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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 03416 5081
Gc 974.7 L992r Lynd, Staughton. The revolution and the common man
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LIND, Stoughton Craig, 1 12 .- THE REVOLUTION AND THE COMMON M.IN: FARM TENANTS AND ARTISANS EN NEW YORK POLITICS, 1777-1738.
Columbia University, Ph. D., 1962 tiistory, modern
University Microtilms, Inc . Ann Arbor, Michigan
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:903
THE REVOLUTION AND THE COMMON MAN Farm Tenants and Artisans in New York Politics, 1777-1782
Staughton Lynd
1962
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University.
Allen County Public Library 900 Webster Street PO Box 2270 Fort Wayne, IN 46801-2270
ABSTRACT
The Revolution and the Common Man: Form Tonante and Ar- Lisans in New York Politica. 17 -- 1788 by Staughton Lynd
This study sneks to interpret the meaning of the American Rd- volution and the United States Constitution by examining the experi- ence of two lower-class groups in the state of New York: the fam tenants of Dutchess County, and the artisans of New York City. Fart I relates the conflict of landlord and tenant in Dutchess from the aid-century through the Revolutionary War, with special attention to the movement for onfiscation of Loyalist lands in 1777-1780. Part II telle of the formation of a merchant-artisan alliance in support of a stronger Federal government during the years 1783-1788.
The evidence brought forward lands support to both of the presently-dominant interpretations of the Revolutionary Era. An in- ternal struggle as to "who should rule at home" vas chronic in Dut- chess County before, durin and (to a lesser extent) after the War for Independence. The same socio-economic groups, to a striking extent the wane individual politicians, ouposed one another in a series of social-revolutionary crises: the tenant rising of 1766; the movement for price regulation and land confiscation during the var; and the battle over ratification of the United States Constitu- tion. The conflict vas essentially one between a few aristocratie landlords and the great mass of the county's farmers, in particular the sizeable population of tenants. The Revolution in Dutchess vas indeed a social revolution as well as an independence struggle. £ The great landlords were sjected from political office. More than 1.0,000 acres in south Dutchess, the heartland of the 1766 rising,
vere confiscated from Loyalist landlords and sold in mall lots, often to former tenants.
But if the revolutionary experience of Dutchess tenants conforms to the interpretations of Charles Board and Carl Becker, the story of the New York City artisans backs up the recent revisionist views of Robert Brown and Forreet KoDonald. For the artisans, in contrast to the rural lower-class, over- whelmingly and enthusiastically supported the United States Constitution. After a period (1783-1785) of considerable bitterness between merchants and artisans, as all groups of av .- refugees struggled for economic footholds in the post-var city, the depression of 1785 converted to Federalism, first the old Sons of Liberty leadership, then the renk-and-file of artisans. The Anti-Federalists of New York City were a hand- ful of merchants, without exception either newcomers to the city or prominent office-holders in the state government. Well before 1787, the city artisans had explicitly rejected Anti-Federalist leadership.
A concluding chapter attempts to synthesize these two, apparently contradictory, phenomena. It is suggested that both olass and sectional influences were at work in the behavior of both Dutchess tenants and New York City artisans during ratification. The former, although steeped in the traditional anti-landlordiam, vere also influenced by the expanding network of commercial farming: the split of the Dutchess delegation at the New York ratifying convention somus to express this conflict of influences. The latter, while solidly Federalist in the ratification conteet, had a far more
democratic program than their merchant allies. Once ratifica- tion was assured, the artisans at once began to reopen old quarrels with the mercantile upper-class.
