USA > New York > Dutchess County > The revolution and the common man : farm tenants and artisans in New York politics, 1777-1788 > Part 6
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2 McCracken, Cld Dutchess Forever, 224.
3Allan Nevins, The American States During and After
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government. .4
It is Interesting to keep in mind the significance of confiscated lands in other revolutions. Marc Bloch writes of the French Revolution: "Consider the problem of the land confiscated during the Revolution. During the Terror, and reversing the earlier legislation, the government decided to sell it off in small lots without competitive bidding. (What was it the men of the Year III hoped for? ] Primarily, they hoped to favor the acquisition of the land by the little people of the rural areas they sought the relief of the poor peasants, as a guarantee of their fidelity to the new order. 45 And Maurice Cob's says of the English Commonwealth:
"It is remarkable what strong opposition was shown , not only by the House of Lords, but by the Presbyterian section in the Commons, and in particular by the leading merchants who composed the common council of the City of London, to the proposed secuestration of the estates of royalists and of bishops, and to the organized sale of delinquents' landg after sequestration had already been decided upon. "º
The Landlord Leaves Politics Even In the first days of the Revolution, the unity of
the Revolution, 1775-1789 (New York, 1924), 268. Spaulding, New York, 1783-1739, 122.
5Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (New York, 1953), 141. 61 Maurice Jobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism ( London, 1947), 172.
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Dutchess Whigs was not altogether cordial. In the spring of 1775 the county divided, north and south as usual, over whether to support the state's illegal provincial congress. Early in April, the four northern precincts of Rhinebeck, Northeast, Amenia and Rombout chose as delegates (to the First Provincial Congress) Egbert Benson, Morris Graham, and Robert R. Livingston .? Benson was a prominent lawyer of northwestern Dutchess, and the future leader of the cornty's Federalists; Graham a large landlord in the northeastern part of Dutchess; Livingston was the chancellor-bo-be already frequently encoun- tered. An opponent at once protested that seven other pre- cincts, containing three-fourths of the county's population, had opposed the election of delegates: Poughkeepsie and Char- lotte by substantial margins, and the southern and southeastern precincts of Beekman, Pawling, Southeast, Fredericksburgh and Philipse 'almost unanimously. "
The news of Lexington and Concord produced a temporary union of forces. The newspaper correspondent just quoted declared an epistolary truce: Le did not wish to pursue the argument' further, for 'a coalition of parties in the County .9 of Dutchess will probably very soon take place. "1º
It wa
Force, American Archives, Series 4, II, 304. 8Ibid,
Force, op. cit., Series 4, II, 304-305. 10Ibid.
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next day that a new ten-man delegation was chosen. It hardly represented a "coalition. " Benson, Graham, and Livingston were excluded and replaced by a group including Melancton Smith, Ephraim Paine, Dirck Brinckerhoff, Gilbert Livingston, and Zephaniah Platt: the principal leaders of the Dutchess popular party down to 1788.11
The manner of electing these delegates was a revolution in itself. It was "the freeholders and inhabitants" of Poughkeepsie, the "inhabitants of Charlotte Precinct" who made these decisions; it was the "freemen, freeholders and Inhabitants" of the county who were asked to sign the Asso- ciation in support of the Provincial Congress. 12 The secret ballot was not yet; the election of Hay 1775 was by "a majority of voices, 4 and a move to have delegates to the next Provincial Congress elected by secret ballot was de- heated. 13 But it was universal manhood suffrage. The at- tempt to write this into the constitution of 1777 failed, 14
11Hough, The New York Civil List, 62-05.
12Force, American Archives, Series 4, I, 702; II, 304. Philip Smith, General History, 52. For what it may signify, the popular vote on the Constitution in 1788 was numerically identical with the figures for signers and nonsigners of the Association: 1,800 to 900 in each case (for the latter, see Force, American Archives, Series 4, III, 597-607).
->Ibid., Series 4, II, 834-835; Becker, History of Political Parties, 227.
14, McCracken, Old Dutchess Forever, 419. The draft of the 1777 constitution in the Abraham Yates Papers, New York Public Library, requires of an elector of assemblymen only that he be over twenty-one, a freeholder, a resident, and a taxpayer.
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and the property qualification was not waived again until the election to the state ratifying convention in 1788, nor in the regular elections of New York until the 1820's.
