USA > New York > Dutchess County > The revolution and the common man : farm tenants and artisans in New York politics, 1777-1788 > Part 2
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with a winch?), oil, and set in motion. So long as this con- fidence lasted, the conservatives of the American Revolution were by no means the centralizing nationalists which they later became. "I am resolved, " Edward Rutledge was writing to John Jay, 'to vest the Congress with no more Power than that which is absolutely necessary, and to use a familiar Expression, to keep the Staff in our own Hands. 3
It was indeed a sense of naked strength nurtured by long handling of the staff of power, which gave conservatives in the early days of the Revolution the confidence that they could control the new state governments. In unwitting anticipation of Thomas Jefferson's testamentary declaration about the masses of mankind, Morris wrote to Jay in 1776: "How do you expect that your unruly Horses [he was referring to Jay's work in drafting the New York constitution] can be kept in Order by & Whip and a Spur. They want the Reins.14 Spirits kin to Morris, like James Duane, were already looking forward to the exercise of power when the war was won. "We must think in Time, " Duane wrote to the Lord of Livingston Manor, 'of the means of Assuring the Reins of Government when these Commotions shall subside. '5
3Edward Rutledge to John Jay, June 29, 1776, Correspon- dence and Public Papers of John Jay, ed. Henry P. Johnston (New York, 1890), I, 67-68.
4 Gouverneur Morris to John Jay, Aug. 3, 1776, Jay Papers.
5James Duane to Robert Livingston, June 7, 1775, Livingston-Redmond Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N. Y.
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These great landlords, who used the word "peasant" and the expression, "the lower orders," in their everyday conver- sation, hardly expected to let power slip from their grasp by the decision of a mere election. Contested elections were, to begin with, a rarity and an annoyance. As the first election under the new New York constitution drew near, Duer wrote to Philip Schuyler: "I dread the consequences which may too probably ensue from that sourness of mind which is the natural result of contested elections."7 And on election eve, Schuy- ler, himself the leading candidate for governor, declared: "They may choose who they will I will command them all. "" The victory, in this June 1777 election, of George Clinton rather than Philip Schuyler as governor of the state, was a blow to conservative control not fully recouped until the 1790's, and then only temporarily. "His family & Connec- tions," observed Schuyler in a famous letter, 'do not Intitle him to so distinguished a predominance. '9 Yet this quotation does only partial justice to the temper of the conservative
"See, e.g., Philip Schuyler to Gouverneur Morris, Feb. 3, 1778, Gouverneur Morris Papers, Columbia U .; Gouverneur Morris to Robert R. Livingston, Sept. 22, 1776, Robert R. Livingston Papers.
7William Duer to Philip Schuyler, June 19, 1777, Schuy- ler Papers, New York Public Library [hereafter N. Y.P.L. ]. For an older instance, see Abraham Ten Broeck to James Duane, Feb. 22, 1768, Duane Papers, N. - Y.H.S .: 'The Patroon and other of my Friends have Prevailed on me & I now Stand a Can- didate for the manor Every Body 18 averse to a Poll. '
Historical Memoirs from 12 July 1776 to 25 July 1778 of William Smith, ed. William H. W. Sabine (New York, 1958), 151.
9Philip Schuyler to John Jay, July 14, 1777, Correspon- dence and Public Papers of Jay, I. 147.
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leaders. They continued to cooperate, albeit sometimes grudgingly, with the Clintons and the Yates thrown to the surface of politics by the swirling energies of popular feel- ing; together the two groups of leaders ran for six years a revolutionary war. In a later sentence of this same letter, Schuyler pledged to Clinton his loyal support in the winning of the war.
Particularly interesting among the conservative leaders are Robert R. Livingston and Alexander Hamilton, whose attitudes to the New York constitution of 1777 have been revealed by the recently-opened Robert R. Livingston Papers. Hamilton, who as "Publius' in 1788 would forever identify his name with con- tempt for democracy and the contrivance of checks and balances, penned in 1777 the following astonishing sentences on the new constitution: "That instability is inherent in the nature of popular governments, I think very disputable; unstable demo- cracy, is an epithet frequently in the mouthe of politicians; but I believe that from a strict examination of the matter, from the records of history, it will be found that the fluc- tuation of governments in which the popular principle has borne a considerable sway, has proceeded from its being com- pounded with other principles; - and from its being made to operate in an improper channel.110 How are we to explain Hamilton's reversal during the subsequent decade? As early as 1780 and 1781, Hamilton would be at the center of the small
LOAlexander Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, May 19, 1777, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett (Now York, 1961- ), I, 254-256.
