arthur B. Gregg of Altamont, Albany County, for material on Helderberg Anti-Renters; Mrs. A. C. Mayham of Blenheim, for material on Blenheim Hill Anti-Renters; Dow Beekman of Middleburg, for material on Schoharie Anti-Renters; John E. Boos of Albany, for Anti-Rent newspapers and material on Judge Parker; S. C. Bishop of Coxsackie for a five-year file of the Albany Freeholder which had been preserved by its editor, Charles Bouton; Laura E. Slingerland of Slingerlands, Albany County, for material, including copies of speeches by John Slingerland, Anti-Rent Congressman; Harry F. Landon of Watertown, for copies of letters by Silas Wright dealing with Anti-Rent; Charles Ellis Grant of Margaretville, Delaware County, for materials gathered by his mother on Edward O’Connor and the Delaware Anti-Renters; S. M. Pedrick of Ripon, Wisconsin, for material on Alvan E. Bovay; Granville Hicks, who read the manuscript in its formative stages and gave me many helpful suggestions; Phyllis Crawford for editorial aid; Zoë Fales Christman for help with research and editing and for constant encouragement; Miss Terry Mangiardi and Miss Nancy Chrysler for typing notes and the manuscript; and the following for various material and information: Herman Lockrow, Mrs. W. C. Liddle, Mrs. Andrew Liddle, Mrs. Lotta Merrill, Miss Grace Slingerland, Arthur Bouton, Robert S. Wyer, Edna Jacobsen of the New York State Library Manuscript and History Section, Clifford K. Shipton of the American Antiquarian Society, Mrs. Albert De Mers, Mrs. Park Mattison, Homer Gallup, William Davis, Willoughby M. Babcock of the Minnesota Historical Society, J. P. Coughlin, publisher of the Waseca (Minnesota) Herald; Alice E. Smith, Curator of Manuscripts of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, and Clifford Agan of Grafton, N. Y.

HENRY CHRISTMAN

Introduction

THERE IS AN ever-recurrent necessity for the retelling of the past in the light of present thought. Events—like works of art—must await the judgment of posterity as to their importance. Readers have often accepted as most authoritative the interpretations of historians who had the advantage of observing during their lifetimes the happenings they recorded. Readers of today have come to recognize the fallacy of making such acceptance a general rule. The eyewitness writer is often too close to his material to realize its true significance.

Tin Horns and Calico tells a story that has never been told in its entirety before. Nineteenth-century historians gave it little thought and less space in their works. In fact their indifference to it was so great that, through lack of feeling for what constitutes true history, they made Henry Christman’s research labors more difficult than they might otherwise have been. His conclusion of them is therefore the more triumphant.

For this narrative is a contribution of importance to American history. It records the dramatic final chapter of the struggle of the people of the United States against undemocratic and feudal practices with regard to the possession of land—practices that had been firmly established for two centuries.

The right of a man to own and till his own land had already been recognized in much of Europe before the first settlers arrived in America. In England feudalism had been abandoned for approximately a century. Yet the establishment by the Dutch West India Company of patroonships along the Hudson as a means of encouraging colonization denied that right. And the English rulers who succeeded the Dutch found it to their advantage to continue the system by allowing the patroons (as manor lords) to maintain their holdings and to grant great manors to deserving English subjects.

The unrest that followed these grants developed into open armed revolt in 1766. Despite bitter differences in other matters the manor lords were in complete agreement that the tenant farmers who rebelled against injustice should be suppressed and disciplined. The king’s troops were used to accomplish this purpose.

Ten years later the great landholders were divided over the revolution against England. Many of the renters of small farms on the widespread manors hoped that the winning of the war by the Continental forces would result in abolishment of feudal manor practices. Others, less optimistic, dreamed that the manors held by Tory landlords would be broken up into small farms which they might own. Both were bitterly disappointed. The manor lords who supported the revolution were so powerful that when it ended they were able not only to continue themselves in their position of agrarian domination but to acquire many of the confiscated acres of the land-holders who had favored the English king.

As the young republic came into being none of its structural legislation affected the manor system. It remained not only a continual injustice, a monument to special privilege within the new democracy founded on the principle of equal rights for all, but a lasting menace to democratic practices. If it could exist along the Hudson there was danger that it might be used as a precedent to justify a similar system along the banks of the Genesee and the Ohio. It might eventually affect landownership practices throughout the nation.