The Dutchess delegations to the Second and Third Provin- cial Congresses and the Provincial Convention, in the years 177c-1777, showed a conservative trend. Morris Graham was back in the second and third congresses; Robert R. Livingston in the third congress and the convention; Egbert Benson became chairman of the County Committee of Safety. Included also were some of the county's most aggressive landlords: Beverly Robinson in the second congress, Robert G. Livingston in the same, and ex- sheriff James Livingston of 17oć notoriety in the third congress and the convention. 15 Their selection reflects the fact that new delegates were in some cases coopted rather than truly elected. Thus Jay wrote Robert R. Livingston: "I shall inform the members of Duchess of your readiness to serve, and advise them to elect you. mlo
At this time even the popular leaders langed behind rank- and-file sentiment. At the Provincial Convention, future Anti- Federalists Gilbert Livingston and Zephariah Platt voted for a L20 freehold requirement for Assembly electors, and against making the secret ballot obligatory after the war. They joined
Robert R. Livingston on both these divisions. 17 In June 1777, Zephaniah Platt, Christopher Tappen and Charles DeWitt Joined John Jay and Mathew Cantine in urging the nomination of Philip
15 Hough, The New York Civil List, 02-05.
16John Jay to Robert R. Livingston, May 29, 1776, Corres- pondence and Public Papers of Jay, I, 64-65.
17, Journal of the Provincial Congress, I, 867, 891-892.
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Schuyler for governor. 18 Presumably this nomination repre- sented the "coalition of parties" mentioned earlier. The voters of Dutchess, however, rejected it, giving George Clinton a 206-132 margin over Schuyler in a light poll. 19 To the sur- prise and consternation of many, not least of Schuyler him- self, the popular party took over the government of the state. C'inton's election, as stated in Chapter I, was a water-
shed in the politics of the state as a whole. It was equally Important in Dutchess County. William Smith was told that re- sentment toward the Livingstons was the dominant passion behind the vote. Philip Schuyler, he noted just before the elections, " says Ulster and Dutchess are jealous of the Livingstons who have already got all the valuable Places and that they will not vote Ph(ilip] Llivingston] for Govr. . "; another informant told him that "the People of Dutchess and Ulster were perswaded in chusing a Govr. to name no Livingston nor any in Connection with that Family & hence Clinton was preferred to Jay & Schuyler. Changes in electoral procedure enabled this sentiment to express itself. All previous Dutchess elections had been held at the county seat, whereas the Convention instructed that this election
should be held at five different points in the county. "Still 21
18Jay, Dewitt, Platt, Cantine and Tappen to George Clinton, June 2, 1777 (Clinton, Public Papers, I, 355-856).
-Professor Alfred Young of Paterson State College kindly made these returns available to me.
20.'illiam Smith, Historical Memoirs, 151, 326.
21See Becker, History of Political Parties, 227, 252; Journal of the Provincial Congress, I, 918.
20
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more important in making the electoral process available to the poor voter was the introduction, at least in the precinct of Rhinebeck, of the secret ballot. Radical politicians John Morin Scott, Thomas Tredwell, Charles DeWitt had fought in vain for the secret ballot in all elections at the state constitu- tional sessions. 22 But, according to William Smith, Melancton Smith as election inspector in landlord-dominated Rhinebeck 23 took advantage of ambiguities in the convention's instructions to insist on a secret ballot.' 24
Melancton Smith was in a position to supervise election procedure because he had just been appointed Dutchess County sheriff. He who doubts that the American Revolution was a so- clal movement should ponder the substitution of Smith and Ephraim Paine, a former store clerk and a former farm hand, for the landlords Philip Livingston and Beverly Robinson as sheriff and chief Judge of Cutchess County. Nor were they - as J. H.
Hexter has argued against the Tawney thesis in England
25
exceptional cases. Between 1777 and 1798 not one member of the old ruling families held an important appointive or elective po- sition in Dutchess County. 26
22. Illiam Smith, Historical Memoirs, 121, 129, 157.
23The presence of many landlords and the hierarchical social atmosphere, described earlier, resulted in frequent pressure on tenants at Rhinebeck elections. For Instances, see my Anti- Federalism in Dutchess County," Chapter I, n. 26.
24.1. William Smith, Historical Memoirs, 159-160.
J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (Evanston, 1901), 121-122.
20Hough, The New York Civil List, 62-05, 74, 109-111, 122- 130, 183-193, 420, 446, 457.
