USA > New York > Dutchess County > The revolution and the common man : farm tenants and artisans in New York politics, 1777-1788 > Part 5
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The first of the petitions refers to the third type of grievance which agitated the tenants of south Dutchess. In addition to the onerous kind of lease in favor with the Philipse heirs, and the uncertainty of their title to the land, the ten- ants on the patent were the victims of a characteristic land squabble of the time: a boundary dispute. Because of the vagueness of patents, there was a disputed strip or "gore" be- tween almost every pair of adjoining patents. The standard method of settling a boundary was to eject a tenant in the dis- puted area and go to court.
The Philipse heirs were lateccmers in the competition for Land. They soon became embroiled with the owners of the Rom- bout and Beekman patents to the north, and with a Connecticut group who claimed land in a narrow strip called "the Oblong" which ran north and south between the two states. Samuel
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Munroe held land both in the disputed Beekman gore and (either at the same time or later) under & Connecticut lease in the Oblong; so did the family of the Jonathan Akin who was to vote against the Constitution at Poughkeepsie in 1788.17 This convergence of two boundary disputes in the neighborhood of Quaker Hill and Patterson was what made it the center of the tenant rising. When on March 11, 1700, arbitrators up- held the Robinson rather than the Connecticut claim to the Oblong lands, 15 the dry tinder of cumulative grievance burst into flame.
A Little Rebellion
During the winter, in the after-harvest talk at Mor- rison's and Towner's taverns, 19 a plan of action had cry- stallized and now was put into effect. When May came no rente were paid. Tenants who attempted to make an individual set- tlement were visited at night by groups of their neighbors armed with clubs and rifles. William Prendergast, a well- respected man rather more prosperous than most of his
-Pelletreau, Putnam County, 105, 633-034. In the Mis- cellaneous Manuscripts -- Dutchess County of the N. - Y. H. S., are some "Papers left by Mr. Munroe [relating to Rombout patent, [ Ste]phen Van Cortlandt's, Beekman's patent,' including a memorandum noting "vacancies" between a number of patent boundaries. The most impo tant boundary in dispute in 1766, that between Rombout and Philipse patents, was still unsettled in 1785 (Egbert Benson to James Duane, April 2, 1785, Duane Papers ) .
18pelletreau, Putnam County, 033-634.
19This and all other details are not imaginary local color, but derived from the testimony at the trial of Prender- cast.
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guaranteeing anonymity. No one came forward, and it may have been this which saved Prendergast's life. For his wife, Mehitabel Wing, galloped to New York City and re- ceived a stay from Governor Moore pending an appeal to the king which was ultimately successful.
Political Repercussions
This tragicomic ending should not blind us to the lasting significance of the tonants' rebellion. Men had been forced to take sides, and the choices they made were not soon forgotten. It was not only Secretary Conway and Governor Moore who spoke of the rioters as "the lower and more ignorant of the people, " "the lowest people. " 24 John Morin Scott, the Son of Liberty, was a member of the Su- preme Court which mocked Munroe and Nimham, the Wappinger chieftain. 25 The sheriff who attempted to rally the Jut- chess militia against the tenants was James Livingston, & ne'er-do-well uncle of Gilbert Livingston; the sheriff of Albany County who led troops against Livingston Manor rio- ters was a Yates. The jury which condemned Prendergast was composed of some of the very men who would later mako political capital from the tenant grievances: two Brinck- erhoffs, related to the assemblyman elected by tenant votes in 1768; and Jacob Griffin, political crony and near 26
neighbor of Dirck Brinckerhoff and Jacobus Swartwout. The
24Handlin, "The Eastern Frontier of New Yorl, ' 69, 72.
25Mark and Handlin, "Land Cases in Colonial New York, ' 167.
26 Ibid., 169. At this time, jurymen were required to 0088688 a ten-acre freehold (McCracken, Old Dutchess Forever, 202-203).
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pattern of reactions to the crisis of 1756 anticipated the future tri-partite division (outlined in Chapter I) between the mass of tenants, the Anti-Federalist poli- ticians who sought their votes, and the conservative politicians who despised them.
The families of both Jacobus Swartwout and Jonathan Akin, the two Dutchess delegates to the New York ratifying convention of 1788 who voted against the United States Constitution, were directly involved in the tenant distur- bances of the 1700's. Quite possibly it was Jacobus Swartwout himself who, like many other south Dutchess ten- ants, took a lease from the Indians as described in the following letter from Catherine Brott (who claimed to own the land) to Sir William Johnson:
Some mischievous white people went to the Indi- ans and hired little bits of land and made them give them leases, then they put in what quantity of land they pleased and made their leases for ninety-nine years. And this old Nimham had been dead about twelve years but his children might have stayed on till this day but his oldest son one Shake came to me and asked me liberty to sell the improvements to one Captain Swartwout. I Opposed it at first and a little after he came down again with seven or eight more Indians for liberty to sell the improvements. I gave him leave to sell the improvements and he sold them for twenty pounds. It being a precarious time, I suffered all this, for fear of their setting up the Indians against me.
