USA > New York > Dutchess County > The revolution and the common man : farm tenants and artisans in New York politics, 1777-1788 > Part 17
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4Quoted in George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats (New York, 1959), 288.
5[Poughkeepsie] Country Journal, Oct. 24, 1787.
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claimants. But what was at stake in the Critical Period was more than the price of wheat or speculative windfalls in government securities. It was also the question: Which class shall rule, and in the image of which class shall the new nation take shape?
What was at stake was aptly expressed in an exchange of letters between Alexander Hamilton and Robert Livingston, Jr. (the aged Lord of Livingston Manor) on the eve of the Nov York elections of 1785. "The situation of the State at this time is so critical,' Hamilton wrote,
that it is become a serious object of attention to those who are concerned for the security of property or the prosperity of government, to indeavour to put men in the Legislature whose principles are not of the levelling kind . . . . All mon of respectability, in the city, of whatever party, who have been witnesses of the despotism and iniquity of the Legislature, are convinced, that the principal people in the community must for their own defense, unite to overset the party I have alluded to. I wish you to be persuaded Sir, that I would not take the liberty to trouble you with these remarks with a view to serving any particular turn; but, from a through conviction, that the safety of all those who have anything to lose calls upon them to take care that the power of government is in- trusted to proper hands.
After the election, Livingston answered that "in this last election, by compleating the necessary Junction previous to the day of Election [which] we have so often desired & Endeavourd for; by uniting the interests of the Renselaer, Schuyler, & our family, with other Gentm. of property in the Country in one Interest . We carryed this last Election to a man. ' 'I trust, " concluded the Third Lord, "we shall always have the like Success provided we stick close to each other. .
Hamilton to Livingston, Apr. 25, 1785, and Livingston to Hamilton, June 13, 1785, Hamilton Papers, Columbia U.
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Beard's restricted conception of economic interest can- not explain the sense of common cause which Livingston and Hamilton express in this exchange. What they stood on together cannot be grasped by Beard's dichotomy of "realty" and "per- sonalty." Hamilton was the spokesman of the nation's investors in fluid capital. Fobert A. Livingston's father, in contrast, could say that "my personall Estate is no more, and we ought to take care of the Reall, " while the Chancellor himself echoed elchteen years later, "I have no personal property.' What bound together the urcan capitalist and the Hudson Valley landlord was the shared ially experience of wielding power over jevendent persons: common beibership in a ruling class. In power, and overcame the carriers separating proud great families and dividing city from country. After ratification, these two great groups of entrepreneurs would discover lesser, clashing interests, and as Republicans and Federalists, Democrats and Whigs, contend for power until the civil War. In quiet times, the aristocratic familles would themselves quarrel and intrigue among each other. But in 1997-1739, all those with something to lose (as Hamilton put it) stood together. When Robert Liv- ingston spoke of his family's 'interest, " he meant not their security holdings but their power to coerce tenant votes. 7
7For the Livingstons' remarks about their "personalty, " see Robert ?. Livingston, Sr., to Robert R. Livingston, Jr., Mar. 1, 1702 and Robert A. Livingston to George Clinton, May 21, 1780, Robert a. Livingston Papers. For quarrels among the Hudson Valley patricians, see, e.c., Thomas Tillotson to Robert R. Livingston, June 15, 1784, Margaret Beekman Livingston to same, Apr. 30, 1783, and Robert R. Livingston to Henry Living ton, 1789, in the same collection.
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If it be granted, first, that an internal struggle for power was real and continuous in Dutchess County, and second, that this conflict was (in the broad sense just described) economic, a third point must also be insisted on, namely, that the Revolution in Dutchess County was a social revolution as well as a war for independence, and worked a permanent change in the social atmosphere and balance of power in the county. Prior to 1776, the greatest landlords and their relatives - Henry Beekman, Jr .; Robert R. Livingston; Beverly Robinson - had monopolized the chief elective and appointive offices. From 1777 to 1788, not one member of these great families held office in Dutchess. Again, the confiscation of Loyalist estates in southern Dutchess wiped out the large landlord in all but the northwestern sector of the county, which henceforth could expect to exert only minority influence. This social revolution may, as Merrill Jensen suggests, have been unintended, but it was nonetheless real. Contrary to Robert Brown, Revolution in Dutchess County wag a "dual revolution, " and was not (at least in result ) 'a revolution to preserve a social order rather than to change it. . 8
This is not to say that the Dutchess tenant farmer (or indeed, any lower-class group in the American Revolution) had the flaming vision of a new heaven and a new earth which possessed, say, Gerard "'instanley, John Lilburne, or Babeuf. He was little concerned with ideology. His eyes were always
8The phrases quoted are from Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691-1780 (Ithaca, 1955), 401. For Jensen's view, see "Democracy and the American Revolution, " Huntington Library Quarterly, XX (1957), 321-341.
