USA > New York > Dutchess County > The revolution and the common man : farm tenants and artisans in New York politics, 1777-1788 > Part 4
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a few fowls, mentioned often as "fat fowls'; and to have his grain ground at Lewis' mill, providing it was within a certain number of miles of the aill.
A "day's riding" meant, in the terminology of one loase:
gan Lewis, his heirs and assigns, one day's work with · . yielding, rendering and performing to said Mor-
wagon, sleogh or plow, two horses or ozen and an able man to drive in such manner with such of the above in- struments and at such time and place, yearly and every year forever, within ten miles of the demised pr P5001868 . as said Morgan Lewis . . . shall direct.
In most of these obligations, the tenant in pre-Revolutionary Dutchess was ce all fours with the peasant of medieval Europe.
Whereas in older leases the tenant was compelled to ren- der a variety of physical services, the relation between landlord and tenant came increasingly to be expressed in money. A series of leases from 1742 to 1787 in the Gilbert Livingston Land Papers shows the transition toward the commutation of services. 18 The earlier leases provide for payment in kind (so
17 Harry Arnold, "Reminiscences of the Lewis Estate at Staatsburgh,' D. C. H. S., Yearbook, XIII (1928), 33-35. In 1762, Judge Robert Livingston of Clermont wrote his son, the future chancellor, that he had 'let 8 farms of 100 acres . for the 10th of all grain and each farm to ride and boards from the saw mill which is a higher rent than any in Dutchess County' (letter of March 12, 1762, Robert R. Livingston Papers).
18Spaulding misunderstands these papers in the N. Y. P. L. because he believes them to refer to Livingston Kanor. The leases and other legal documents in the Land Papers are valuably supplemented by the correspondence between vari- ous Livingstons in the two boxes of the Gilbert Livingston Papers. The letters reveal a bizarre mixture of very hard- headed business instructions with family chitchat. Thus Robert G. Livingston wrote to Gilbert Livingston, Sept. 28, 1786: "Abaraham Finch vas here two days ago soliciting for further time to pay the small balance remaining, I told him I had waited long enough already and that I would not consent to anything of the kind and an with our kind love to all at the house . . . "; and Henry G. Livingston wrote to Gilbert, Jan. 1, 1782: "Inclosed you have two notes against Rufus Herrick have you arrested Shafer? Affectionately . .' (both in Box 1).
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many bushels of "good sweet merchantable winter wheat" ), a "couple of live fat hens," and a day's work with wagon or seven shillings. In a lease of 1758 the same printed form 18 used but the clauses about the hens and a day's work are crossed out. In a lease of 1707 a new printed form is used which mentions neither fowls nor carting, but still provides for payment in kind. 19 The last in the series, dated 1787, provides for a casn rent. Clauses that remain throughout the series are those providing for reentry or seizure of goods by the landlord in the event of default of rent, those pro- hibiting waste, especially of timber, and those which require the tenant to grind his grain at the landlord's mill and to offer his grain for sale to the landlord before anyone else. Thus the manorial lease shaded off into the cash lease, as the cash lease was to shade off into mortgage indebtedness.