As to the Akins, they owned land in two of the dis- puted gores near Quaker Hill and Patterson, as mentioned above. But their connection to the tenant rising was closer than this. For the father (also named Jonathan
27 Catherine Brett to Sir William Johnson, Aug. 26, 1762 (McCracken, Old Dutchess Forever, 278-279). Like the "Captain Swartwout' of the letter, Jacobus Swartwout was at that time a captain and lived on the land claimed by Mrs. Brett ("General Jacobus Swartwout, " D. C. H. S. , Yearbook, XIII [1928], 67).
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Akin) of the Anti-Federalist delegate was one of the two justices of the peace who legally confirmed Samuel Mun- roe's status as attorney for the Wappinger Indians. This action was condemned by a report to the governor in coun- cil, in March 1765, which said of the two justices that their behavior "appears to this committee such an abuse of their respective offices, and so dangerous a precedent for encouraging Indian claims against the rights of the Crown, and in disinherison of his Majesty, that the com- mittee is humbly of opinion, that an order of your honor in council ought to be served on the said Terboss and Akins, for them to show cause why they should not be displaced for such misconduct. 128 As a result, botn Akin and Terboss were "excused" from the commission of the peace in 1766. 29 The immediate result of the political moment of truth in 1766 was the startling outcome of the 1758 elec- tions. Henry Beekman, on his political retirement, had arranged that Dutchess be represented in the Assembly by his old lieutenant, Henry Livingston of Poughkeepsie, and by Robert R. Livingston of Clermont, the father of Chan- cellor Livingston. They held the seats from 1751 to 17c8 but were defeated in 1708 by Leonard Van Kleek and Dirck Brinckernoff, although Livingston, as Cadwallader Colden reported to his superiors in England, "had everything in his favour, which power could give him. #30
28Quoted by Pelletreau, Putnam County, 71.
29"Travelled Documents," D. C. H. S., Yearbook, XX (1935), 87.
30 Cadwallader Colden to the Earl of Hillsborough,
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The election signified two things. The first was the appearance in Dutchess politics of "a rising middle class of freeholders which disliked the domination of the landed aris- tocracy: 31 to challenge the power of the landlords. Van Kleek and Brinckerhoff, like the Anti-Federalist politicians who later stepped into their shoes, were far from being poor tenants. Van Kleek paid more taxes than anyone in Poughkeepsie, while Brinckerhoff was sufficiently affluent to lend L7004 in mortgages between 1708 and 1795.33
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These men, like the Cromwellian gentry of the English Civil War, were of 'markedly lower social origin" than the "old ruling families" whose power they contested. 34 Consider for example the DeWitt family. Petrus Dewitt during the Revolution was a leading spirit in the county price-fixing movement. H18 son John was an Anti-Federalist delegate to the state ratifying convention of 1798. Yet Gouverneur Morris could write to Robert A. Livingston in 1778, apropos the New York delegation in the Continental Congress : "If there is any man of the lower or- ders whom you can trust, & DeWit: for Instance, I think it would be advisable to be open-mouthed and loud for him. Such
April 25, 17-8, in E. 3. O'Callaghan, Documents, VIII, ol. 31 nite, Beekmans of New York, 206.
32 In 1771, Leonard Van Zleek was assessed at L32, Henry Livingston the next highest at L30 (Edmund Platt, The Eagle's History of Poughkeepsie (Poughkeepsie, 1905], 54).
33Reynolds, Eighteenth Century Records, 55, 59, 71, 72, 73, 30, 81, 96, 97, 112, 122-131, 229, 270, 283.
34These phrases are used by Christopher Hill, Puritan18m and Revolution, 21-22.
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a man would be of infinite service if appointed by US. «35
In selecting two Livingstons as Dutchess assemblymen, Henry Beekman had made a fatal mistake. No doubt the fact that Robert Livingston was his son-in-law blinded him to the political liabilities of an aristocrat, a non-resident, and a second Livingston. Namier says that in England it was usual to nominate one aristocrat and one gentleman of the county: "hardly ever was an attempt made in a county to fill both seats with members of the same family, " for fear of allencting the middling county gentry. 36 The next year, possibly in recognition of this blunder, Judge Livingston ran for the Assembly with one of the Abinebeck Hoffmans, but was defeated a second time.