In one of the most comprehensive and efficient research studies of recent years Henry Christman tells us in this book how this threat was destroyed—not by great and influential champions but by earnest citizens of less than average means whose chief weapon was a burning belief in the rightness of their cause.

Having sought some of the sources from which Mr. Christman obtained his materials myself (when preparing to write a historical study of the Hudson River) I can testify to the thoroughness, the persistence, the imaginative quality of his research. He has proved himself a detective of remarkable powers—both deductive and intuitive—in running down elusive evidence.

Even more impressive, I believe, is his marshaling of his facts into a stirring narrative. Let it be admitted at the outset that he was wise first of all in selecting as his subject one of the most picturesque and dramatic of America’s untold tales. Material, no matter how compelling, may be ruined in its presentation, as any intelligent lay reader of history can testify. Henry Christman has not only enlightened us on an important historical subject. He has written of it with honesty and with the ability to recreate the past in vivid, sure, and rhythmic sentence.

I prophesy with much more certainty than I usually feel when I attempt to look into the future that this narrative will be the standard authoritative history of its subject for many years to come. It deserves to be read not only by those whose especial interest is the story of our country but by all people who find interest in the study of dramatic human conflicts. I hope that it may be the basis for other works—novels, plays, motion pictures—for all of which it provides exciting materials. I believe it should be told again and again because it tells most effectively the story of the triumph of the democratic spirit over the unjustified pretensions of aristocracy, pretensions from which to this day our country is far from free. The words of the heroic leader of the Calico Indians, Dr. Boughton, ring as true today as they did when he said them:

If a civilization such as ours (which professes respect for the individual man) is to endure, it obviously cannot become the monopoly of an elite. It must become so far as possible the common enterprise of all. The purpose of our society is not for the few of maximum strength and ambition to lead lives of Byzantine glory, but for all men to make the most of their common humanity. We are pledged to a general diffusion of culture, of independence, and self-respect and the means to a good life.

Tin Horns and Calico is a history lesson—and a thrilling tale—which I recommend to all Americans.

CARL CARMER

MAP

Chapter 1—A Landed Aristocracy

NOWHERE in the America of the late eighteen-thirties were the promises of the Declaration of Independence less fulfilled than in Albany, the capital of New York. Here was the seat of power of a landed aristocracy, the center of an island of semi-feudalism in a nation that had, little more than half a century before, declared its common faith in democracy and free enterprise. Under the patroon system, flourishing as vigorously as it had in the days of the early seventeenth century, a few families, intricately intermarried, controlled the destinies of three hundred thousand people and ruled in almost kingly splendor over nearly two million acres of land.

In Albany class lines were sharp. Democracy was so little known that a veteran of the Revolution might be refused a seat on the Albany-Troy stage because he was shabbily dressed. Newspapers found it sufficiently important to report that cigar-smoking had lost its charm for the elite since almost every shop boy and dirty little urchin had taken it up. Society was geared to a round of pleasure matched only in Washington, and local politicians mapped the nation’s political future over drinks at Eagle Tavern.

Workers left stranded at the completion of the railroad and the Erie Canal, demoralized by the panic of 1837, herded together in the poverty-ridden section on the city’s edge known as the Pasture. They had begun to talk of organizing against low wages, unemployment, and unstable purchasing power. Most of all they were beginning to cry out for land—land through which to escape the vagaries of profits and wages. But almost no land within a radius of one hundred and fifty miles of Albany could belong to the people. The Hudson Valley gentry had owned it for generations, their ownership guaranteed by a charter which was a direct denial of the people’s constitutional rights. The situation, in these unsettled times, was beginning to draw question: How long must this continue? Had it established a principle for the future in a nation rapidly expanding into the territories of the West?

Some of the Hudson Valley gentry bore British names—Livingston, Morris, Jay; others, descendants of Dutch settlers, were named Van Rensselaer, Hardenbergh, Verplanck, Van Cortlandt, and Schuyler. No other was so proud or so influential as the Van Rensselaer family, pioneers in American feudalism, who for more than two hundred years had been the owners of the largest estate in the region. Rensselaerwyck embraced all of Albany and Rensselaer counties and part of Columbia, and by 1838 was maintaining between sixty and one hundred thousand tenant farmers. Their overlord was Stephen Van Rensselaer III, who had become the sixth lord of the manor at the age of five, and was now an urbane old gentleman in his seventies, a former soldier and a former Congressman who rejoiced in the sobriquet of the Good Patroon and was adored by six sons, three daughters, and numerous grandchildren.