Political Power
Given this centralized economic power, politics could be only partially democratic at best. Even had the universal manhood suffrage of the 1788 election existed in the seventeen- fifties, what Namier calls "the inevitable result of open voting by people in dependent positions" would have had its
19 Another series of Dutchess contracts illustrating this type of lease appears in a "List of sundry Farms in the second nine Partners 1st August 1785" (Visc. Mas. Dutchess County, N. - Y. E. S. ), as follows:
LIST OF SUNDRY FARMS IN THE SECOND NINE PARTNERS . . let August 1785
Number of Lot
Livos Loaso
Acros
Ront in Wheat Bushels
Ront Due in Bushole
Cash Due for Riding & Fowle at 8/6 per Annum
Supposed Value per Acre
Supposed Value of each Farm
1
284
25
--
40 8./
L568
28
2
214
25
25
1
L 0. 8. 0
40 8./
40 8./
476
2
238
24
982 2
2
108
211
172
2
35
1
203
30
120
8. 6
35 8./
354
2
161
30
136
1. 2. 6
30 B./
241
1
135
12
154
5.18. 6
30 8./
202
2
1
135
12
60
2.11. 0
30 8./
202
1
270
18
108
2.19. 6
30 8./
405
2
228
24
281
8. 1. 6
30 8./
342
19
2
228
24
96
6. 0. 6
30 8./
342
1
428
2.11. 0
4. 5. 0
30 8./
162
46
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effect; Namier, writing of England in the same period, esti- mates that only one voter in twenty had sufficient economic and social independence to be able to vote as he pleased. 20 Abraham Yates wrote of pre-Revolutionary New York: "What ma- terial difference is there whether one elector by his own voice sends a Member to parliament, or a manour settled with a hundred or a thousand Tenants, under the influence of one Person (and moved by his insinuation, nod or at least a letter the Tenant [gives] his vote against his inclination, against his most intimate friend or relation, to a person the landlord was pleased to nominate. ,21
Voting for state legislators was restricted to owners of 140 freeholds. Tenants with farms of this value whose leases ran for twenty-one years or more enjoyed the suffrage, but freeholders with lands worth less than L40 did not. In 1713-1714, out of a total Dutchess population of 445, there were 89 adult males and o7 freeholders; in 1740-1746, out of a total population of 8,806, there were 2,056 adult males and 235 freeholders; in 1771-1775, out of a total population of 22,404, there 4, 687 adult males and 1, 80 ) freeholders. The 22 percentage of freeholders to adult white males, then, was 75 per cent in 1713-1714, 11 per cent in 1740-1746, and 38 per cent in 1771-1775. Was this a rough indication of the per-
20Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, second ed. (London, 1957), 70, 73.
21 "Speeches to Delegates in Congress, 1780," Yates Papers. 22These figures are taken from O' Callaghan' s Documentary History, with the exception of 1,800 freeholders in 1775, which comes from a letter in Peter Force ed., American Archives (Washington, 1837), Ser. 4, II, 304.
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centage of adult white males who could vote? The ques- tion might seem impossible to answer since there seems to be no way of determining how many tenants were considered freeholders at election time. 23 However, a rough indication 18 provided by the electoral census of 1790, which listed 2780 persons with freeholds worth L20 or more in a white male population over 16 of 10, 968: a percentage of 25.4. 24 If, after the creation of new freeholds by land confiscation in the Revolution (see below, Chapters IV and V), no more than a quarter of the county's adult white males qualified a8 L2' freeholders, it seems reasonable to assume that the percentage of LO freeholders before the Revolution was not much greater. The fact that about 1200 persons actually voted in the one Dutchess election before the Revolution for which returns exist, 25 suggests that this estimate is not
wildly out of line: Michael D'Innocenzo has calculated that these actual voters were about 30 per cent of the county's adult white males at the time. 2.6
Quite apart from electoral pressure of landlords upon tenants, therefore, it appears that (at least for Dutchess)
23For an attempt to grapple with this question, see Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage From Property to Domo- cracy, 176)-1860 (Princeton, 1960), 28.
24 New York Daily Advertiser, Jan. 15, 1791.
25New York Journal, Feb. 16, 1769. 1200 was derived simply by halving the total vote for the four candidates. 26, Michael D'Innocenzo, "Voting in Colonial New York, " 78. It should be noted that this author believes Dutchess figures were untypical of the state: he concludes that 50-60 per cent of adult white males in the state could vote, and 40-50 per cent did vote (1bid., 60 ff.).
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Becker was correct in saying "that over half of the male population over the age of twenty-one years" could not vote. If so, one must view Dutchess politics not on the model of Massachusetts but rather on that of Virginia, where also - in the Judgement of Charles Sydnor 28 - less than half of the adult white males enjoyed the franchise.