The United States Constitution, then, as seen through the eyes of the common people was neither wholly the creature of a capitalist minority as suggested by Charles Beard, nor simply the democratic and public-spirited document conceived by traditionalists and revisionists. It was both capitalist and democratic, and the Founding Fathers sav more clearly than many later apologists that these two aspects of their work were by no means altogether in harmony,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A married graduate student in straitened circum- stances needs many kinds of help to complete a big piece of research. I hope that all those who helped, in so many ways, will find some reward in the final product. I want particularly to thank:
My teachers, Harold C. Syrett and Richard 3. Morris, for humane encouragement as well as scholarly criticism;
Alfred F. Young, for reading 1001 drafts with dogged imperturbability and a deadly eye for bad work;
Lee Benson and Lawrence Towner, for help in making the big jump into print;
Robin Brooks and Robert Christen, fellow-students of New York in the Revolutionary Era, who generously shared many 'finds";
Sue Robinson, and Andrea and Joseph Nold, who proved abundantly that they also serve who only baby-sit;
and my wife, Alice Lynd, who in addition to everything else did most of the final typing.
Staughton Lynd Atlanta, Ga.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 11
INTRODUCTION 1
PART I. THE TENANTS OF DUTCHESS COUNTY
Chapter
I. NEW GOVERNMENT, OLD CONFLICTS: 1777 10
The Conservative Leaders The Radical Leaders The Tenant Farmers
II. LANDLORD AND TENANT IN DUTCHESS COUNTY 38
Economic Power Political Power
III. THE TENANT RISING OF 1766 53
The Grievances A Little Rebellion Political Repercussions
IV. THE SEQUESTRATION OF LOYALIST LAND, 1777-1779 75
The Landlord Leaves Politice A Disgruntled Militia Price Control Land Sequestration
V. THE CONFISCATION OF LOYALIST LAND, 1780 AND AFTER 101
The Crisis of 1779-1780 Administering Confiscation
111
VI. STALEMATE: 1781-1783 . 128 1780-1781 1782-1783
PART II. THE ARTISANS OF NEW YORK CITY
VII. THE EVACUATION OF NEW YORK CITY: 1783 . 148
A British City Committees Again Return of the Natives
VIII. WHIGS AGAINST TORIES: 1784 168
The Politics of Exclusion Restless Mechanics
IX. NEW ALIGNMENT3: BANKS, DEBTS AND PAPER MONEY IN THE POLITICS OF THE CRITICAL PERIOD . . 196
Debts to England Banks and Paper Money The Anti-Federalist Merchants
x. DEPRESSION AND COALITION 221
Was There & Depression? Building a Coalition
PART III. CLASSES, SECTIONS AND THE CONSTITUTION
XI. TENANT FARMERS AND ARTISANS IN THE RATIFICATION STRUGGLE: 1787-1788 253
Demo and Aristo Commercial Farming Working-Class Federalism
INDEX OF NAMES 282
BIBLIOGRAPHY 286
Essay on Manuscripts Secondary Sources
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INTRODUCTION
This is a study of democracy and nationalie in the Ameri- can Revolution, as revealed by the experience of two lower-class groups: the tenant farmers of Dutchess County, and the New York City artisans.
In method, the study stresses the use of local history to test broad historical generalizations, and the comparison of the American Revolution with the revolutionary experience of other countries. A few words need saying at the outset as to each of these points.
Amid the cut and thrust of scholarly controversy over the meaning of the Revolutionary Era, all combatants have agreed on the need for more detailed local studies. - Charles Beard himself recognized that "not even a beginning" had been made on the 'enor- mous and laborious rescarches" required either to prove or disprove his interpretation. Beard said of his own pioneering pages that they merely sketched "the broad outlines of the study which must be filled in and corrected by detailed investigations. .2 Recent critics of Beard charge correctly that, after the publication of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, he did not proceed to the close-in study his book advised. Yet these same critics have not been content to dig in at the state, county and township level, and postpone continental synthesis to
See in particular Edmund S. Morgan, "The American Revolution: Revisions in Need of Revising, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XIV (1957), 3-15.
2 Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitu- tion of the United States (New York, 1913), 19, 22, 24.