2

The patroon system which Stephen and his contemporaries inherited had been engrafted on America by Kiliaen Van Rensselaer in 1629, long after it had been discarded in Holland. An influential pearl-and-diamond merchant in the Dutch capital, Kiliaen joined with other crafty businessmen to obtain a charter for the Dutch West India Company, ostensibly to colonize the New World. However, their true purpose was to wage privateer war against Spanish ships carrying gold and silver from Peru and Mexico, and to re-establish Dutch command of the sea without violating the country’s treaty of friendship with Spain. Armed fleets set sail with orders and authority to conquer provinces and peoples and administer justice. Enormous riches returned to the company, and the prize of maritime supremacy kept the government complaisant until other interests, alarmed at the British challenge of Dutch claims in the New World, began to ask what had become of the projected colonization. Shrewdly, the directors explained that settlement of such a wild and uncultivated country called for more settlers than they could supply; important inducements would have to be offered before the undertaking could succeed.

It was relatively easy, therefore, for the directors to get authority to offer a grant of land, with absolute power as patroon, to any member of the company who would plant a colony of fifty persons in America within four years. The patroon would have baronial authority, with full property rights and complete civil and military control over the people, who would be bound by contract to fealty and military service as vassals.

Each tract was to be legally purchased from the Indians, and limited to a river frontage of sixteen miles, or if the land lay on both sides of a river, eight miles on each bank. But enterprising Kiliaen made his own laws. He had his agents give a basket of trinkets to the Indian chiefs for title to land stretching twenty-four miles along the Hudson River, with Fort Orange, a fur-trading settlement, as the approximate geographical center. Of six patroonships granted, his was the only one to survive the first six years, for although he never crossed the ocean to his dominions, he was as fortunate in choosing his deputies as he had been in selecting his location.

Tenants imported to secure his title were under absolute control of his agents. They were compelled to buy all supplies from the patroon’s commissary at usurious prices, grind their grain at the patroon’s mill, and pay over to him part of all crops and increase in livestock. Hobbled by such restraints, agricultural settlers were few, but the traffic in beaver skins flourished.

The Van Rensselaer empire stood at the gateway to the fur trade of the inland wilderness, and although the grant of patroonship specifically reserved this trade to the company, Kiliaen had a fort built on Barren Island at the southern end of his domain, and decreed that no ships should pass except those in his personal service. When the company protested that trade rights belonged equally to all members, Kiliaen declared he would enforce his edict by weapon right, and from the watchmaster of Barren bland all ships got orders to strike thy colors for the Lord Kiliaen and the staple right of Rensselaerwyck.

Peter Stuyvesant, the hot-tempered, peg-legged director general in New Amsterdam, took passage upriver to have it out with Van Rensselaer’s agent at Fort Orange. When the boat docked, he stumped up the hill to the agent’s house and ordered the soldiers to tear down the patroon’s flag. That done, he laid out a town adjacent to Fort Orange, named it Beverwyck, and proclaimed it company property under the jurisdiction of three magistrates whom he himself appointed. Beyond that, the patroon’s influence with the home government proved too strong even for the hot-headed governor.

As the land was cleared and farms became productive, the tribute paid by Kiliaen’s slowly growing nucleus of settlers added measurably to his fortune. I would not like to have my people get too wise and figure out their master’s profit, especially in matters in which they themselves are somewhat interested, he wrote in 1629 to William Kieft, director of New Netherland.

After the British seized New Netherland in 1664, the changes were largely superficial. Fort Orange and Beverwyck were combined under the name of Albany, from the Scottish title of the Duke of York, afterward James II of England. Kiliaen’s grandson, then in actual residence, was confirmed in his possession of Rensselaerwyck by provisional orders; in 1685 the governor granted a patent transforming the patroonship into an English manor and the patroon into the lord of the manor. His civil rights were restricted a bit, but there was no change in the relations between landlord and tenant.