27
As in Virginia, too, running for office in pre-Revolutionary Dutchess County called for "swilling the planters with bumbo." ,29 The political boss of the county from the 1720's until 1758 was its largest landowner, Henry Beekman, Jr. Pursuant to the e- lection of 1752, Beekman sent the following instructions to Hen- ry Livingston, who served him both as rent collector and politi- cal lieutenant:
Mr. Filkin said he would provide or furnish beef and backing. Most all should be built a day or two before the election and brought to the several houses of ours . . "the cider should also be distributed be- fore the day. I will send you my Negro Sam till the elections be over. Bread we intend to bake here 100 rum are to have from Bowdwyn that also should be dis- tributed to such houses wherein it cannot be had. 30
As Yates expressed the situation, if the "landed Gentlemen" agreed on a candidate, the result of an election was a foregone conclusion; if not, "the public houses in every quarter were o- pened and a trial made who had the most influence and the lar- gest purse. *31 Election returna were often a formality: one Quaker, for example, told Beekman after church "that all the Friends
27 Becker, History of Political Parties, 11. Compare Mark, Agrarian Conflicta, 97 n., and Milton M. Klein, 'Democracy and Politics in Colonial New York, " New York History, XL (1959), 237. 28 Charles S. Sydnor, Gentleman Freeholders (Chapel Hill, 1952), 28-32 and Appendix II. 29Ibid., Chapter IV.
30 "A Packet of Old Letters, " D. C. .. S., Yearbook, VI (1921), 35. 31 ªSpeeches to Delegates in Congress, 1786,' Yates Papers.
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would go one way. They can make about 100 votes in our County. . 32
Beekman controlled the governor's appointments of shs- riff, coroners, militia officers, and justices of the peace for Dutchess County. "So routine were patronage matters to Henry in 1744," White comments, "that he confessed to his ne- prew and political lieutenant, Henry Livingston, that he had forgotten on a trip home 'to consult for a fit person to be Coroner !. . 33 A year earlier he had directed Livingston to send down a list of five commissioners of the peace as it is now circumstanced, and judges and &8816- tants for keeping the courts . , and who would suit best and convenientest for assistants case of & new commission. I should only surmize as Judge Terboss, Filkin, Swartwout, assistant H. Beekman Mathew DuBoys, Lou Van Kleek, Cornelius Van Wyck, Gul. Verplank, Henry VanDerburgh.
Then as now, money might grease the machinery of appointment. "Louis CuBoys of your place, " wrote Beekman, 'told me he would this day apply to the governor for a Captain's license for him- self if Doctor Colden be gone home he will perhaps elsewhere be not understood. Money only hath sense. ">
Beekman was occasionally challenged for election by rival landowners who wished to secure some of this valuable patronage,
32Henry Beekman to his brother, May 9, 1744, and samo to Henry Livingston, Feb. 10, 1743, Misc. Mss. Dutchess County, V. - Y. H. S.
33philip White, Beekmans of New York, 131; see also 109- 170, 192, 183.
340A Packet of Old Letters, " 29.
35Ibid., 33.
35.
·
nde
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but he held his seat until he voluntarily retired. 30 The gerrymandering of political districts which became so common with the more democratic electoral battles after 1768, was apparently unnecessary in the mid-century. 37 Landlord con- trol was secure.
Conclusion
A combination of economic and political power gave great landlords like Henry Beekman, Jr., a dominant influence in Dutchess County in the 1740's and 1750's. Open voting by tenants sedulously wined and dined in preparation for election day prevented the emergence of an effective opposition. The practical extent of Beekman's influence is suggested by a letter from Joseph Alexander to Joseph Murray in 1753. "There is little probability," Alexander wrote, "that impartial jury can be found in that county to try those causes. For all the first Nine Partners are concerned against us [and] the greatest part of the rest of the land in the county either Col. Beekman or bis sisters or their relations or the owners of the two Nine Partners or their relations are concerned in and [ there are] very few men that are unconcerned in that county. ' Alexander concluded that he would accept a jury "of any foreign county except Albany and Ulster where Col. Beekman has great interest and relations. .38
30Beekman's challengers and their motives are discussed by Philip White, Beekmans of New York, 192-198, 206-207.
