USA > New York > Dutchess County > The revolution and the common man : farm tenants and artisans in New York politics, 1777-1788 > Part 3
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Discontent among the tenants fed on the quasi-feudal nature of the manor leases, which throughout the Revolutionary
3- Irving Mark, Agrarian Conflicts in Colonial New York, 1711-1755 (New York, 1940), 111-112.
32 Ibid., 115 ff .; Oscar Handlin, "The Eastern Frontier of New York, " Now jork History, XVIII 91937), 50-75; corres- pondence of Robert Livingston, Jr. , with his Massachusetts agent Jacob Wendell, 1751-1755, Livingston Papers, Museu: of the City of New York.
Robert Livingston, Jr., to James Duane, Feb. 15, 1762, Duane Papers. For other references to the "club" or "combina- tion" of Livingston Manor tenants, see Documentary History of the State of New York, od. I. B. O'Callaghan (Albany, 1851), III, 826; Edward B. Livingston, The Livingstone of Livingston Manor (New York, 1910), 314-315.
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Era required the tenant to render such perquisites as two days of work. (with team and wagon) and four 'fat Hens" for the Lord each year, not to speak of the obligation to grind his wheat and saw his boards at the Lord's mills; "" on the simple poverty of families living on "molasses, rice.and limited spices" available to tenants at the manor store, while the Lord's table groaned under 'sweet oil, raisins, currants, cloves, cinammon, cheeses, oysters, mint vaters, figs, olives, and capers" : 35 and on the incorrigible habit of the great landlords to settle their land disputes by ejecting tenants in order to create test cases in court. Such ejections were the immediate occasion for the tenant rising of 1766, when on Livingston Manor (wrote the British officer John Montresor) 'some hundreds of Tenants are . turned Levellers and are in arms to disposses some and main- tain others in their own [farms], without rent or taxation" ; two hundred of these tenants actually marching "to aurthor the Lord of the Manor and level his house, unless he would sign leases for 'em agreeable to their form,' until dis- persed by Walter Livingston (one of the three members of the Treasury Board of the United States in the 1780's) at the head of forty armed men. 36
""For a series of manor leases in the 1750's, 1760's and 1790's, see Joan Gordon, "Kinship and Class: The Liv- ingstons of New York" (unpublished Ph. D. thesis, Columbia U., 1959), 133; Robert R. Livingston, Sr., to Robert R. Livingston, Jr., Mar. 12, 1762, Robert R. Livingston Papers; Dangerfield, Chancellor Livingston, 190.
35Joan Gordon, "Kinship and Class, ' 148. 36 Quoted in Irving Mark, Agrarian Conflicts, 140, 142-143.
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Historians have failed to realize that the discontent of Livingston Manor (as of Dutchess County) tenants contin- ued right into the Revolutionary years, until it exploded in the uprising of 1777.37
Signe of an approaching storm were in evidence well be- fore May, 1777. In 1775, Robert R. Livingston (whose Cler- mont estate was the southern or "lower" portion of Livingston Manor) wrote to John Jay:
I told you some time before I left you that many of our Tenants here refused to sign the asso- ciation, & resolved to stand by the King as they called it, in hopes that if he succeeded they should have their Lands. Since troops have been raised in the province & two of my brothers have got commis- sione they have been frighted & changed their bet - tery. In order to excuse themselves they assert that they can not engage in the controversy since 88 their leases [are] not for lives their families must want when they are killed . To deprive them of all excuse, my father has declared to them that a new lease shall be given to the family of every man who is killed in the service & Mrs. Livingston had come to the same resolution [Margaret Beekman Liv- ingston, mother of Robert R. Livingston, who owned lands in her own name]. Notwithstanding which the scoundrels have as we are informed sent in a peti- tion to the Congress replete with falsehoods & charges injurious to the memory of my Grandfather & Mrs. Livingston.
His father (Robert R. Livingston, Sr., who died later that year), continued the future Chancellor, had offered to pay three-fold if a representative of the Provincial Congress upheld the tenants in any of their charges. Jay must be sure to rebut the tenants' petition when it arrived, for, Livingston concluded, the tenants "will if they meet with
3 The leading authority says, "to what extent anti- rent agitation continued during the Revolution is difficult to say" (Mark, Agrarian Conflicts, 15 n. ).