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group of conservatives laboring to strengthen the national government.
Robert R. Livingston would attract attention in this study if only because he was the principal landlord of Dutchess County, and the bête noir of the democratic move- ment in that county. But he was also to prove in the long run the most flexible and liberal of the state's conserva- tive leaders, espousing Republicanism in the 1790's when al- most all men of his social and economic position were Feder- alists. Here, too, is a change in political position which has baffled later students. Like Schuyler a great landlord and county magnate; like Jay (his bosom friend), Duane and Hamilton, a lawyer; like Duer a large entrepreneur in the produce of his estate; like Morris a man of a speculative turn of mind - there was nothing in Livingston's background or personality to explain the later divergence of his views from the views of his former associates. Livingstons and Delanceys had contested for political leadership throughout the eighteenth century; when in 1784 independence was won and Robert R. Livingston acquired Oliver Delancey's "large square" pew at St. Paul's Church, New York City, 11 one might have thought that Livingston's Revolutionary objectives had been fulfilled.
Yet as early as 1777 Livingston differed from his friends in the little knot of New York conservatives at least in the
11 Thomas Tillotson to Robert R. Livingston, June 15, 1784, Robert R. Livingston Papers.
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choice of metaphors. Writing to Duer in the interval between the promulgation of the new constitution and the first elec- tions under it, Livingston stated that Schuyler rather than himself would be the conservative candidate for governor, as his own name was too much disliked by the people. This deci- sion 'to change our battery" Livingston justified by a meta- phor which likened the voice of the people not merely to the working parts of a pre-constructed machine, but to a stream, whose torrent wiser heads must strive to curb and direct. the substitution of Schuyler, Livingston told Duer, showed "the propriety of swimming with a stream, which it is impossible to stem." He went on to contrast the position of the New York conservatives with those in Pennsylvania, recently chagrined by the enactment of an ultra-democratic constitution. "Wilson [James Wilson, leader of the Pennsylvania conservatives] will remember, ' Livingston wrote, "that I long age advised that they shd. yield to the torrent if they hoped to direct its course - you know that nothing but well timed delays, indefatigable in- dustry, & a minute attention to every favourable circumstance could have prevented our being exactly in their situation. .12
Were these men democrats? That depends on how one de- fines the term. Conservative New Yorkers would have rejected the label: even Hamilton, more liberal in 1777 than his col- leagues, believed that "when the deliberative or judicial powers are vested wholly or partly in the collective body of
12Robert R. Livingston to William Duer, June 12, 1777, Robert R. Livingston Papers.
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the people, you must expect error, confusion and instability. " Here at least Hamilton was consistent with his later thought, in opposing the direct participation of the people at large in government. Yet these men were, unlike their fellow-aristocrats who became Tories, republicans. 'A representative democracy, ' continued Hamilton, "where the right of election is well se- cured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, execu- tive and judiciary authorities, 18 vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable. "-3 Certainly the conservative Whigs were too democratic for their friend William Smith. 'These People, " Smith confided to his diary, 'have had no Foresight of the natural Consequences of a republican Spirit in a poor Country, where Gentlemen of For- tune are but few They are losing their Significance every Day. They will be happy if they can save their Estates. . 14
The Radical Leaders
The election campaign of 1777 brought into the open a long-standing divergence of temper and aspiration between the conservative and radical factions of the New York Whig leader- ship. Clinton, the successful candidate for governor, was not a radical but a moderate, standing between Schuyler on the one hand, and the old Son of Liberty, John Morin Scott, on the
13 Alexander Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, May 19, 1777, Papers of Hamilton, I, 255.
1 William Smith, Historical Memoirs from 1776 to 1778, 280, 306.
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other. It was Scott who, in the words of William Duer, "rail(ed) at an Aristocratic Faction which he pretends has formed and organized the new government, " and blamed his failure in obtaining a leading office on Duer, Duane, Robert R. Livingston, Philip Livingston, and Morris, "whom he des- cribes as a faction & tends [sic] to a family interest. ">> After his defeat in the gubernatorial election, Scott led in the Senate the campaign (to be described later) for the radi- cal program of price-fixing and land-confiscation.