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on "aris et focis. "> hearth and home; his primary concern was always to obtain a freehold, and when obtained, to hold on to it. If farmer Assemblymen were, as William Smith charged, chiefly interested in the regulation of highways and the destruction of wolves, wild cats, and foxes, their tenant constituents had views equally mundane, although often more rebellious. Dutchess County town meetings dwelt mainly on the fencing of hogs.
All the same a visceral hatred of the aristocratic land- lord was almost an inherited passion in the Dutchess country- side. It was to this palpable while inchoate reality that Anti-Federalist prators appealed so 1n 1737-172 -. it was this that Federalist penmen had in mine in calling Crange and Dutchess Anti-Federalists followers of Jack Cade. 10
in truth, by 1732 the landlord's oppression had become more retorical than real in Dutchess County; but it had be- come so only because of the confiscation of Loyalist lands. What Crevecoeur said of Europe - "a country that has no bread for him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with Jails and punishments" - had been America for the tenant of pre-Revolutionary Dutchess. And what his philosophical ui- ster neighbor thought the inevitable fruits of immigration, the Dutchess County tenant had to wrest by revolution.
9peter Van Schaack to Philip Schuyler, Apr. 3, 1738, Schuyler Papers, N. Y. P. L.
10 [ Poughkeepsie ] Country Journal, Var. 18, 1788. See the description of the campaign in my 'Anti-Federalism in Dutchess County," ch. I.
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Commercial Farming
For all its virulent anti-landlordisa, Dutchess County voted Anti-Federalist in the elections to the New York rati- frying convention by a margin of only two-to-one, and in the final vote on ratification four of its seven delegates voted "Yea. " The election results cannot be rewarded as an accu- rate barometer of popular sentiment, for we know that in this as in other elections of the 1780's the Federalist landlords of northwestern Dutchess used "compulsive measures among the tenants. #11 But the shift of Gilbert Livingston, Zechaniah Platt, John Dellist and Melancton Smith at the convention 1s more Articule to explain. Smith, of course, was In 1732 a New York City merchant: his political future did not lie in the county. But if the other three hoped for future political careers, they would have been unlikely to change as they did without expectation of considerable popular support.
The fast is that the Cutche:s electorate in 1736 was
responding to more than the traditional anti-landlordism of the county's "common people. 1 12 The spread of commercial
11 Cornelius Wynkoop, Jr., to Peter Tan Gaasbeck, May 5, 1733, Van Juasbeck Papers, F. C. S. Library. See also Thomas Tillotson to Robert R. Livingston, Mar. 23, 1757 and Margaret Beekman Livingston to Robert R. Livingston, Apr. 1789, Robert A. Livingston Papers; Robert Livingston, Jr., to James Duane, Apr. 30, 1788, Duane Papers; Peter Van Schaack to Philip Schuyler, Apr. 3, 1733, Schuyler Papers, N. Y. P. L. ; Abraham G. Lansing to Abraham Yates, July 20, 1788, Yates Papers.
12m: find the new Constitution circulating here The common people here will generally oppose it" (Peter Tappen to George Clinton, Sest. 29, 1797, Bancroft Transcripts, N. Y. P.L. ).
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farming - the orientation of farm management to the sale of a s rplus in distant markets - created practical inducements to political conservatism which conflicted with the traditional anti-landlordism. In 1735, Robert A. Livingston was still obliged (as in 1777) to exclude himself from the gubernatorial race "on account of the prejudices against his family name. ">> But when, at the state ratifying convention in 1733, the Chan- cellor rose to announce that 'we are all equally aristocrats, .14 his remark was not alt -gether ridiculous: for small as well as large farmers could feel the pull of an expanding economy and a wide-open market. In the 1990's, Kansas wheat farmers became political radicals; but in the 1780's, dependence on a foreign market which called for a strong government to guard ocean shipping and pry open prohibited ports, led to political conserva:1sm. It was no acclient that all the Cutchess dele- gates who changed at the convention came from the county's leading commercial town, Pourkeepsie. Only in areas where landloriism was still strong and the means of shipping grain to market remote, coouli the old anti-aristocratic sentiment continue to work unchallenged. Ne do not have precinct election returns for 1793 from Dutchess County, but in neighboring Col- umbla, it was the old castern manor area - traditional theater of unrest and trenty miles from the Hudson - that was most
13Philip Schuyler to John Jay, May 30, 1795, Correspondence and Public Payers of Jay, III, 151.