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the least encouragement throw the whole country into confu- sion. #38
By October 1776, a tenant rising on the manor was ex- plicitly feared. The disaffected, wrote the chairman of the manor Committee to Peter R. Livingston (heir to the manor and President of the Provincial Congress), were increasing daily; many were hiding in the woods; the militia was not reliable. 39 A week later William Smith noted in his diary that the Kin- derhook, Claverack and manor regiment had been ordered to march against Burgoyne. Henry Livingston, Lieutenant Colonel of the regiment, would disobey the order, Smith wrote, on the advice of Robert R. Livingston, "it being the Opinion of both, that not above 50 will move . . & that there is Danger of a Rising if the Whigs go . . agt their Families and especially agt the Members of the Committee. "40
What match finally ignited this tinder 1s impossible to say. One observer thought it was the inquisitiveness of the Claverack militia; another believed it was the folly of cer- tain officers in picking out men for the Revolutionary army, rather than drawing lots. 41 Possibly hostilities began with
38Robert R. Livingston to John Jay, July 17, 1775, Jay Papers.
39 Samuel Ten Broeck to Peter R. Livingston, Oct. 9 and 10, 1776, Journals of the Provincial Congress, Provincial Con- vention, Committee of Safety and Council of Safety of the State of New-York (Albany, 1842), II, 319, 320.
William Smith, Historical Memoirs from 1776 to 1778, 26. 41 Ibid., 132. William Smith's accuracy has been ques-
tioned. In this case, the major outlines of his story are completely corroborated by the Journals of the New York Pro- vincial Convention.
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an incident reported in the Tory press of New York City, a brush between forty residents of the manor and patriot sol- diers conducting prisoners at the order of the Albany Commit- tee. According to these accounts, two officers and three privates of the patriot soldiery were killed in the encounter. The prisoners were freed by the manor Loyalists, but re- captured the following day. 42
Whatever the immediate cause, it is certain that the anticipated arrival of British troops had prompted the manor tenants to plan a rising in support of the redcoats. William Smith, observing the event with mixed sympathies from his local vantage-point, and the three-man commission appointed by the Provincial Convention (Robert R. Livingston, Zephaniah Platt, and Mathew Cantine), gave almost identical accounts of the essence of the plot. "Almost every body in the upper manor,' reported the latter to the Convention, "particularly the eastern part of it, appears to have engaged with the enemy, first by taking an oath of secrecy, and then an oath of allegiance to the King of Great Britain; it appears to have been their design to have waited till the enemy came up, when they were to rise and take the whigs prisoners. .43 William Smith recorded in his diary: "They were to expect the Regular Army up by the first Inst. There are 3 called their Captains
42, The Royal American Gazette, May 15, 1777; The New- York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury, May 19, 1777.
4Robert R. Livingston, Zephaniah Platt and Mathew Can- tine to the Provincial Convention, May 8, 1777, Journals of the Provincial Congress, I, 918-19.
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none of whom [are] yet taken. One Euston [Hughaton; later hanged] was to be their Colo. He was a Half pay Officer & 16 now in Jail at Albany. The Sworn were to have Pay from the Time of the Junction [with the British army] & each 200 Acres of Land. . 44 Many of the manor tenants had departed, slipping north through the woods in an attempt to join the British; 45 of those who remained, almost all were privy to the plot, and they were joined by fifty more fighting men drawn from 'Inhabitants Mechanics and Inmates & the Camp Peo- ple" outside the manor boundaries. The Convention commission- ers reported the number of insurrectionists as "infinitely greater than we could have conceived. 146
As the British army drew near, 'the sworn" borrowed powder and shot from their unsuspecting neighbors, on pre- tense of deer-hunting; seven hundred pounds of powder were stolen from John Livingston's powder mill; and the lead was removed from the nets strung out across the Hudson to bar the 44 William Smith, Historical Memoirs from 1776 to 1778, 130.
45About the time of the insurrection, the New York City press reported a conflict "east of Albany" between 100 Loyal- 1sts attempting to reach the British army, and 400 patriot soldiers, in which eleven men were killed (The New-York Ga- zette: and the Weekly Mercury, May 19, 1777). See also William Smith, op, cit., 225, 267, 366.
40The conclusion that the rising was almost unanimously supported by the tenants is derived from a comparison of William Smith's estimate of the number of rioters (460), and the number of farms ( approximately 500) and militiamen (425) which the manor contained about 1770 (William Smith, His- torical Memoirs from 1776 to 1778, 132; Joan Gordon, Kinship and Class, ' 133).
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passage of British ships. 47 Tragically for the tenants, how- ever, fighting began when the British were still too far dis- tant to be of aid.