37For later examples of gerrymandering in Dutchess, see John Jay to Robert R. Livingston, Jan. 1769; "Reasons against dividing Beekmans precinct," n.d. ; Ephraim Paine to Robert R. Livingston, Feb. 12, 1779; Henry Livingston to Walter Living- sten, Mar. 2, 1785 (Robert 2. Livingston Papers).
38James Alexander to James Murray, Apr. 11, 1753, 1bid.
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Very occasionally, however, a discordant note is heard in Beekman's genial correspondence. In 1749 he wrote to Livingston that a riot had occurred on "Sister Pawling's" lot. In 1751 Beekman told the same confidant: 48 to the affair of our tenant have had item four or five months ago, kept the thing a secret with intent to find its first mover, then sus- pecting the person you do hope you'll find out who those were, at the Poughkeepsie meeting truth will come out, and the authors of rebellion, seducers - give them rope enough they will hang themselves. " They had not, however, hung themselves by the following year, when Beekman complained to his agent that a tenant was claiming "he held under a new fair field right and not under Philips. So that they trump up more and more titles against us. ' 39
The rebels and geducers referred to were the first movers in the tenant discontent which was to overturn the political machine that Beekman built. Centering in the Philipse patent of south Dutchess, the discontent also affected Beekman's holdings in the precincts of Pawling and Beekman. "Their will be two parties, " Beekman had commented in 1749, referring to the unusual event of a contested election. 40 There were indeed to be two parties, but in a deeper sense than the one Beekman imagined.
39Henry Beekman, Jr., to Henry Livingston, Aug. 31, 1749 (Misc. Mss. Dutchess County, N. - Y. H. S. ); "A Packet of Old Letters, " 34; Henry Beekman, Jr., to Henry Livingston, Apr. 7, 1752 (Henry Livingston Papers, F.D. R. Library).
"Henry Beekman, Jr., to his cousin, Jan. o, 1749, Misc. Mss. Beekman, N. - Y. H. S.
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CHAPTER III THE TENANT RISING OF 1766
Southern Dutchess, in which the tenant riots of 1760 centered, was in many ways separated from the rest of Dutchess County. A high ridge, culminating at the Hudson with Mount Beacon, Breakneck Aldge, and Anthony's Nose, made north-south travel arduous. Even a modern road map shows how the farmers of Patterson and Carmel took their wheat southwest to Cold Springs and Peekskill rather than over "the mountain' to Fish- kill (now Beacon). The soil of the southern region was gene- rally poor and rocky. "The south part of the county, ' wrote William Smith in 1756, "is mountainous and fit only for iron works. "- Finally, it was only in the 1750's, later than any- where else in Dutchess, that the land was surveyed, subdivided
and leased out in farms.
2
Thus in respect to isolation, poor
soll, and late settlement, this was Dutchess County's frontier.
Later, it would be politically radical. The area voted consistently Clintonian in the 1790's, when north Dutchess was
1William Smith, History of the Late Province of New York from its Discovery to 1762 (New York, 1830), I, 311.
2 "Four-fifths of the land of Dutchess was not opened for gettlement until after 1730" (McCracken, Old Dutchess Forever, 77). For the exact dates at which different precincts were divided among their patentees, and so made available for leasing, see ibid., 58, 76, 77, and William Pelletreau, History of Putnam County, New York ( Philadelphia, 1880), 40-49.
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consistently Federalist and central Dutchess wavered between the two. Although none of the seven Dutchess delegates at the ratifying convention of 1788 came from the southern region, two came from precincts just to the north (Swartwout from Rombout, Akin from Pawling), and these were the two who voted against the Constitution when the blue chips were down.