2
a later day. 3
In the following pages, two counties, with a combined population during the 1780's of about 50, 000 (a little less than 2 per cent of the population of the nation), have been used as laboratories wherein to test major interpretative hy- potheses about the era of the American Revolution.
Dutchess County, on the east bank of the Hudson River half-way between New York City and Albany, entered the Revolu- tion with a history of tenant unrest. It was the political home base of the aristocratic Livingston family that led the anti-British party in pre-Revolutionary New York. After 1776, Livingston leadership was increasingly rejected as the Revolu- tion in Carl Becker's famous phrase, became a "struggle over who should rule at home" as well as a 'struggle for home rule. 14 Dutchess County, accordingly is an appropriate vantage-point from which to view the democratic groundswell which gathered force as the Revolution dragged on.
If Dutchess County was a focal point for internal class conflict, politics in New York City centered on the demand, shared by all classes, for economic and political independence from Great Britain. To be sure, the city artisans favored more democracy than the mercantile upper class, and the two groups often
3These remarks would appear to apply to Robert E. Brown's Charles Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Analysis of "in Economic Interpretation of the Constitution" (Princeton, 1956), to Forrest McDonald's We, The People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 1958), and to Lee Benson's Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered (Glencoe, 1960).
4Carl L. Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776 (Madison, 1909) .
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wrangled bitterly. But with the exception of the years 1783-1785, from 1776 to 1788 the merchants and mechanics of the city joined forces in support of independence and strong national government. Thus events in New York City tend to support Brown, McDonald and other scholars who view the Revo- lution as a national liberation movement in which internal conflicts were of small significance. 5
6 In attempting to weigh the Becker-Beard hypothesis againat the contrasting revisionist outlook, to choose be- tween the analysis suggested by Dutchess County and the opposing view which the New York City evidence supports, a side-glance at the revolutionary experience of other countries can be most helpful. For assessment of the American Revolution as a "real" revolution, or, alternatively, as "merely" a var for indepen- dence, presupposes a yardstick with which the American Revolu- tion can be measured; and this yardstick or standard of compa- rison is, inevitably, the kind of revolutionary upheaval common in European history.' In this study, therefore, the reader vill be asked to compare the punitive and confiscatory laws of the
5See, in addition to the works of Brown and McDonald already cited, Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691-1780 (Ithaca, 1955); Oscar and Mary F. Handlin, Radicals and Conservatives in Massachu- setts after Independence, " New England Quarterly, XVII (1944), 343-355; Louis B. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Now York, 1955).
6 The link between Becker and Beard is the assumption that the contest of Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, Federalist and Anti-Federalist, simply continued pre-Revolutionary party divisions; for a clear statement, see Becker, op. cit., 256, 274-275. For modern ro-statements of the Becker view, see Elisha Douglass, Rebels and Democrate (Chapel Hill, 1955) and the work of Merrill Jensen, most recently "Democracy and the American Revolution, " Huntington Library Quarterly, XX (1957), 321-342.
7See Richard B. Morris, "Class Struggle and the American Revolution, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XIX (1962), 3-29.
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French and English Revolutions with land confiscation in Dutchess County; to view the "new men" who rose to power in revolutionary Dutchess with their counterparts in seventeenth century London or Kent; and to set the social composition of the Jacobin Clubs side-by-side with that of the mechanics' movement in New York City. The fruitfullness of this kind of comparison can be illus- trated by an example: the problem of the relationship of poli- tical representatives to their constituents. In recent work on the English Civil War, painstaking research on the members of the Long Parliament has revealed almost no characteristic dif- ferences between Cavalier and Roundhead Members of Parliament. 8 Yet there can be no doubt that both in the countryside9 and in city 10 the a the strength of Parliament vas concentrated in cer- tain regions and socio-economic classes, and that of the King in others. Beyond question, the research design of the Namier- ite study of Parliament mistakenly assumed that the M. P. typi- fied his constituency, as well as representing it.