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After Clinton's election, landlords in Dutchess ceased to seek election. Robert G. Livingston, one of the Dutchess delegation in the Second Provincial Congress, became a passive Tory, and when the British fleet sailed up the Hudson to King- ston and burned the manor houses of Rhinebeck, Livingston's was left conspicuously untouched. Beverly Robinson, a dele- zate at the same congress, became an active Tory, an officer in the British Army. His house was Benedict Arnold's base of operations in the spring of 1780.
Robert R. Livingston remained solidly Whig, but he like the landlords who turned Tory was excluded from the New York legislature. If the election of 1708 signified the emergence of an effective opposition to landlord candidates, the election of 1777 ushered in a time when landlords (at least in Dutchess ) did not dare to run for office in person but operated through others. Thus in Dutchess, as will appear below, Egbert Benson became Livingston's representative in the Assembly, until in 1721 Benson himself was unseated by the democratic movement. Characteristic of Livingston's new indirect mode of operation was such a letter as this to Jay: "many preparatory steps were taken to produce a change in the delegations which will
take effect shortly. ,27 As Becker so well put it long ago: "The great families, the traditional leaders, found it neces- sary to modify their methods of political management.
27Robert 2. Livingston to John Jay, Apr. 20, 1779, Robert A. Livingston Papers. On Livingston's dilemna, see Dangerfield, Chancellor Livingston, Part II, Chapters III and IV, and in particular the apt summary comment: "One has simply to remark how difficult it was for a man brought up in the politics of privilege to adjust himself all at once to the politics of Opportunity" (82).
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The personal relation, as a means of holding the voters in line, was replaced by appeals to the voters' intelligence or interest, in the form of public letters or resolutions setting forth the principles for which the candidate stood. ,28
Early in the Revolution, therefore, the coalition patched together after Lexington and Concord showed signs of strain. In
Fecruary 1778, William Smith declared in his diary that there was "a Severance between the Popular & the landed Interest and they will mutually pull each other down. 129 Yet Smith himself helps to supply the reason that the coalition neld together as long and as well as it did. In good part, of course, the British army welded a unity between Robert R. Livingston and the popular politicians he privately denounced as wicked and igno- rant. 30 - Another unifying pressure was the threat of unrest from below. The Whig leaders of Dutchess, Smith wrote in 1776, had "a general Suspicion of the lower Classes of the People. "31 At times it seemed that the county's Revolutionary leadership would exhaust all its energy in restraining popular discontent, and have none to share for the redcoats. "We have always thought, " Ezbert Benson commented at one point, 'we should be happy if we were capable of combating our internal foes, and leave those from without to be resisted in some other way. #32
25 Becker, History of Political Parties, 17. 29william Smith, Historical Memoirs, 220.
30 See, e. g., Livingston's letters to Gouverneur Morris, Aug. 3, 1777, Jan. 1778, Jan. 29, 1778, and Apr. 5, 17?8, Robert R. Livingston Papers.
31Villiam Smith, op, cit,, 27.
32Egbert Benson to the New York Provincial Convention, July 15, 1775, Journal of the Provincial Congress, II, 309.
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As the war dragged on, future Federalists and Anti- Federalists labored together on dozens of overlapping Revo- lutionary committees in Dutchess. Striving to cope with an endless series of administrative emergencies, they increas- ingly found themselves attacked from behind by a mixture of outright Toryism and Whi- discontent. The discontent cen- tered in three areas: the militia, the cost of living, and the land.
A Disgruntled Militia
From the beginning, conservative Thies had seen in the militia a threat to their control. James Duane wrote to Robert R. Livingston in 1775:
I am much pleased that young Mr. Livingston is rais- ing & company in the Manor. I wish he may extend his views further, in the only plan, which, independent of the grand contest, will render landed property se- cure. We must think in time of the means of assuring the reins of government when these commotions shall subside. Licentiousness is the natural object of civil [ "war" crossed out by Duane in the manuscript] discord and it can only be guarded against by placing the command of the troops in the hands of men of pro- perty and rank who, by that means, will preserve the same authority over the minds of the people which they enjoyed in the time of tranquility .. 33
But the men of property and rank did not control the militia in Dutchess. The three large landlords of south Dutchess -- Philipse, Morris, and Robinson -- were all Loyalists. It is true that the well-to-do Morris Graham and Richard D'Cantillon were lieutenant colonel and major, respectively. But Dirck Brinckerhoff, the popular assemblyman elected in 1738, was
33James Duane to Robert R. Livingston, June 7, 1775, Livingston-Redmond Manuscripts, F.D.R. Library.