Moderately well-to-do, concentrated in and around the town of Poughkeepsie, densely inter-related, 37
the radical politicians of Dutchess in the Revolutionary Era viewed with ambivalence the poor tenant farmers on whose votes they depended. Gilbert Livingston certainly represented one extreme. He belonged, not to the aristocratic branches of the Livingston family, but to a line distinctly less wealthy and prestiz lous whose income derived largely from minor government offices. 38 Gilbert Livingston's uncle James helped to put down the riots
35Gouverneur Morris to Robert R. Livingston, Sept. 22, 1778, Robert A. Livingston Papers.
30Manier, Structure of Politics, 71.
37For a full portrait of the Dutchess Anti-Federalists, with documentation of all these characteristics of their group portrait, see my "Anti-Federalism in Dutchess County, New York" (unpublished Master's essay, Columbia U., 1960), Chapter II.
38 Joan Gordon, "Kinship and Class, " 264-265.
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during 1766 in his capacity as Dutchess sheriff; his father- in-law Bartholomew Crannell was a lawyer for Beverly Robinson. Livingston himself worked as a lawyer in partnership with the Federalist James Kent, his practice consisting largely of pro- secutions for dett. 39 Moreover, he acted as agent for another uncle, Robert G. Livingston, heir to one third of Henry Beek- man's vast holdings and one of the county's most notorious landlords. "Robert Gilbert's instructions to his nephew," Joan Gordon writes,
regarding these lands show great resoluteness about the collection of back rents, eviction of tenants, and the protection of his property from the destruc- tiveness of the tenants. His references to his tenants generally indicate a disregard for them and the need to make his authority and superior position known. "By no means let him stay on the place. Drive him off as soon as possible. I would rather the farm should stund idle than suffer such a sot to stay on it. 440
In addition to what his partner Kent called a 'great and estab- lished run of business" as a lawyer, Gilbert Livingston left at least L7, 540 of real estate when he died. 41
At the opposite extreme in his relation to lower-class constituents was Ephraim Paine. His father was a farmer and blacksmith. Ephraim was apprenticed to a farmer in his youth, then made a modest fortune on a voyage to the West Indies. Many of his relatives were Separatist leaders, and he himself was
"Livingston's account book in the Library of Congress, summarized in John Theodore Horton, James Kent (New York, 1939), 51 n.
40 Joan Fordon, "Kinship and Class, " 197.
412. J. Reynolds, "James Kent, " D. C. F. S., Yearbook, VIII (1923), 23.
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expelled from the Senate in 1790 for being a minister.
He held that there should be no distinction in dress, and wore, therefore, the dress of a laboring man in the halls of legislation, and in the house of worship. Many mistakes are mentioned, resulting from Mr. Paine's plainness of dress. He was at one time treated as a menial by the landlady at whose house he was staying during his time at court in Poughkeepsie. The only rebuke he gave when she apologized was, "you should treat all men alike." A gentleman who rode in haste to the house on public business gave him his horse to hold while he went in to speak to Judge Paine. Another was looking over the farm for Judge Paine and, finding a man ditching, asked him, "Where is your Master?" "In Seaven," was his ready answer. Judge Paine's education had been without the aid of schools . He opposed decidedly the financial policy of General Hamilton. 43
The same democratic outlook is obvious in the well-known speeches of Melancton Smith, who began his working life as a clerk in a retail store, and was one of the few Revolutionary leaders in Dutchess who could not put an "Esquire" after his name. 44
The ambiguity of the radical politician's relation to his constituency is neatly illustrated by an inclient in the tenant rebellion involving Jonathan Akin, Sr. As described above, Akin had helped the tenants certify Samuel Munroe as their legal rep- resentative. When they turned to violence, however, ho persuaded a group of them (so he testified at the trial of Prendergast) to give up their arms. 45
Just how great was the gap between the radical poli-
42Newton Reed, The Early History of Amenia ( Amenia, 1875), ?2, 102-103.
"Philip Smith, General History, 121-122.
J. Wilson Poucher, "Melancton Smith, " D. C. E. S. , Yearbook, X (1925), 29-48. "Judge Smith" appears only in the 1780's.
"SMark and Handlin, "Land Cases in Colonial New York, " 193.