Such a division of the patriot leadership as took place in New York was not, of course, peculiar to that state, nor indeed to the American Revolution. The process has been well described by Elisha Douglass. "When, " he writes, 'any sub- stantial portion of a population rises against lawful author- ity, its own internal conflicts are only temporarily shelved in the pursuit of a common objective. The various groups throwing their weight against existing government usually have different plans for the future; only the commonly shared op- pression induces them to subordinate individual objectives for the main task at hand #16 William Smith, watching the internal struggles of the Whigs with considerable satisfac- tion, succinctly observed of New York that there was 'a Sever- ance between the Popular & the landed Interest and they will mutually pull each other down. '17 This severance, already
15William Duer to Philip Schuyler, two letters dated June 19, 1777, Schuyler Papers, N. Y. P.L.
16Elisha Douglass, Rebels and Democrats, 1-2.
17william Smith, Historical Memoirs from 1776 to 1778, 306.
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marked in 1777-1778, would become still sharper in the financial crisis of 1779-1780.
Who were the radical leaders? What made them radi- cal? Their outstanding common trait (as will appear in our discussion of the democrats of Dutchess) was that they were nouveau riche: self-made men, social climbers, moderately wealthy but not so far from humble origins as to forget them. Melancton Smith hit them off aptly in his statement, at the New York ratifying convention of 1788, that they were men who felt the inconvenience of paying small sums. They were men who before 1776 had been fer- vent Whigs; who after 1783 became Anti-Federalists; and who during the war took the lead in pressing for popular regulation of private enterprise, and the confiscation and sale of Tory property. Gouverneur Morris (an ardent cham- pion of free enterprise until his relative Robert became Financier ) accurately noted the connection between nov laws of this kind, and the new men who administered them. "It was hardly possible to embitter (the] bitter Draught these Laws had prepared, " wrote Morris, "yet it was effec- ted by the manner of enforcing them. Men of old approved Character who respected their Neighbours and were respected would not descend to it. The Executors of these new Laws therefore were Men who like the Laws themselves were new. #18 Such a new man was Abraham Yates of Albany, New York's principal Anti-Federalist pamphleteer in the 1780's. A
18Fragment, n.d., Gouverneur Morris Papers, Columbia U.
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lawyer, member of an old Albany burgher family, Yates filled a variety of minor local offices until the Revolution shot him suddenly into prominence as chairman of the Albany Com- mittee, member of the committee which drafted the 1777 con- stitution, and state Senator. 19 Philip Schuyler, leading aristocrat of that aristocratic county, described Yates' rise in a letter to Gouverneur Morris: "Abraham Yates, I mean the Honorable Abraham Yates Esq. one of the Senate of this State, a member of the Council of Appointment - one of the Committee of the City & County of Albany, Recorder of the City of Albany - & Postmaster General, late Cobler of Laws & Old Shoes, is to be put in Nomination for Lieut. Governor. "20 The tone of this letter tells one more about what made Yatos radical, than could a volume of statistics. 21
Yates himself viewed his role as that of spokesman for the middle orders: the substantial farmers, or as they liked to call themselves, the 'yeomen. " in Yates' view, "the safe- ty of the rights and liberties depended upon the Middle sort of the people . . . the yeomanry of the country . . . the husband-men and mechanics." "The very Rich, and very poor, "
19 See Carol Spiegelberg, "Abraham Yates" (unpublished Master's essay, Columbia U., 1960). 20 Philip Schuyler to Gouverneur Morris, Feb. 3, 1778, Gouverneur Morris Papers, Columbia U.
2-The New York conservatives had a particular dislike for Yates. Soo Thomas Tillotson to Robert R. Livingston, May 1784, Robert R. Livingston Papers, wherein he is des- cribed as an "old booby"; and Alexander Hamilton to Robert Morris, Aug. 13, 1782, Alexander Hamilton Papers, Columbia U.
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Yates thought, 'were dangerous and ought to be guarded against Give the People at large time to consider - as their object is right, they generally determine so; and when they go wrong, it is owing to the over-rich and over- poor who play into each others' hands The common People," he concluded with unwonted eloquence, 'like common sense generally hold the balance between the two extremes. ,22 Here again, as with Jay, Morris and Duer, was a mechanical metaphor of government too static and too brittle for times of rapid change.