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also a colonel; and Brinckerhoff's friend Jacobus Swartwout, 34 one of the two Dutchess delegates to vote against the Consti- tution in 1788, rose from colonel to general to be the highest- ranking officer in the county. These higher officers were appointed at a county or state level. From the rank of cap- tain down, militia officers were elected by the common sol- diers. In Dutchess the lower officers so chosen were a mixed bag of future Federalists and Anti-Federalists, many of whom by virtue of their popularity would represent Dutchess in the Assembly in the seventeen-eighties. 35
If the officers were uncertain, the men were much more so. Egbert Benson wrote to the Provincial Convention on July 15, 1776, that of the four hundred militiamen in Rhine- beck, one hundred had been disarmed for suspected disloyalty, and he doubted whether there were two precincts in the county with less disaffection. 3º The reason for the soldiers' dis- satisfaction is not far to seex. A militia colonel received seventy-five dollars a month, a private six dollars and sixty-six cents.37 In August, 1776, Zephaniah Flatt wrote to
""swartwout was a near neighbor of Brinckerhoff's, second to him in responsibility for the Rombout Committee of Safety, and one of the executors of his will (Reynolds, Eighteenth Century Records, 89).
35philip Saith, General History, Appendix A, 477-481. Listings of rank must be used with care because men changed their rank so often.
SeForce, American Archives, Series 5, I, 355-357.
37 Johnson, Colonel Henry Luddington, 02. This source provides a good picture of the organization of the militia in Dutchess.
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the Provincial Convention that "there is great complaints amongst the troops concerning this bounty, many of them having no money to purchase necessaries, having left at home what little they had for the use of their families. "38 George Clinton wrote to the Continental Committee of Safety a year later:
The continental pay and rations being far below the wages given for ordinary labor the difference becomes a tax rendered by personal service and as the train band list (from the exemptions arising from age, of- fice and other causes) consists chiefly of the middling and lower class of people, this extraordinary tax 18 altogether paid by thea.
The extraordinary tax bore with particular severity on the poor tenant militiamen of south Dutchess. In this area every militia officer was a tenant. 40 Their colonel, Lud- dington, wrote to George Clinton on May 1, 1781:
At best the regiment are very poor when compared with other regiments and are called on to raise an equal number with the others, when I can affirm that ten farmers in Col. Brinckerhoff's regiment 18 able to purchase the whole of mine. In this unequal way, I have been obliged to turn out of my men until they are so much impoverished that they almost despair. 41
This was written in 1721. But as early as the spring of 1777, the three commissioners for detecting conspiracies, Swartwout, Benson, and Smith, were
laboring to enforce discipline among mutinous and rebellious members of the militia, especially in
38 Journal of the Provincial Congress, II, 279. 39johnson, Colonel Henry Luddington, 95. WOLuddington to Clinton, February 20, 1778, quoted in ibid., 107.
41 Ibid., 178.
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Colonel John Freer's regiment which was the Poughkeep- sie Regiment and in Colonel Henry Luddington's regiment in the southeastern part of the county. Much of the trouble was doubtless due to the failure on the part of the militia members to receive the bounty due them from the State.
In the same spring, special three-man commissions visited the most heavily tenanted areas, Livingston Manor in the north and Philipse Patent in the south, to search out dis- loyalty. Cn May 8, Zephaniah Platt, Mathew Cantine, and Robert A. Livingston reported to the Provincial Convention of the State of New York that on the Livingston Manor almost everyone was disaffected, especially in the eastern part. "> At the same time a traveler reported to William Smith that 4the Drafts in Dutchess were few and would not serve [be- cause] the People were wore out last year. Those in the Army lost the opportunity of seeding their Ground and were now starving for Bread. #44
The Provincial Convention which heard these disquiet- ing reports in early 1777 was also attempting to draft New York's Revolutionary constitution. Abraham Yates, Jr., of Albany, antiquarian and future Anti-Federalist, believed that discontent in the militia had much to do with the demo- cratic features of the new government. "The Yeomanry of the Country, " he wrote, "were wanted to fight and the Militia Duty which equally affected the poor and the rich (a Man of
42"General Jacobus Swartwout, " 03.
43Johnson, Colonel Henry Luddington, 141.
"William Smith, Historical Memoirs, 119, Robert R. Liv- ingston reported to William Duer on July 3, 1778, that militia service caused low wheat yields both in 1777 and 1778, and "the plough stands still" (Robert R. Livingston Papers).