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ticians and their tenant constitue :. ts, the tax records make clear. Thus Akin, as stated earlier, was rated at L12, and the tenant leader Samuel Munroe at less than L2. It is instructive to compare the tax assessments of the Poughkeepsie Anti-Federalist politicians with the assessments in the south Dutchess precincts where the most radical ten -. ants lived. In 1771, Zechaniah Platt was assessed for L16, John Bailey for L13, Gilbert Livingston and Lewis DuBole for b5, in a tax-list which ran up to L38. 46 In 1777 in southern Dutchess, 727 of 765 taxpayers were rated at i44 or less; 28 were rated from L5 to L9; only 9 were rated at L10 or more. One of the three landlords of south Dutchess, Bev- erly Robinson, was rated at =70. 47 Here then is a numerical expression of three-way separation of political forces in Dutchess as elsewhere in the state.
These figures confirm the impression that the radical leadership was a long step up the social ladder from their constituents, yet still well below the conservative aristo- cracy. The typical radical politician in Dutchess County was a man of the 'middling" class who lived in a neighbor- hood which had long enjoyed the security of freehold tenure. The county's anti-landlord voters were men for whom tenancy was an ever-present reality, eviction a constant fear. Their situation prompted them to collective direct action outside
40Tax lists, 1771-1779, Adriance Memorial Library, Poughkeepsie.
47 Compiled from the tax list printed in Pelletreau, Putnam County, 121 ff.
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the political forms more natural to their representatives. Voting was only one way a tenant might express himself. Even tenaits sufficiently prosperous to vote and fortunately resident in neighborhoods where the landlord was far away and his electoral pressure less blatant, were habitually addicted to the withholding of rents and to "voting with their feet" by moving on to new frontiers.
When they could and did vote, however, and when emotion ran high so that men spoke their minds even in public polls, then tenants voted against their landlords. We know from two sources that this happened in Dutchess in 1768. One is the statement of Robert C. Livingston that his kinsman had been beaten by the votes of the tenants of Henry Beekman and Robert G. Livingston, whose lands were in Beekman pre- cinct in southeast Dutchess. The other is the following 48 poem composed for the election by a twelve-year-old boy, William Moore, Jr., of Oswego, Beekman Precinct:
One night in my slumbers, I saw in a dream Judge Livingston's party contriving a scheme To set up great papers and give some great bounty For to be assemblymen in Dutchess County. But Leonard [Van Kleek] and Derrick [Brinckerhoff ] are both chosen men, The Livingstons won't get a vote to their ten, So pull down your papers, talk no more of bounty, You can't be assemblymen in Dutchess County. Your printed relation Wants confirmation Tho' signed by Judge Thowas: hand Your writings are discreet But in them there's deceit Not a vote would you get if it wasn't for your land. 49 48Quoted in Irving Mark, Agrarian Conflicta, 159. 49"A Packet of Old Letters, " 36 n.
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Thus the second significant meaning of the 1708 election in Dutchess County was that (in Robert C. Living- ston's words) despite "all the pains was taking with them, tenants in the county voted according to their minds instead of their masters. Here, as throughout New York state, this election ended the time when a landlord could regard the county where his land lay as "my county, " as a political sure thing. The habit died hard. In 1787, Robert R. Liv- ingston could write of Dutchess: "I shall endeavor to make my(self] useful by affecting some changes in the represen- tation. . 50 In the long run, however, the pattern of landlord control, once broken, could never be quite put together again.
Conclusion
Defeated la the elections of 1708-1759, the conservative party had recourse to the governor's control of appointments. The key officials in county administration were the sheriff and chief judge. In 1769 and 1771, Dutchess received now men in each of these posts. The sheriff was Philip J. Liv- Ingston, Lord of Livingston Manor; the chief judge was none other than Beverly Robinson. 51
SORobert A. Livingston to Alexander Hamilton, Mar. 3, 1787, Hamilton Papers, Columbia U. For "my county," see William Smith to Robert R. Livingston, Jan. 5, 1769: "Take care of your county (Robert R. Livingston Papers).
51Platt, History of Poughkeepsie, 33. The diary of William Smith records considerable tussling between the new radical assemblymen and the great landlords over appointive positions. See Historical Memoirs from 16 March 1703 to 9 July 1770 of William Smith, ed. William H. W. Sabine (New York, 1956), I, 52, 68, 171-172, 193. This is the volume of Smith's memoirs preceding the 1776-1783 volume which is cited through- out this study as Historical Memoirs.