14See Dangerfield, Chancellor Livingston, 220-230.
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strongly Anti-Federalist. 15
The area of New York state which practiced commercial farming and bought goods from the metropolls in exchange, was expanding rani ly in the 1780's. James Beekman, for example, expanded his upstate trade to five-eighths of his total sales. 16 The town of Hudson, more than 100 alles from the Atlantic Ocean, exported in 1738 the following: To the West Indies (in eleven ships, each of 120 tons, which sailed back and forth to the islands), 3000 barrels of herring, 40 horses, 800 hogs, 700 firzins of butter and lard, 500 barrels of peas, 50,000 staves for sugar-barrels, 15, 000 barrel hoops, and 'a quantity of beef pork corn oats hay"; to Europe (in four vessels of 200 tons apiece), flaxseed, pot ashes, barrel-staves, timber and rum - all in addition to the whaling products, such as sperma cetti and whalebone, in which the town specialized! 17 Here was no self-sufficient frontier or isolated, unspoilt village economy. Referring to the nation as a whole, Gouverneur Morris estimated before the end of the Revolution that the averare family spent $000 a year on products obtained through foreign or domestic commerce. 13
15 Se: Abraham Yates --- , June 2, 1787, Yates Papers, and Cornelius Wynkoop, Jr., to Peter Van Gaasbeck, May 5, 1788, Van Gaasbeck Papers, for voting in eastern Columbia County. This was the area Peter Van Schaack (as cited above, c. 9) had in mind when he said that Federalism had no hope because of "the il2-fated controversies about their lands. "
15. . White, Beekmans of New York, 523. See also Noah Webster, Description of New York," American Museum, Var. 1733, for an estimate of New York City's trading area.
17 min Thomas Jenkins to Robert R. Livingston, Jan. 10, 1799, Robert A. Livingston Papers.
18" Some thoughts on the Finances of America, " n.d., Gouv- erneur Morris Papers, Columbia U. Morris' figure 18 an average: he gives the expenditure of a "miudling" family as $272.
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The importance of the "commercial farming" areas in the ratification struggle is, of course, no new point. It was the fundamental conclusion of Orin Libby's 1894 study of the geographical distribution of the vote on the Constitution. 19 More recently, Jackson T. Main has underlined Libby's analysis 20 Because Beard hand-
with a wealth of fresh documentation.
it has apparently been assumed somely acknowledged Libby, 21 that he built on Libby's conclusions: but in this crucial regard Beard took a long step backward. For Beard largely ignored Libby's painstaking distinction between subsistence and commercial farmers, and reverted to the all-too-well-worn contrast of "the farmer" and the capitalist. In speaking of the ratification struggle as one between "capitalistic and agrarian interests" 2 and in and in asserting that "the democratic
.23 party was the agrarian element, Beard not only ignored
the democratic artisans in the cities but also vastly over- simplified the situation in the countryside. He ignored the difference between commercial and subsistence farmers; he also neglected the fact that landlords and land speculators were capitalists, and committed himself to the fantastie pro-
19Orin G. Libby, The Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States on the Federal Constitution, 1787- 1788 (Madison, 1894).
Jackson T. Hain, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781-1788 (Chapel Hill, 1961), especially 268-274.
21Thus Beard, Economic Interpretation, 5, where Libby's work is called "the most important single contribution to the interpretation of the movement for the federal Constitution."
22 Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York, 1915), 3.
23Beard, Economic Interpretation, 258.
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sition that the most throughly aristocratic element in the state of New York - the patrician landlords of the Hudson Valley - were somehow on the side of democracy (this blunder was corrected in the introduction to the 1935 edition). By distorting Libby's work, Beard made almost impossible a rational explanation of the Constitution's popular support. For in a country where only 3 per cent of the population lived is toyna with a population of more than 8000 (Beard's figures), even the support of all classes in the cities could hardly have made possible the adoption of the Constitution by the requisite nine states. To ignore the commercial farmer made a conspiracy theory inevitable.