Such vas the stage. The dramatis personne fell into two camps. On the one hand were the three heirs to the Philipse Patent which embraced the entire 205,000 acres of southern Dutchess. They were Philip Philipse, son of the patentee; Roger Morris; and Beverly Robinson, who as a member of an old Virginia family exemplified the similarity of Hudson Valley and Tidewater aristocracy. On the other hand were the settlers, who came almost entirely from New England' and numbered just under nine thousand by 1788. They came, in the words of a 4 Moravian missionary, 'in expectation of bettering their for- tunes by the purchase of cheap farms, and for the enjoyment of religious liberty, '5 naming their hamlets Carmel, Sharon, and Amenia, as their descendants would found Sweet Home and Lebanon at the end of the Oregon Trail. For most of them it was to be a long day before they could enjoy the fruits of the land under their own vine and fig tree, and be not afraid.
Mccracken, Old Dutchess Forever, 471, finds only 2 per cent of the names in the 1800 census of southern Dutchess to be Dutch.
4 Pelletreau, Putnam County, 128.
5Journal of Abraham Rhinke, quoted in Philip Smith, General History, 112.
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The difference in social atmosphere between this southeastern .part of the county and the northwest was ex- treme. To the Old Red Dutch Church of Rhinebeck we can contrast the Baptist congregation of Patterson which split in 1796 "on account of the superflous dress, and the holding of posts of civil and military office in earthly states, by certain members. #0 While slaveholding was common here as in all parts of Dutchess County, the Quakers of Pawling were one of the first organized groups in the country to exclude members who held slaves, ' and Baptist groups along the eastern frontier also occasionally declared against the practice. 8
The Grievances
Three types of grievance brought things to a head in southern Dutchess. The first involved all the tenants on the Philipse Patent and was tersely summarized by one of the 1766 rioters as 'largeness of rents and shortness of leases. "9 The Philipse heirs followed a rigorous policy of lease rather than sale; down to the Revolution, only one farm on the pa- tent had been sold. Many of the leases ran for only one year and were secured by a penal bond of one thousand pounds.
Philip Smith, General History, 448.
7Mccracken, Old Dutchess Forever, 198. 3 Thus the Baptist congregation of Northeast declared slavery contrary to the Gospel in 1778 (James H. Smith, His- tory of Dutchess County, New York [ Syracuse, 1832], 249).
Testimony of Samuel Peters at the trial of William Prendergast, August 5, 1766. The notes on this trial, printed
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Whereas most Dutchess landlords were nonresident, Morris and Robinson moved onto the land and instituted a close super- vision more characteristic of the manors. Robinson's cool, aggressive intelligence set its stamp on all the subsequent events. For example, when on one occasion the tenants con- tested the validity of the Philipse Patent before a Court of Chancery, Robinson suddenly produced ( but did not permit the tenants to see) what purported to be a record of sale by the Indians, and by this "obvious forgery"10 carried the day.
Robinson's later claims to the British commission which compensated American loyalists, give a precise indication of the rent burden under which his tenants labored. As of May 1, 1777, Robinson's tenants owed him b7191 in principal and -1338 in interest; on three lots, the amount owed was two- and-a-half times the annual rent bill. 11
The second grievance involved only a few tenants direct- ly, but threatened many more. For decades before 1754, set- tlers had filtered onto the Philipse Patent. They took leases, when they took them at all, from the only apparent owners, the Wappinger Indians. This tribe claimed ownership of the east bank of the Hudson from Yonkers to Poughkeepsie,
by Mark and Handlin, "Land Cases in Colonial New York, " to- gether with the secondary accounts of Mark, Handlin, Pelle- treau, and McCracken, as previously cited, are the basis for the following paragraphs.
-This is the Judgment of Mark and Handlin, "Land Casos in Colonial New York," 168.
1-Frederick C. Haacker, "Early Settlers of Putnam County, New York, " typescript, N. Y. P. L. (1946), 2, 15.