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From 1708 to 1775 an uneasy truce prevailed in Dut- chess County. The elected officials were of one persuasion, the chief appointive officials of another. Judges were on one side, juries on the other. Gilbert Livingston wrote to Robert G. Livingston in 1773: "On mature consideration I think it much the best not to commence a suit against him here in the county court, as he is one of the assistant Justices himself, and it will be tried by a jury who will be perhaps half of them in the mob interest. . 52 Beverly Robinson wrote to his lawyer, James Duane, Just after the tenant rising was suppressed: "I dare say that you do ima- gine after the correction that our rioters have lately had I should enjoy my lands in peace and quietness, but it seems my troubles are not yet an end. .53 In 1773 Robinson, by then chief justice of the county, was still trying (with the legal assistance of Scott, Duane, and Gilbert Livingston's father-in-law) to "eject old Samuel Munroe. #54
The problem of tenancy remained central and unsolved on the eve of Lexington and Concord. British agents were quick to exploit it. In December 1775, Samuel Dodge (a future Dutchess commissioner of forefeited Loyalist land) wrote to
52Gilbert Livingston to Robert G. Livingston, Sept. 28, 1773, Gilbert Livingston Papers, N. Y.P.L.
53Beverly Robinson to James Duane, Sept. 9, 1766, Duane Papers.
54 Robinson to Duane, May 3, 1772, Mar. 25 and May 8, 1773, 1bid,
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the president of the Provincial Congress: "There are sev- eral very officious Ministerial agents in the county, who have corrupted the minds of many of the ignorant and baser sort of men among us, maliciously telling them the Whigs were in rebellion; the King would conquer them, and their estates be forfeited; and if they take up arms against them, the King for their services will give them the Whigs' pos- sessions. * 55 In 1777 John Watts, a Dutchess landowner and a member of the Supreme Court which baffled the Dutchess tenants in 1766, wrote that "the counties of Albany, Dutchess and Westchester, in the province of New York, are in an ab- solute state of vassalage, being all tenants at will to Rensalear, Livingston, Beekman and Philipse"; a promise to make them freeholders "would instantly bring you at least six thousand able farmers into the field. . 50
All depended on who could carry out that promise first.
55Samuel Dodge to the president of the Provincial Con- ress, Dec. 5, 1775, Journal of the Provincial Congress, II, 100.
SóQuoted in Irving Mark, Agrarian Conflicts, 13.
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CHAPTER IV
THE SEQUESTRATIO !: OF LOYALIST LAND, 1777-1779
The preceding chapter examined the creation in the seventeen-sixties of a political party or grouping, based largely on tenant votes, to oppose the traditional dominance of the largest landed families. The present chapter examines the impact of the Revolution on this prewar political align- ment. It shows how the county's radical and conservative political tendencies at first joined hands in common support of the war with England, but how, by 1779, the coalition had begun to split into its pre-Revolutionary wings over the 18- sue of sequestration and sale of Loyalist lands. The issue of the Loyalist lands is the connecting link between Dutchess politics before and after the Revolution. It is the proof that in this county the concept of two-party continuity, far from being "mossy," is the only possible way to understand the politics of the Revolutionary area.
Looking bac :, it is easy to underestimate the meaning of the bill to sell Loyalist estates. No doubt the bill merely accelerated a long-run trend toward freehold tenure which, bill or no bill, would have triumphed in the end. As earlier noted, the percentage of freeholders in the adult male population of Dutchess County doubled in the generation between 1745 and the Revolution. Hard-bitten landlords like
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Robert G. Livingston still gold off a farm here, a farm there, finding it more convenient to hold mortgages on free- nolds than to try to control a tenant's management of the land. 1 In a continental economy with much land and few hands to work it, the neofeudal land system of the Hudson Valley could not have long survived. Quite apart from the Revolution, the flood of New England immigrants and the Yankee egalitarianism they brought with them would have swept it away -- as McCracken observes, all the leaders of 2 the pre-Revolutionary tenant riots were New Englanders.
So it seems looking back. But to contemporaries, liv- ing through the event and making it, the law would seem to harg had a more comprehensive symbolic significance. It was the first major breakthrough of the political revolution into social change; with this dike zone, who could tell how far the waters would spread? Only this fear can explain why in Dutchess County, as in the state as a whole, the struggle for the bill became a political watershed. "Thereafter, " Allan Nevins writes, "the patriots were clearly divided into
moderate and extremist factions. 0 3 And Spaulding con- firms: "The Confiscation Act for the first time aroused a conservative Whig opposition to the extreme measures of the
1"Only let the farm year to year because I will sell them both as soon as possible"; "If any body would be in earnest about it I would agree about the price for I had better sell them almost at any rate than to have them out for they want repairs" (Robert G. Livingston to Gilbert Livingston, April 6, 1773, and March 22, 1775, Gilbert Livingston Papers, Box 1).
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