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[10 had the same Duty as the one of 10, 000) upon the Prin- cipal of Personal Service was Become very Burthensome to the yermanry and if the Rich Intended the other should continue to fight for there [their] Estates it was Necessary to show that they did not make any Difference but wihlere it was unavoidable. ,45
This is a side of the Revolution too often forgotten. If for government contractors like Melancton Smith and Mathew Patterson the Revolution meant one swift bound from obscurity to riches, for many common soldiers like those described in the following memoir it meant impoverishment.
Many who served in the ranks were industrious men who had acquired a little foothold in life and owned small farms. The colonists were straitened for means wherewith to carry on the war, and pay for the soldiers was uncertain and slow in arriving. Some served for years without being able to draw their small pay, and Meantime their families at home were getting deeper and deeper in debt for their necessary subsistence.
When the war ended and they at last received their pay it was in continental currency which at once became worthless. By this means the men who had done patient duty in the army for years returned home only to lose their farms and homesteads, and discouraged by their losses and by the general confusion in political and industrial affairs, many lost hope and courage and drifted into vagrancy.
'My mother,' continues the writer, an Amenia resident,
was born in 1800, and she often recalled that during her early life there were many tramps of a certain type travelling the country roads . . .
. Rarely or never were their requests for food, drink, or lodging denied, for it was well known that they were old Ro- volutionary soldiers impoverished in the vars.
45 Notes on Early History of New York, etc. , " Yates Papers, N. Y. P. L.
46 Charles E. Benton, Troutbeck: A Dutchess County Homestead (Poughkeepsie, 1916), 14-15.
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The distress of Dutchess militiamen is suggested by the fre- quent advertisements for the apprehension of deserters which appeared in the New York Journal and New York Packet (New York City newspapers published during the Revolution in Poughkeepsie and Fishkill, respectively) .
Price Control
In these newspapers one finds also the story of the second great popular grievance in Revolutionary Dutchess: the high cost of living. As early as December 1776, Henry Ludd- ington and others wrote to the Council of Safety inveighing against the "wicked, mercenary intrigues of a number of in- grossing Jockles, who have drained this part of the state of the article of bread to that degree, that we have reason to fear there is not enough left for the support of the inhabi- Cants. 47 Discontent on this score became acute in 1779, when the continental currency depreciated from about one- eighth the value of specie to about one-fortieth. The resul- ting inflation is su rested by figures in the papers of the Dutchess Commisioners for Sequestration a Negro slave girl sold for L50 on December 23, 1777, and for -3, 080 on Oc- tober 5, 1730; on A gust 1c, 1730, a pair of oxen was sold for L1:40.
Throughout America the public expressed its indignation
47Journal of the Provincial Congress, :I, 355. 45 V. - Y. E. S. These papers are much used in the remainder of this chapter. Acquired by the Society only in 1950, they were not available to Spaulding, Yoshpe and other previous students of the disposition of Loyalist lands in the state of New York.
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at the rising cost of living by reviving the local committees of the first days of the Revolution. Robert R. Livingston complained of a price regulating committee in Albany County in August 1777. "Tho they have not been followed by the other counties, ' Livingston commented, 'yet they have excited a spirit that will be troublesome. .49
Committees to regulate prices were supported even by farmers, who feared that runaway inflation would turn the money received for their produce into worthless paper. "At length," wrote a correspondent to the New York Packet in July 1779,
is the virtuous part of the community alarmed, and the old and true friends to their country again step forth to remedy evils the laws cannot reach, by the exertion of Committees, the terror of all villains . As soon as the authority of your Committees · ended, knavery shewed its head, villains of every class came forth and practiced with impunity . Lot no time be lost then, my countrymen, in forming your Committees. 50
The committeemen reasoned that if local scrutiny and extra- legal direct action could be brought to bear, inflation might be checked. 51
The Dutchess committees were inspired by the example of Philadelphia, whose price-fixing committee called in July for the formation of local committees 'in every state and county. '52 Within a week, Rombout Precinct had set up a com-
49Robert R. Livingston to Gouverneur Morris, Aug. 8, 1777, Robert R. Livingston Papers.
50 New York Packet, July 15, 1779.
51The price-fixing movement in the various states and in the Continental Congress is described by R. B. Korris, 'Labor and Mercantilism in the Revolutionary Era, " The Era of the American Revolution, od. R. B. Morris (New York, 1939), 76-139. 52New York Packet, July 15, 1779.
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