The state of New York's response to the United States Con- stitution, Libby observed, was a classic example of the influ- ence of commercial farming. Only New York City and the most immediately adjacent rural areas ( the counties of Richmond, Staten Island and Westchester) elected Federalists to the state ratifying convention. The delegates who, elected as Anti- Federalists, voted in the end to ratify, came from the next ring of counties: Queens and Suffolk on Long Island, and Dutchess. Those areas most distant from the sea and the Hudson opposed the Constitution to the bitter end. And the provincial towns showed the same pattern: Albany and Hudson voted Federalist, although Albany and Columbia counties did not; 24 Poughkeepsie, whose residents were reported mostly Federalist in January, 25
24 Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 228-229.
25 Abraham Bancker to Evert Bancker, Jan. 19, 1788, Abraham Bancker Papers, N. - Y. H. S.
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was as stated carlier the home neighborhood of those Dutchess delegates who changed over while the convention was in 808- sion; Kingston, principal town of arch-Clintonian Uster County, became a Federalist center a few years later. As Main rephrases Libby:
The commercial interest was not just urban. The con- mercial centers were supported by nearby rural areas which depended upon the towns as markets and as agen- cies through which their produce was exported over- seas. That is to say, the commercial interest also embraced large numbers of farmers, and the influence of each town radiated, perhaps in a degree relative to its size or commercial significance. The same in- fluence permeated the rich river valleys and bound the great planters and other large landowners in the commercial nexus. Just as in physics each point along a beam of light itself acts as a point source of light, so also the major channels of commerce, rivers or 26
roads, influenced the country through which they passed.
Dutchess County, intermediate between the seacoast counties with little history of landlordiem ( Queens and Suffolk) and the isolated and still landlord-dominated counties (Albany and Columbia), neatly expressed the opposing influences of anti- landlordism and commercial farming by its split delegation.
The feelings of farmers in the commercial farming sections are suggested by some surviving letters. John Smith, a Long Island Anti-Federalist, felt keenly the pressure arising from his constituents' commercial involvemente. The Federaliste, Smith complained, declared that the that has old Horses will sell them for a Large sum when all the Porte in the west Indies are open (and] he who has fat oxen will get double for them" - if the Constitution were adopted. 27 When, early in July while the
26 Main, Antifederalista, 271.
27john Smith to David Gelston, n.d. [but before the state ratifying convention met], John Smith Papers, N. - Y. H. S.
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convention sat, word came that New Hampshire and Virginia had ratified so that the Constitution was now the law of the land, the pressure mounted. Ezra L'Hommedieu, a moderato Federalist, wrote to Smith (now a convention delegate) : "You may be assured, that since the adoption by New Hampshire & Virginia a great Change in Sentiment has taken Place with tuudo who were before opposed to the Constitution. I believe there are but few if any in this City [New York) who do not think it expedient for this State under the present Circumstances to become part of the Union & so far as I am informed the senti- ment is general in the southern part of the state." Referring to the change in sentiment of Samuel Jones of Queens County, L'Hommedieu continued: "We hear that Mr. Jones is for adopt- ing the Constitution, by the Information I have had from Queens County his Conduct in that particular will be approved by his Constituents, it is here by those who have been opposed as well as those who have approved. #28 Smith presumably could read between the lines, for he too voted "Yoa. ' And while such correspondence has not survived from Dutchess, it seems reasonable to suppose that Gilbert Livingston, Zephaniah Platt and John DeWitt were under similar pressure during those critical July weeks.
Just as mechanic Federalism was plain years before the ratification debate, so the eventual Federalism of the commer- cial farming areas could have been surmised from voting in the
281 1 Hommedieu to Smith, July 20, 1788, John Smith Papers.
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New York legislature as early as 1786. Jonathan Havens and David Hedges of Queens and John DeWitt of Dutchess, all of whom changed over during the New York convention, all also voted against paper money, and for a Federal impost, two years before. 28 Indeed of the eleven delagates at the New York convention who switched from opposition to final support of the Constitution, seven had been opponents of paper money. 29 In 1788, delegates from the commercial farming areas began to vote with the Federalists at the ratifying convention several days before the final vote on ratification. On July 19, Jones, Schenck and Havens of Long Island voted with the Fede- ralista to adjourn the convention. 30 On July 21, Platt from Dutchess along with Havens, Jones, Carman, Lawrence and Schenck from Long Island joined the Federalist minority in voting on an amer.dment regarding a standing army. The same day, Schenck and Lawrence atayed with the Federalists in voting on another amendment respecting the holding of public offices by Congress- men. In the first decisive vote (July 23) on the motion to ratify "in full confidence" that amendments would later be adopted, these six men were joined by DeWitt, Gilbert Livingston and Melancton Smith of Dutchess, together with three more Long Islanders, to produce a Federalist majority. 31
28 Journal of the Assembly (New York, 1786), votes Feb. 11 to Mar. 30.
29 Main, Antifederalists, 269.
30 DeWitt Clinton to Charles Tillinghast, July 19, 1788, DeWitt Clinton Papers, Columbia U.
'-The voting on amendments is recorded in the convention notes of John Mckesson ( Mckesson Papers).