The English almost outdid their predecessors in saddling the valley with big estates, for in addition to nine actual manors, they handed out millions of acres in patents to lesser members of the Hudson River aristocracy. It was regarded as good policy to place large tracts in the hands of gentlemen of weight and consideration, who would naturally farm out their lands to tenants, a method which would create subordination and, as the last of the colonial governors expressed it, counterpoise in some measure the general levelling spirit that so prevails in some of His Majesty’s governments.

Even the Revolution did not weaken the feudal hold of the big landowners. It merely stripped them of baronial honors and privileges. The rent-distressed tenants of New York State gave themselves and their supplies to the struggle; they fought at Saratoga, Oriskany, and Valley Forge for the right to be independent landholders. Side by side with men seeking freedom for capital enterprise to exploit the wealth of the New World, farmers and wage earners fought for the principles of individual political and economic freedom. With a common rallying cry, two wars were fought, one within the other—and one was lost. The farmers and the wage earners found themselves betrayed in victory, when the new government became a bulwark for the rich and the middle class against the despised proletariat and the rising tide of democracy.

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and the Livingstons worked unceasingly to keep New York the most conservative commonwealth in the new Union. In 1777 the people of the state guaranteed that nothing in the state constitution should be construed to affect any of the grants made by the authority of the king or his predecessors.

Two years later, however, under Governor George Clinton, the estates of Tories who had been loyal to the Crown during the Revolution were confiscated. In 1780, these and the lands acquired from foreclosures, tax sales, and Indian purchases were promised as bounty for Revolutionary services, but the land office was not created until four years later. By that time, the choicest tracts had been taken by prominent Federalists to satisfy their war claims, and great blocks had been sold to speculators and corporations for a pittance. Wherever impoverished veterans turned, they found the speculators had been there first. The tenant system spread, in flagrant disregard of the broader economic interests of the state. Highly skilled settlers fleeing Old World oppression and class distinctions avoided New York, rejecting its terms of perpetual tribute for the use of soil and water power. Still the great landowners would offer only leases.

3

Thus it was that when Stephen Van Rensselaer III came of age on November 1, 1785, Rensselaerwyck was as extensive as it had been at the death of Kiliaen in 1646, and had grown vastly in wealth and influence.

Hudson River society felt that young Stephen had every quality necessary to a leader of a landed aristocracy. He had been educated by his grandfather, Philip Livingston, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. His wife was the lovely Margaret Schuyler, with whom he had eloped at the age of eighteen. In beauty and elegance she was second to no young woman in the region except her sister Elizabeth, who had married Alexander Hamilton. Not since the Hamilton-Schuyler wedding had Albany known a beef and liquor dinner such as was spread for Stephen’s coming to power. The flower of society was there. But the social sensation was over-shadowed by the young patroon’s revelation of his business plans—plans which betrayed the skillful guiding mind of Hamilton.

The great manor had always returned income enough to support its lords in luxury, but the farms were few. Only scattered settlers had gone beyond the fertile valley lands to clear the heights of the Helderbergs, where thousands of untouched acres still awaited the ax and the plow. East of the Hudson, thousands more stretched across the rolling hills. Stephen now announced a liberal program to people the rest of his seven hundred thousand acres. He would give the patriots of the Revolution homesteads without cost; only after the farms became productive would he ask any compensation.

Surveyors were sent over the hills; farms of one hundred and twenty acres each were blocked out; exaggerated reports were issued about the fertility of the soil, the salubrity of the climate. Men began to come, and to each the patroon said: Go and find you a situation. You may occupy it for seven years free. Then come in at the office, and I will give you a durable lease with a moderate wheat rent. Before long, nearly three thousand farms were taken, and villages sprang up around church spires.