Yates' views on the place in politics of the "middling" sort of people were neither unique nor arbitrary: they were typical of the entire group of radical loaders. Their views Sprang not from personal whim or scholarship, but from the generalized social experience of New York's middle-class in 1ts generations-long struggle with the provincial aristocracy. Yates' own writing is permeated by a town burgher's resent- ment of the nearby feudal lord. Several of his unpublished manuscripts explore the early history of Albany County, al- ways from the standpoint of Albany city vis a vis the usur- ping patroon. 'Patroon, " for Yates, was "a term used in various acceptations though all reducible to the relation of & protector, or guardian . . their Behavior no more appli- cable than Satan when he appeared in the Garden as an Angel of light.'
22 "Speeches to Delegates in Congress, 1786,' Abraham Yates Papers, N.Y.P.L.
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Yates expanded this key definition into several frag- mentary histories of the patroon's theft of the land of the original Albany settlers. "The fact seems to be, " says Yates, "that the States General and their West India Company under the name of patroons were watching every opportunity to grasp at tracts of country to which they had not an equitable right to one hundred perhaps not to one thousand part." The original occupants were forced to 'set down with Common Fair" so that the landlords might "git the Jurisdiction out of their hands"; as for historians who told a different story, Yates accused them of deliberately concealing the truth as "tools of these speculators." One Yates manuscript begins by citing a newspaper notice wherein Albany residents are warned against taking wood without permission from "the Com- mons of Stephen van Renselaer.' Then follow fifty closely- scribbled pages in which the furious burgher argues that even the Indians permitted general access to the timber- lands, and that the citizens of Albany "since the Original Settlement of the City about 1612 a period of near two Con- turies peaceably used and exercised a right of commons. 123 Those historians who deny the existence of an American feudalism and the comparability of European and American 24
society, have perhaps not consulted these manuscripts.
23 " Historical account of the colony of Rensselaerswyck, " "Notes on early history of Albany, ' Yates Papers.
24 On this point, see Richard B. Morris, 'Class Struggle and the American Revolution," 8-17, in contrast especially to Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 67-86.
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Yates' conception of the constitution of 1777 followed rigorously from his primal sense of social conflict between burgher and patroon. He saw 'a similarity in the revolutions of 1688 [in England ] and that of 1776 for there were those of the wealthy then as well as now that stepped forth with diffidence until they saw the way prepared by the Common People and even then they made themselves conspicuous by their envy, quarreling with the commons for not surrendering every office of profit or honor to them." The constitution of 1777 was regarded by Yates as a set of concessions by the conser- vatives. 'The yeomanry of the country were wanted to fight and the militia duty which equally affected the poor and the rich . upon the principle of personal service was become very burthensome to the yeomanry (; ) and if the rich intended the other should continue to fight for there Estates it was Necessary to show that they did not make any difference but w[h]ere it was unavoidable. . 25 Hence, as Yates saw it, the lowering of the property requirement for Assembly voters from a L40 freehold to a L20 freehold or 406. leasebold; hence the provision for a secret ballot in the election of Governor and Senators; hence the popular election of the Governor - hence, in a word, those provisions which made the 1777 constitution, if less democratic than Pennsylvania's or than the demands of the New York radicals, 26 much less con-
25" Notes on the Early History of New York, ' Yates Papers. 262 For early drafts of the constitution which included universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot in all elec- tions, and popular election of all local officers, see
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servative than the instrument later adopted by Massachusetts. The radical leadership was not so coherent a group 88 its conservative counterpart. Schuyler, Hamilton, the Liv- ingstons, Duane, Jay, Duer, Morris were bound together by a dense web of over-lapping family and business relationships. Thue Hamilton married into the Schuyler family, Duane and Jay into the "Manor" branch of the Livingstons. On the county level, as will become plain in our study of Dutchess County, the radicals also formed such tight cliques, or in the eighteenth-century phrase, "interests. " But just because the radicals were men of less prominence, they tended to move in the circle of county rather than state-wide affairs. Their state-wide organization, therefore, was less solid and coherent than that of the conservatives, who, for oxam- ple, made group decisions as to which of their number should serve in a given year in the state legislature, and which should go to the Continental Congress. Indeed there are several in- stances where future radical leaders first appear on the his- torical record as surveyors, rent-collectors and local poli- tical managers for the Schuylers and Duanes, managing the county business of the great men while the latter attended to more lofty concerns. 27
This lack of cohesion in the radical party was the cause of its defeat at the New York ratifying convention of
William Smith, Historical Memoirs from 1776 to 1778, 18-21, 36, and Yates Papers, Box 2.