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but by mid-century had retreated to the most inhospitable fragment of this area, the southern Dutchess highlands. At the outbreak of the French and Indian War the men of the tribe left to fight for the British, leaving their women and children at the Indian settlement in Stockbridge, Massachu- getts. On their return to the highlands they found the Philipse heirs in possession, and commenced a legal action which they carried to the New York Supreme Court, to the governor and his council sitting as a Court of Chancery, and to the Lords of Trade in England. 12
In this legal action the Indians were allied with the white squatters on the Philipse Patent. Fifteen of these squatters, some of whom had farmed the land for thirty or forty years, Robinson attempted to eject, without, as the tenants said,
any manner of recompense for their labour, fatigue, and expense in cultivating manuring clearing fencing and improving said lands, nor for their buildings thereon erected, nor for their crops thereon then growing. W
"Being chiefly poor people, " the tenants explained, they "unitedly agreed to stand trial in only one" of the fifteen cases of ejectment; but they "found that every attorney at law in that whole province was previously retained on the other side. - " The Indians thereupon had a poor tenant,
12The Supreme Court consisted "Wholly of important land- owners and land speculators," the Court of Chancery was "ev- ery member . a large-scale landholder" (1bid., 118, 116).
13Brief of Nimham ( the Wappinger chieftain) before Chan- cery (Pelletreau, Putnam County, 39 ff; Handlin, "The Eastern Frontier of New York, " 68).
14Ibid.
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Samuel Munroe, 15 acknowledged as their attorney by twc Justices of the peace, and proceeded with their case. As their suit was rejected and roughly rebuked by courts en- tirely made up of large-scale landowners and land specula- tors, they and their neighbors cast about for some other means of redress. "The reason for turning people out of possession,' an observer later testified, was that those who had been turned out of possession had an equitable title but could not be defended because they were poor.
The tenants on the Philipse patent summarized their grievances in two petitions hitherto unut:lized by students of the rebellion. One, dated November 10, 1753, and entitled, "a petition for a confirmation of our inheritance together with our associates," described the contested area between the Rombout and Phillipse patents, and stated:
This land has been claimed by both Philipse and Col. Beekman which has discouraged people from building good houses etc. and planting orchards and some have been disinherited and the given leases of Col. Beek- man are intolerable.
Another petition (of February 24, 1764, and also in Samuel Yunroe's papers at the New-York Historical Society) said in a long
15In tax collector Abraham Wing's account book for 1752- 1753, Samuel Munroe along with many others was rated at bl s. ld. 6, the lowest assessment listed. Well-to-do farmers in the same neighborhood were taxed up to L15. Jonathan Akin, father of a son with the same name who was a Dutchess Anti- Federalist delegate in 1788, was rated at L12. (Abraham Wing Papers, F. D. R. Library).
A Mr. "Monroe, " originally from Connecticut, was an ob- ject of Henry Beekman's wrath as early as 1749 (Beekman to Henry Livingston, Feb. 10, 1749, and to his cousin, May o, 1752, Misc. Mgs. Beekman, N. - Y. H. S. ).
loMark and Handlin, "Land Cases in Colonial New York, " 175, 191. The Philipse heirs spent L20818. 18d. 10 defending their patent ( Irving Mark, Agrarian Conflicts, 150).
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sentence which seems to express the bursting out of grievances in its very grammar :
We the subjects abovesaid finding possessions and livings on a tract of vacant land and unpatented or not granted to any by the King's letters patents though claimed by several and the civil inhabitants put to great damage and difficulty being disinherited and thrown out of possession at the same time the Claimers refusing to give their obedient tenants & good or warrantable title by leases deed or any other title for their leases for 3 lives or twenty years : theirs only to quit their claims their resolution especially Cant. R. . . s. . ns in November intolerable for he would not lease the land to the inhabitants who had lived on it for near 30 years past and had manured and cultivated the same but would oblige them to buy their farma paying down for it or else to remove immediately
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