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Dutchess County in 1798 thus faced both backward toward its neo-feudal past, and forward to its entrepren- eurial future. Class and sectional influences played a part. 1775-1825 was the "grain period" of Dutchess history when 'all but the most isolated farms raised wheat for the New York market. #32 This involvement in far-flung markets pushed Dutchess farmers to think nationally, and to appre- ciate the protection a strong government could give.
Yet as Libby noted with some puzzlement, 33 Dutchess like the rest of the Hudson Valley was fundamentally Anti- Federalist territory. To account for this, one must over-lay Libby's pattern of sectionalism with the pattern of landlord- tenant conflict. In neighborhoods like southeastern Dutchess or eastern Columbia County, where markets were inaccessible and the anti-landlord tradition strong, Anti-Federalism fol- lowed as a matter of course.
The mixed emotions and split votes of Dutchess County during the ratification struggle expressed the conflict of these contending influences. In New York City, too, the political behavior of the artisans was not the simple result of either clase or sectional forces, but a complex compound of both.
32 Martha Collins Bayne, County At Large (Poughkeepsie, 1937), 3.
33Libby, Geographical Distribution, 21: '. . . what has been given seems insufficient to explain why the state should have been so strongly Anti-Federal north of New York county, with such a river as the Hudson . . . opening up the whole region to . . commercial relations with New York City. "
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Working-Class Federalism
Sherlock Holmes once observed ( in the case of the race- horse "Silver Blaze") that the most "curious incident" in a situation can be the thing that does not happen. The most interesting fact about New York City politics in the years 1783-1788 is that the mechanics did not oppose the United States Constitution. They did not join with their rural counterparts, the tenants and small yeomen, in a struggle of "poor guys" against "rich guys. #34 On the contrary, as in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Charleston, 35 the arti- sans voted overwhelmingly ( the New York City margin was twenty-to-one) for Federalist candidates to the state rati- fying convention. The genuineness of this working-class Federalism is beyond question. For apart from the fact that the election in New York was by secret ballot and open to all adult males, the New York City mechanics (as in all the other large cities) capped their ballots with a victory parade in which craft after craft marched under its banners. 3ยบ
34This is Forrest McDonald's five-word version of the Beard thesis, in his exchange with Jackson T. Main, William and Mary Quarterly, Ser. 4, XVII (1960). Lefebvre likewise points out for the French Revolution that the politics of the rural poor were quite distinct from those of the town-dwelling artisan (quoted and translated in Greenlaw, Op. cit., 75).
35See on the mechanics in general, Main, Antifederal- ists, 266-268. On the mechanics of Charleston, see ibid., 219, and Walsh, Charleston's Sons of Liberty, 109 ff. On the mechanics of Philadelphia, see Main, op. cit., 190, 273, and Robert L. Brunhouse, The Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1776-1790, 142, 165, 176-177.
36500 above, Chapter X, n. 1.
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It will not do to dismiss the Federalism of the ar- tisans as "petty-bourgeois." The contemporary Jacobin mobs in Paris were drawn, like the New York mechanics, from a variegated array of 'workshop masters, craftsmen, vage-earners, shopkeepers, and petty traders. .37 Clearly what needs to be explained 1s why such groups were revolutionary in France, but conservative in the America of 1787-1788.
Working -class Federalism was recognized by Beard, but quickly dismissed on the ground that urban workingmen were "politically non-existent" and lacked 'an organization that commanded the attention of the politicians of the time. .38 In the 1930's even this much was forgotten. Influenced no doubt by the surge of labor organization in those years, Herbert Morais wrote of the New York City Sons of Liberty that in the 1780's they were "still on the alert to detect the slightest sign of counterrevolutionary activity, serving as a democratic leaven in the formative post-war society"; and Eugene P. 39 Link agreed that "these organizations, which were composed largely of artisans and mechanics, preserved their watch over government well into the postwar era."40 It was natural enough for Morais, studying mechanic acti:1ty before 1775, to extrapolate forward, and for Link, interested in the 1790's,
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