27 see, e.g., the correspondence of John Lansing and Philip Schuyler for the war years, Schuyler Papers, N. Y.P.L.
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1788, where a two-to-one numerical majority crumbled before careful Federalist exploitation of ita various internal fis- sures. The patronage dispensed by Governor Clinton was a bond among the radicals; their pervasive sense of class ante- gonism toward New York's aristocrats was always their princi- pal, if implicit, party program; 28
o but they were simply no match for the superb sense of history and purpose possessed by those brilliant patricians-on-the defensive, the New York conservatives.
Were the radical leaders democrats? That would be an easy question to answer could we rely on their own statements, which uniformly portrayed their cause as a struggle of 'demo- cracy' against "aristocracy." Nor, with all due skepticism, can it be doubted that they wished to end the dominion of the gilded familles who before 1777, bestrode like a colossus the little world of New York politics. As George Clinton once put it to Rufus King, they wished to give the people something more than a choice between two groups of aristocrate; what .29 was true for George Clinton held a fortiori for more consistent antagonista of wealth and privilege, like Yates and Melancton Smith. The crucial question is whether, in their effort to substitute "the politics of opportunity" (in George Danger- field's fine phrase) for "the politics of privilege, '30 they
28 See George Dangerfield, Chancellor Robert R. Living- stou of New York, 1746-1813 (New York, 1960), 222-233.
29Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, ed. Charles King (New York, 1894-1900), I, 354-356.
30Dangerfield, Chancellor Livingston, 88. On Anti-
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truly represented the small farmers and artisans of the state, or rather made use of the lower classes in furtherance of their personal ambitions? This question can only be anewered by an exhaustive inquiry into the year-to-year political ac- tivity of the lower classes and their would-be leaders.
Cne thing. however, can be stated with certitude at the outset. Throughout the Revolutionary Era, the New York radi- cal leaders joined hands with the conservatives in crushing all efforts of the lower classes to obtain their own ends for themselves by violence. Whether in the tenant rebellion of 1766, when John Morin Scott sat on the court which condemned to death the rebellious tenants' leader, William Prendergast, or in Shays' Rebellion of 1787-1788, when George Clinton and Marinus Willett marched at the head of the New York militia to turn back insurgents fleeing for safety toward the New York border, the New York radicale, with all their inconsistencies, were consistent in this.
Such also was their attitude when in May 1777, just as the state legislature wound up its work on the new constitu- tion, the tenants of Livingston Manor rose in arms to support the advancing British army.
The Tenant Farmers
Livingston Manor lay just north of Dutchess County on the east bank of the Hudson River, in the present Columbia
Federalists as democrats, contrast Cecilia Kenyon, "Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Repre- sentative Government, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XII (1955), 3-43, with Jackson T. Main, The Antifederalists (Chapel Hill, 1961).
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County. Tenant unrest on its 160,000 acres was two genera- tions old in 1777. In 1711, Governor Robert Hunter called on 130 soldiers to overave Palatine German tenants in that part of the manor known as the "East Camp. "31 From the mid- dle of the century to the outbreak of Revolution, conflict on the manor was continuous and often bloody. In the early 1750's, manor tenants near the Massachusetts border (encou- raged by Massachusetts land speculators) refused to pay rents, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for title under that colony, and resisted with arms the attempts of the third Lord of the Manor to oject them. 32 In 1762, the latter wrote his son-in-law James Duane about "the Club who hars fc: five years plagued me in the back part of my Man- nor." They are all, continued Robert Livingston, Jr.
a pack of Vagabonds who are fled from their Credi- tors & gott together in the mountains & vant my flatt Lands to Settle on, but Chiefly to Sell & pay their debts, for they cannot live any longer in the mountain as they have nothing left to sup- port on.
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