On May 3, both the Provincial Convention and William Smith learned of the outbreak of fighting. Robert R. Living- ston and his two assistants were directed to proceed to the scene with 200 Dutchess County militiamen; they were to call on Generals Alexander McDougall and George Clinton for more help if needed. The Claverack militia had already gone into action at the western end of the manor, near the Hudson, and New England troops at the eastern end, along the New York- Connecticut line. 48
By May 5, it was apparent to the tenants that British troops were not in evidence. Already two men had been killed and three wounded. "Certain of the Tenants in Arms" there- fore approached Henry, Peter and Walter Livingston, three sons of the Lord of the Manor, offering to give up their weapons if they would be left undisturbed on their farms. The Convention commission, reads Smith's entry for May 5, "would not hear of this Proposal & will tomorrow scour the Manor unless they will give up their Chiefs with Proofs to hang them. 49
On May 7, Robert R. Renselaer of Claverack and John
Livingston advanced into the eastern manor at the head of 100
47. William Smith, op. cit., 195; The New-York Gazette: and the Weekly Mercury, May 19, 1777.
48Journals of the Provincial Congress, I, 909, 910; William Smith, op. cit,, 127, 128.
49William Smith, Historical Memoire from 1776 to 1778, 127, 128, 133-134.
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soldiers, with orders "to fire upon every Man fleeing before them. " That same day, Robert R. Livingston wrote from the other end of the estate that the insurgents were dispersed.50 By May 10 everything was over.
There remained the delicate question of more than three hundred prisoners. They were sent for safety to Kingston, Albany and several points in Dutchess County. Yet prison space was still inadequate, uor could the three commissioners begin to sift carefully each case: 'though the harvest vill be large, " John Morin Scott wrote them, "the laborers are few. . 51 Beyond these mechanical problems was (in Smith's words ) the "Fear of starving their Families & exasperating the Multitude." In the end, one of every ten prisoners was retained as a hostage (the same system was applied to those who had escaped into the woods, as they were gradually captured) ; those who seemed 'penitent and ignorant" were dismissed after taking an oath of loyalty; and two, Hughston and Arnaut Vielle, were tried and executed. 52
The rising afforded a sudden, and to the Livingstons, terrifying glimpse, of the decay of aristocratic authority in revolutionary New York. A distraught aunt summoned Philip Livingston home from the Continental Congress at Philadelphia; Peter Livingston made up packets of provisions should sudden
50. Ibid., 129, 130; Robert R. Livingston to Peter R. Liv- ingston, May 7, 1777, Journals of the Provincial Congress, II, 475. 51John Morin Scott to the three commissioners, May 5, 1777, ibid., 1, 912.
Mathew Cantine and Zephaniah Platt to Peter R. Living- ston, May 10, 1777, ibid,, II, 449; William Smith, op. cit., 136, 143, 165.
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flight prove necessary; their father, the Lord of the Manor, was advised by his sons not to leave his house, Visiting their home on May 12 and 13, William Smith found the Lord of the Manor distraught and wildly inconsistent on every topic but one: "his Execrations upon his Tenants." "His Fears, " Smith continued,
have driven him to Temerity. He exclaimed agt. set- ting up any Governt. at this Juncture. He could formerly carry 400 votes to an Election, but by our new Govt was nothing, nay that his Tenanta were agt. him. . . . He says his Tenants owe him L10,000. He can't bare the Thought that his Indulgences shew that he has no Influence upon them, much less that they are in such a Temper as to prevent him from riding about his own Manor; and seeing no safety but in their Expulsion hints his wishes that they may all be hanged and their children starved. 53
The third Lord did not exaggerate the political reper- cussions of this week in May. When two months later the critical vote for governor took place, not one manor tenant appeared at the polls and Philip Schuyler blamed his 1068 on the low vote in the county. 54 (Ten years later, a Fed- eralist found the tenants of the eastern manor solidly op- posed to the proposed United States Constitution, for, he said, they considered it a struggle for hearth and home ( "pro aris et focis" ) arising from "the ill fated controver- 81es about their Lands. "55) Thus the mutual hostility of
S3William Smith, Historical Memoirs from 1776 to 1776, 128, 132, 133-134, 136.
54Ibid., 163; Philip Schuyler to William Duer, July 3, 1777, Schuyler Papers, N. Y.P.L.
55 Peter Van Schaack to Philip Schuyler, Apr. 3, 1788, 1bid.
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tenant and landlord was laid bare just at the moment when the different factions of the Whig coalition began their struggle for the power to determine what kind of society would emerge from the war.
Conclusion
New wine, according to the Gospels, cannot be put into old wine-skins. This introductory chapter has sketched out a contrasting attempt to make a new container around combustible material which remained intractably unchanged: to build a new form of government around a tri-cornered class struggle which had not altered.