Similarly, research on the United States Constitution is now bogged down in a sterile quarrel over the economic interests of individual members of the Constitutional Convention, and of the
See, especially, D. Brunton and D. H. Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament (London, 1954).
See Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958), 21-23, and the county studies there cited.
10See Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (London, 1961), especially 240-246.
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state ratifying conventions. We might have learned from the English mistake that the members of public assemblies are not, &8 Lee Benson well puts it, "the electorate in microcosm, ,11 so that to discover whether Alexander Hamilton or Melancton Smith owned more United States securities proves little about the people who elected them.
Recent work on Virginia shows the necessity of distin- guishing between leaders and voters. In 1953, Robert Thomas demonstrated that "the leaders of both the Federalist and Anti- Federalist parties came from the game class - slaveowners, large landowners, land speculators, army officers and professional people, in short, the gentry. " Thomas then went on: "The leaders of both parties were recruited from the same class, and the contest over ratification of the Federal Constitution in Virginia was essentially a struggle between competing groupe
within the aristocracy. Now, this second sentence simply .12 does not follow from the first. Two quite different commun1- ties might well have sent to the Virginia ratifying convention delegates similar in their economic and social standing. In 1955, Jackson Main argued that this had been the case. Surveying the economic characteristics of the county constituencies, Main found differences which were regularly expressed in the voting of their representatives. 13 Had Main's finding been fortified by the comparable English results, the controversy over Beard
Lee Benson, 'A Critique of Beard and his Critics" (un- published), 126-127.
120 Robert E. Thomas, "The Virginia Convention of 1788," Journal of Southern History, XIX (1953), 72.
13Jackson T. Main, "Sections and Politics in Virginia, 1781- 1787, ' William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XII (1955), 96-112.
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could have been much illuminated long since.
The usefullness of a comparative approach extends still further. The worldwide uprising of colonial peoples since World War II, like the great revolutions of continental Europe, can open up new perspectives in the study of the American Revo- lution. Indeed, reflection on modern colonial revolutions suggests that the Beard-Becker and Brown-McDonald ways of viewing the American Revolution are not, perhaps, the only possibilities. A third perspective is indicated, wherein the American Revolution figures not as essentially similar to the French or Russian Revolutions, nor historically unique, but as the first of those partly-national, partly social-revolutionary colonial rebellions so common in our own day.
Thus the hitherto-puzzling nationalism of New York City mechanics in the Critical Period takes on fresh meaning when compared to a characteristic experience of the newly-independent nations today. This is the recognition that political indepen- dence does not solve all problems, that the old economie depen- dence on the "mother country" tends to reassert itself, and that a second struggle for economic freedom must be waged.
Again, a typical problem for the new nations of the present is that the achievement of independence leaves unresolved many social cleavages, which then express themselves as left- and right-wing tendencies within the nationalist movement. Just so the great failure of democracy in the American Revolution was its failure to destroy slavery; and much of subsequent American his- tory can be viewed as the wages of that sin.
The story which follows is told in two parts. The demo-
.
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cratic movement in revolutionary Dutchess came to a climax in the financial crisis of 1779-1780. The story of New York City nationalism unfolded only after the return of the city's Whigs from their seven-year exile in November 1783. Hence the two parts of the essay follow each other in roughly chrono- logical order. In Part I, dealing primarily with Dutchess County, the emphasis is on the breakdown of the patriot coalition. during the war. In Part II, the stress falls rather on the for- mation of a nationalist alliance after 1783.
Throughout, the attempt is made to view through these local lenses the politics of all of New York state, and in a certain sense, indeed, of the nation as a whole.
PART I
THE TENANTS OF DUTCHESS COUNTY
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LIVINGSTON MANOR
Clermont
HILLSDALE
. Red Hook
. Rhinebeck
Amenia .
Albany
CHARLOTTE
· Poughkeepsie
Fishkill
BEEKMAN
New York C.