Seven years went by, and the tenants came in for their durable leases. By this time, protected by the new Federal Constitution which he had helped to frame, Alexander Hamilton had perfected for his brother-in-law a lease that would bind the new tenants permanently to the estate. In effect, its terms did not differ radically from those offered by the first patroon to his original settlers. By calling the contract an incomplete sale, Stephen Van Rensselaer adroitly sidestepped the issue of feudalism, which had been outlawed in New York State in 1782 by the abolition of entail and primogeniture. He sold the property to the farmer and his heirs and assigns forever, on the following conditions:

As purchase price for the title to and the use of the soil, the tenant was to pay ten to fourteen bushels of winter wheat annually, and four fat fowls; and he was to give one day’s service each year with team and wagon. He was to pay all taxes, and was to use the land for agricultural purposes only. The patroon specifically reserved to himself all wood, mineral, and water rights, and the right of re-entry to exploit these resources. The tenant could not sell the property, but only his contract of incomplete sale, with its terms unaltered. A quarter-sale clause restricted him still further: if he wished to sell, the landlord had the option of collecting one-fourth of the sale price or recovering full title to the property at three-quarters of the market price. Thus the landlord kept for himself all the advantages of landownership while saddling the tenant with all the obligations, such as taxes and road-building.

This contract was an expression of Hamilton’s theory of government. He proposed to save the nation from democracy by putting the rich and well-born in a position to check the unsteadiness and imprudence of the common people. America should be a nation of landed gentry, rich merchants, and professional men, with a strong, coercive government to serve business and capital by guarding against the ambitions of laborer and farmer. He would preserve the old class distinctions by preserving the institutions which made them possible. For his brother-in-law the patroon, he accomplished this objective.

Too late the settlers realized that the terms of the durable lease should have been agreed upon in writing when they took possession of the land. One farmer described his experience:

I was poor. I found a lot that suited me and went to work, cleared me a spot for a log cabin and barn....At the end of seven years a large portion of the forest had disappeared. Myself, wife and little ones had just commenced to enjoy the fruits of our labor. I called at the office for my lease. It was handed to me. I told them I could not read it and requested that it should be read to me, which was complied with. I frankly told them that the lease did not agree with our verbal contract.

It’s the only lease given by Mr. Van Rensselaer, the agent said.

What does the quarter-sale mean? the settler asked.

You Dutchmen will never want to sell, and if you should the patroon will never exact it. Mr. Van Rensselaer does not want the Yankees to get among you, for if they do they will make trouble. It is put in to keep them out.

The agent further assured him that the day’s service would never be exacted, except in the case of building a mill in that neighborhood. Then the patroon would call on the tenant and his neighbors for a few days’ teaming.

If the day’s service is only to be performed in the case of building a mill in my neighborhood, why not insert it so? the settler suggested. ‘That is not in accordance with our agreement, and I shall not take it."

You must take it or leave the premises.

Thus, the settler’s story concludes bitterly, I was compelled to take the lease.

Those first seven years were cruelly hard for most of the men who took up homesteads in Rensselaerwyck. A few found good soil, but more did not. Some traveled as much as ten miles to labor for half a bushel of corn a day, carried it home on their backs, and then took their axes out into the forest to clear the land, with nothing but cornbread to eat. This way they were able to get together a few tools with which to begin farming. Yet Stephen Van Rensselaer expected them to accept his terms without question.

Others received a worse fleecing as a reward for superior enterprise and equipment. The following passage is quoted from a speech before the state legislature:

I have in mind an instance where a man erected a mill costing some three or four thousand dollars, built two dams, dug a canal a quarter of a mile in length in order to lead the water to a spot where nature designed the erection of the mill. And for this privilege he was obliged to pay seventy dollars a year to Mr. Van Rensselaer while Mr. Van Rensselaer didn’t pay a cent of tax....In my native town I know of an instance where a man erected a fulling and carding mill at much expense, and who, when the terms of his lease expired, was threatened the moment he put water to his wheel to have a writ put on him. And finally they drove him off entirely, and he went to Schoharie where he now resides.

Any offer to buy the land outright was scorned, for no investment could be so secure for the landlord as this perpetual interest in the produce of his land. Only a few tenants had the courage and the hardihood to refuse the leases and turn to the wilderness to begin their toil anew. The rest remained in a serfdom which was, for all practical purposes, complete. For non-payment of rent, Stephen Van Rensselaer and his kind could issue their own warrants for the seizure and sale of crops and livestock to satisfy their claims, their own testimony being all the proof required; they could fix their own price; they could call upon the sheriff to collect for them, and the tenants had no appeal to the courts. The farmers worked, one sympathizer with the tenants said, so the landlord could swill his wine, loll on his cushions, fill his life with society, food and culture, and ride his barouche and fine saddle horses along the beautiful river valley and up to the backdrop of mountain.