The three characters that we set upon our stage -- the conservative and radical leaderships, the underlying popula- tion of disgruntled tenants -- have been suggested, but only suggested. The necessary task remains of seeing them more solidly and in the round, and of tracing their inter-reactions not merely in the chronological cross-section of a single spring, but year-by-year throughout the Revolutionary War.
As explained in the Introduction, it has seemed best to make this effort in the restricted arena of a single county. Hence we proceed now to Dutchess County: 'blithe Dutchess" according to its latest historian, but a harsh and bitter home for many a laboring man in the eighteenth century.
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CHAPTER II
LANDLORD AND TENANT IN CUTCHESS COUNTY
Dutchess County before the American Revolution was not the mellow and genteel community we know today. It was a society in which an heiress married "under a crimson canopy emblazoned with the family crest in gold -- a demi-lion crowned issuing from a coronet"; and "as on rent day, the tenants gathered before the manor hall to feast an: wish happiness to the bride while within a lavish banquet was spread for the Van Cortlandts, Livingstons and other river families. 11 It was a society, too, in which the leader of a tenant rising was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered for high treason: that 19, to be hung, cut down, and have his severed genitals and extracted intestines burnt before his eyes while be was ( in theory at least ) still alive. 2
The brilliance and brutality of this neofeudal society rested on the ownership of land. 3y 1710, when the popula- tion of Dutchess numbered only a hundred-odd families, 3 every one of the county's eight hundred square miles had been
1 Alice Curtis Desmond, "Mary Philipse: Heiress, " Now York History, XXVIII (1947), 26.
2 Irving Mark, Agrarian Conflicts, 147.
The population of the county in 1713 was 445 (Federal Writers' Project American Guide Series, Dutchess County [Philadelphia, 1937], 11).
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patented to a few dozen absentee landlords; and in the seventeen-eighties, Dutchess, of all New York's counties, atill "showed the proudest array of large, well-settled patents. 14 Between tenant and landlord, as between mortar and pestle, the politics of the county was formed. "If one may Judge anything by the number and nature of the cases in Dutchess County courts, " comments Mccracken, "the period of the Revolution witnessed a conflict in society beginning twenty years earlier and lasting ten years longer than the actual hostilities of war. "5 The struggle between landlord and tenant in Dutchess flared into armed riots in the seventeen-sixties; was fundamentally settled by the soques- tration and sale of the Morris and Robinson holdings in the Revolution; but lingered on, in many individual dramas of mortgage payments and sheriff's sales, to affect the politics of 1788.
To understand the landlord-tenant struggle, and the conflict of political parties which grew from it, it will help to take a quick overview of land tenure and politics in Dutchess in the seventeen-fifties.
Economic Power
The owner or owners of a patent very often did not live on or even visit their land. There is no record of
"E. Wilder Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 1783-1789 (New York, 1932), 89.
SHenry Noble Mccracken, Old Dutchess Forever! The Story of an American County (New York, 1956), 234.
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Henry Beekman, Jr., ever setting foot in his Beekman Back Lots, while "the widow Pawling came over from Rhinebeck once a year in a lumber-wagon to collect her rents. #ยบ Patents were often purchased for scandalously small sums. Thus, Lord Bellomont wrote to the secretary of the Board of Trade in 1698:
One Henry Beekman, a Lieutenant Colonel in the militia, has a vast tract of land as large as the Midling county of England, for which he gave Fletcher ( the governor] a hundred dollars, about 25 pounds English, and I am told he values his purchase at 65000.7
Often the patents were illegal, in that no proper purchase from the Indians was ever made. This was preeminently true of the Philipse Patent, embracing all of southern Dutchess. Professors Mark and Handlin call it "undoubtedly fraudulent, " and in the nineteenth century, when it was safe to do so, the New York legislature said the same -- adding, however, that to call it in question at that late date "would unsettle the title to a large portion of the State. "8 Moreover, by loose- ly specifying unsurveyed boundaries, patentees frequently contrived to take possession of many times the acreage inten- ded by the government. Here, too, the Philipse Patent 18 a prime example. The eastern boundary was a certain "marked
"Jennie Grem, "Some History and Some Traditions of Pawling, New York," Dutchess County Historical Society [here- after D.C.H.S. ], Yearbook, XXIX (1944), 57.
7 Quoted by James Smith, History of Dutchess County, New York ( Syracuse, 1882), 254.
8 Irving Mark and Oscar Handlin, "Land Cases in Colonial New York, 1765-1767: The King vs. William Prendergast, ' New York University Law Review, XIX (1942), 168.