PAWLING
100 M.
ROMBOUT
Quaker HIII
Fishkill
. Patterson
FREDERICKSBURG
S. Dutchess
-
10 m.
DUTCHESS COUNTY
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CHAPTER I NEW GOVERNMENT, OLD CONFLICTS: 1777
"Another turn of the winch,' commented the principal draftsman of the New York constitution of 1777, 'would have cracked the cord" of confidence holding together the patriot party. Thus Carl L. Becker ended his classic study of Now York politics in the early years of the American Revolution, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776.
The spring of 1777 was a time tense with more than the strains of constitution-making. This was the year when the British almost cut America in two by conquering the whole of New York state. In September 1776, Washington's army had abandoned New York City, more than half the city population Joining in flight. Of Becker's gallery of radical leaders, Isaac Sears took up privateering in Boston, John Lamb lost an eye before Quebec, Marinus Willett would officer the repulse of a critical British and Iroquois sortie along the Mohawk. The autumn months as Washington retreated across New Jersey were the times that tried mons' souls. The revolutionary government of New York fled from place to place, dropping and resuming work on the new constitution, mixing debate on the secret ballot and the governor's veto with more mundane but equally difficult decisions about stubborn militiamen, Tory
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spies, and the price of flour. In March 1777, as the legis- lators put final touches on the new instrument of government, General Burgoyne vas preparing a drive south from Canada; by July, Fort Ticonderoga would be in British hands and Philip Schuyler in brooding retirement under a cloud of disgrace. General Howe was moving back across the Jerseys toward Now York City. Everyone expected that when he arrived there he would move north to join Burgoyne. Somewhere near Albany, Howe's army, a first arm joining the second aru of the Brit- ish pincers, would seek to crush the independent state of New York: an area, even before the British campaign, consisting only of two strips of land along both sides of the Hudson be- tween Fishkill (now Beacon) and Albany. For a year after April 1775 the war had centered in New England; after 1777, the war would turn to the south; this was the year in which the stage would be the Middle Colonies, and above all, New York. Forming a new government set the seal on the state's decision for independence. Only then did the historian William Smith, under house arrest at Livingston Manor and in communi- cation with friends on both sides, lose hope for a conciliation. It was a team of rather unnatural comrades who thus put their hands together to the revolutionary plough. Aristocratic conservatives, long used to managing the popular party in state politics, planned the selection of proper persons for the lead- ing offices of government. Plebeian democrats regarded the democratic features of the new constitution as concessions wrung from doubtful allies, and its conservative features as
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proof of the necessity for a final reckoning with the "great families." And as the two sets of leaders squabbled and plotted, a pro-Tory tenant rising on the estate of the clan Livingston underscored the political reality of a third group: the inarticulate masses of the countryside. These were the three groups whose strength and desires would shape New York's internal politics in the Revolutionary War.
The Conservative Leaders
The New York constitution, wrote William Duer to John Jay in May 1777, was "possibly as good as the Temper of the Times would admit of." He continued: "I assure you I am not without my Fears concerning the Choice will be made of those who are to set the Machine in Motion. Our all depends on it. "- Later in 1777, reflecting wryly on those who had been chosen, Gouverneur Morris likewise turned to a mechanical metaphor. "I say, ' Morris wrote to Robert R. Livingston, "watch the Legislature. The more I reflect the more I am convinced that they will want some friendly Care and Attention . The Machine [is] unwieldy it will require much oiling winding and the like before it works well for the State. . 2
Conservatives like Duer and Morris still thought in 1777 that the Revolutionary state government vas a machine which they and their friends, like the God of deism, could construct, wind (had not Jay also spoken of winding the cord of government
William Duer to John Jay, May 28, 1777, Jay Papers, Columbia U.
"Gouverneur Morris to Robert R. Livingston, Dec. 1, 1777, Robert R. Livingston Papers, New York Historical Society [here- after N. - Y. R.S. ).
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