It was small wonder, then, that the tenants’ resentment grew. Glowing descriptions had led them to expect rich soil like that of the valley farms, taken up long before the Revolution. Some settlers found small, loamy valleys east of the Hudson, but the majority were pushed up into the Petersburg Mountains, where the soil was hard and sterile; or even farther into the wild, rocky picturesque tableland of Taghkanic Mountains, along the eastern border of the state. West of the Hudson, they found themselves established in the Helderbergs, the rock wall rising abruptly from the Hudson Valley which once served as the great girdling shore line for an ancient sea. Along the ridge, the receding glacier had left a deposit of boulders and rubble over which the years had sifted a thin topsoil. Here the farmers spent their energy wresting a living from the grudging land, and talked with patient humor of the stones that pushed up perennially as the only dependable crop. Some even fancied that the Helderbergs were the last place made by God, and the dumping-ground for all the rock left over from Creation.

A missionary making a tour of the Mohawk and Black river valleys in 1802 wrote: The American can never flourish on leased lands. They have too much enterprise to work for others or remain tenants, and where they are under the necessity of living on such lands, I find they are greatly depressed in mind and are losing their animation.

4

While Van Rensselaer’s incomplete sale was yielding millions, he was energetic in guarding his interests on the political front. Like others of his class, he was a Federalist, and in the legislature at Albany and the House of Representatives in Washington he struggled to resist the tide of Jeffersonian democracy. In 1805 he helped to enact state legislation permitting the imposition of rents as a condition in a contract of sale, a practice he had put into effect in Rensselaerwyck nearly twenty years earlier.

During the state Constitutional Convention of 1821 he revealed his fear of unrestricted suffrage in his vigorous but unsuccessful fight against the relaxation of property qualifications for voting in the state senatorial elections. As another of the conservative leaders put it:

I wish those who have an interest in the soil to retain the exclusive possession of a branch in the Legislature....The men of no property, together with the crowds of dependents connected with great manufacturing and commercial establishments, and the motley and undefinable population of crowded ports, may, perhaps, at some future date, under skillful management, predominate...and yet we should be perfectly safe if no laws could pass without the free consent of the owners of the soil.{1}

Three years later, when the patroon was a member of Congress, his fear of losing his empire tricked him into casting the vote that made John Quincy Adams President. Adams, Andrew Jackson, and William Crawford were locked in a three-way stalemate which had to be broken by the vote of the House of Representatives. Van Rensselaer had promised Martin Van Buren, the young New York Senator with whom he occupied a house in Washington, that he would vote for Crawford, who was neither a dangerous Jeffersonian democrat like Jackson nor a Yankee like Adams. At the last minute Henry Clay and Daniel Webster called Van Rensselaer into the speaker’s office to see if he could not be scared out of his position. They told him that a continued deadlock might result in complete disorganization of the government, and anarchy was sure to threaten his manor. Their proverbial eloquence impressed the patroon. He returned to his seat on the floor and, as always before making an important decision, bowed his head on the edge of his desk and prayed. When he opened his eyes, an Adams ballot lay on the floor before him. It was divine guidance enough, and the patroon gathered up the ballot. His vote swung the State of New York, and Adams was elected President.

Stephen Van Rensselaer was too realistic not to know that the semi-feudal power of the Hudson Valley aristocracy was an anachronism, and that a single act of provocation might crystallize democratic opposition. Knowing the history of his title, he was constantly harried by doubts of its legality. He betrayed this weakness on one occasion after he had announced that he was going to dispense with the services of a prominent Albany lawyer to whom he had been paying a thousand dollars a year.

Very well, said the lawyer. Then I shall be at liberty to accept a retainer from your tenants, and I will then show you that they are no longer your tenants, but the owners of the soil.

The payments were continued, it is said, to the end of the lawyer’s life.

Another incident revealed the patroon’s dread of a court test. One of his subagents brought a man named Potter Maxon before a justice at Grafton, on charges of poaching timber from the manor. When Maxon demanded proof that Van Rensselaer owned the timber, the case was transferred to the Rensselaer County court. The patroon sped Robert Dunbar to Grafton to settle the case out of court, but Maxon, backed by neighbors who were anxious for the test, would not be pacified. Greatly agitated,