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tree, " which as originally intended would have limited the patent to 15,000 acres; but by asserting that the tree was really somewhere very different, Philipse succeeded in adding 190,000 extra acres to his claim. 9
Having taken possession, patentees were slow to survey and divide their holdings. In Dutchess it was after 1750 when all the land was made available for actual farming. Whether the patent was leased or sold varied from owner to owner. In Rombout one of the three owners, Catherine Brett, began to sell at once, disposed of 30,000 acres, and in 17oC was rated at only twenty pounds; 10 whereas the Verplanck family, holding another third of that patent, maintained a strict leasehold policy into the nineteenth century. Very generally, north and south Dutchess were predominantly in leasehold until the Revolution, while central Dutchess-the precincte of Romcout, Poughkeepsie, Charlotte, and Amenia- was predominantly in freehold. 12 What the Revolution did was to make south Dutchess, as well as central Dutchess, predominantly freehold ( see map on p. 9 ).
Northwest Dutchess was the home of most of the great
Oscar Handlin, "The Eastern Frontier of New York, ' New York History, XVIII (1937), 52.
10Mccracken, Old Dutchess Forever, 73. In the same year Beekman was rated at four hundred pounds.
11For Rombout, Helen Wilkinson Reynolds, ed., Eight- conth Century Records of the Portion of Dutchess County, New York, that was included in Rombout Precinct, D. C. H. S., Col- lections, VI (1938), preface; for Poughkeepsie and Amenia, James Smith, Dutchess County, 54, 342; for Charlotte, McCracken, Old Dutchess Forever, 40.
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absentee landowners of the eighteenth century, just as 1t was the site of most of the "places" of the nineteenth- century gentry. Many of the great landlords were heirs of Henry Beekman, Sr. (1652-1716), whose holdings comprised most of Rhinebeck, Beekman, and Pawling precincts. He bequeathed his property in three equal parts to his daughters and to his son, Henry Beekman, Jr., who in the second quarter of the eighteenth century "ruled the rapidly growing population of Dutchess almost as if he had been its manor lord. : 12 A11
three branches of the Beekman heirs married in the first or second generation into the Livingston family, one of the most powerful families in the province, whose vast holdings north of Dutchess County cast a formidable shadow of influence southward. Chancellor Robert A. Livingston, Jr., the heir of part of Margaret Beekman Livingston's 240, 000 acres in Dutchess County, 13 would be next to Hamilton the most promin- ent Federalist spokesman in the New York ratifying convention.
What Thorstein Veblen called the "underlying population"
was in both Rhinebeck and Northeast precincts made up in good part of Palatine Germans. Their ancestors had been imported in the early eighteenth century as indentured servants and settled at Rhinebeck and just across the Hudson to extract tar from the pitch pine. 14 Richard Smith, traveling up the
12philip L. White, The Beekmans of New York in Poll- tics and Commerce, 1647-1877 (New York, 1956), 159. 13Joan Gordon, "Kinship and Class," 189. 14vr McCracken, Old Dutchess Forever, Chapter II.
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Hudson in 1769, landed at Henry Beekman's manor in Rhinebeck and found no one who could speak English; he noted that one tenant paid an annual rent of twenty bushels of wheat for his farm of ninety-seven acres and had the liberty to cut wood anywhere on the manor. 15 The quasi-feudal social atmosphere in these parts of the county 18 suggested by the Old Rod Dutch Church, erected in northern Rhinebeck about the time of the Revolution.
A raised floor extended along each side of the body of the house, on which were square pews, provided with an ornamental railing on top, so high that when a person was seated nothing of him was visible except his head. These were intended for the use of the families of the landed proprietors. The common people occupied the slips in the body of the church. The elders and load- ing members sat in the side pews on either side of the pulpit.16
Probably typical of Rhinebeck leases were those custo- mary in the seventeen-nineties at the estate of Morgan Lewis, a future governor of New York who married one of Chancellor Livingston's sisters. His leases were usually in perpetuity, thus providing both security of tenure and the legal status of freeholder. But they also customarily contained such fea- tures as the following:
.
.
a provision that the tenant should pay a certain
proportion of the sale money, and this was usually from one-sixth to one-tenth; also to deliver a certain number of bushels of wheat, usually "good merchantable winter wheat"; also to do a certain number of days riding whenever he was directed to do it, and to furnish
15Richard Smith, A Tour of Four Great Rivers: The Aud- son, Mohawk, Susquehanna and Delaware in 1709, edited by Francis W. Halsey (New York, 1906), 10. 16. Philip H. Smith, General History of Dutchess County from 1609-1876 Inclusive (New York, 1877), 383.
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