USA > New York > Dutchess County > The revolution and the common man : farm tenants and artisans in New York politics, 1777-1788 > Part 8
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Not so the conservatives as a group. Although privately bitterly hostile to every interference with private enterprise, whether in the form of price control or an embargo on grain or an income tax or the confiscation of land, the New York conservatives were committed to Livingston's counsel of yielding to the current if they hoped to direct its course. 17 Thus they often voted for things they actually despised. They were well aware, for example, that the Senate's rejection of a confiscation bill in the spring of 1779 would (as Livingston put it) "excite a flame out of doors, 18 or (in the words of Benson) occasion 'some Clamor and Uneasiness. ,19 Better to yield half a loaf now, ran the thinking of the conservatives, than to have the ; hole loaf snatched from their hands later.
1>Livingston to Morris, Sept. 10, 1778, Robert R. Livingston Papers.
16. Livingston to Jay, Mar. 4 and Apr. 20, 1779, ibid.
17 See above, Chapter I, n. 12.
Livingston to Jay, Mar. 4, 1779, as cited n. 16.
19Benson to Jay, June 23, 1779, Jay Papers, Columbia U.
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Benson, carrying the burden of managing conservative tactics in the Assembly, was the most flexible. The confis- cation bill which Livingston considered a compound of folly, avarice and injustice should in Benson's opinion have been passed and amended later. For. 20 21 While John Sloss Hobart wrote of price control that he would "oppose that hydra to the last, " Benson who also privately condemned it (see n. 11, above) supported it in the legislature. 21 In the same spirit Benson wrote later of a taxation bill that although "the tender and penal clauses are neither yours nor mine, I was obliged to consent to them or I should have lost the whole bill. . 22 Yet as early as 1779 Benson was encountering "considerable Opposi- tion" in Dutchess County where he was denounced for his hostil-
ity to radical legislation,
23
and in 1781 he lost his seat
although regarded at the time as the most powerful member of the Assembly. 24 He did not regain it until 1787.
The radical politicians did not form a solid phalanx,
either. Yates, for example, opposed price-fixing and the con- fiscation of land. 25 Yet just as on the whole it is correct
20 Benson to Jay, June 23, 1779, as cited in n. 19.
21Hobart to Livingston, Feb. 15, 1780, and Benson to Liv- ingston, Jan. 3, 1780, Robert R. Livingston Papers.
22Benson to Livingston, July 28, 1780, ibid.
23Benson to Jay, June 23, 1779, as cited in n. 19; for the accusation that Benson was more hostile to radical Whigs than to Tories, see New York Journal, Mar. 15 and Mar. 22, 1779.
2"For contemporary testimony as to Benson's power in the Assembly, see Walter Livingston to Robert R. Livingston, Jan. 7, 1781, Robert R. Livingston Papers, and Hamilton (writing as "H --- G --- ") in the New York Daily Advertiser, Mar. 12, 1789.
2) " Speeches to Delegates in Congress, 1786, ' Yates Papers, confirmed by Yates' voting record in the Senate during the war.
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to portray the New York conservatives in opposition to dras- tic interference with private property, so there can be no doubt that radical politicians as a group were ready to coun- tenance it.
Thus, as we saw in Chapter IV, future Anti-Federalists such as Gilbert Livingston and Jacobus Swartwout pressed for price-fixing and land confiscation in county committees. In the legislature, John Morin Scott introduced bills for these purposes as early as the winter of 1777-1778, 26 and the follo- wing autumn Robert R. Livingston accused his opponents of making proposals to regulate prices and to sell confiscated or
.27
unappropriated lands 'the basis of their popularity.
william
Smith was told in 1779 that "a Man in the Secrets of the Leaders" of the Dutchess and Ulster radicals had commented on the Tory literature promising the estates of Whig landlords to their tenants, that 'it was half right but the Tenants would not get the Lands in that Way meaning from the Crown but that when the Independency is established the Manors would be parcelled out to such Tenants as were in Favor with the New established Govern- ment. : 28
Thus, too, it was Dutchess radical Dirck Brinckerhoff, the anti-landlord champion of 1768-9, who led the struggle for con- fiscation and sale in the critical Assembly sessions of 1779- 1780. His course paid off politically, just ae Benson's did not.
26. Votes and Proceedings of the Senate (Fishkill, 1777), 17, 199.
27 Livingston to Gouverneur Morris, Sept. 10, 1778, Robert R. Livingston Pepers.
28 William Smith, Historical Memoirs, 326.
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After the passage of confiscation legislation in 1779-1780, Brinckerhoff served in the majority of the eight Assembly sessions which preceded the adoption of the United States Con- stitution.
This radical leadership was Clintonian only in the imagi- nation of historians. For Clinton, as observed in Chapter I, was not a radical but a moderate. Clinton said of the confis- cation bill that it "was in my Opinion neither founded in Jus- tice warranted by sound Policy or consistent with the Spirit of the Constitution. #29 His position appears to have earned him some dislike among the rank-and-file. "Some Folks talk freely," commented an observer in the spring of 1779, "& say that a certain Gent (who played the Politician the first
Election he got in for Governor ) leads cows by the Nose.
.30
In the state's second gubernatorial election, in 1783, Robert R. Livingston's mother would support the moderate Clinton against both the conservative candidate Schuyler and the radical candidate, Ephraim Paine of Dutchess. 31
In fact, the confiscation legislation of 1779-1780 vas forced from below. Before the spring elections of 1779, Liv- ingston obesrved that the counties of Orange and Ulster were drawing up instructions for their legislators, and "several Batteries are playing off out of doors chiefly designed to make
29George Clinton to John Jay, Mar. 17, 1779, Jay Papers, Columbia U.
30 Charles DeWitt to same, Apr. 20, 1779, ibid.
3-Margaret Beekman Livingston to Robert R. Livingston, Apr. 30, 1783, Robert R. Livingston Papers.
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a change in the Delegations. .32 The batteries were most suc- cessful. According to Egbert Benson, surveying the election results in June, there were "Great Changes throughout the State for Representatives at the last Election"; in the fall Assembly of 1779, at least two-thirds of the members would be now. Of Special significance was Benson's comment on the character of those who had been defeated. "Men of Substance and Importance, ' sighed the future Federalist, were dropping out of New York politics. 33 A year later Benson would be able to exult to Liv- ingston that all but one of "the little faction which was found last winter" had been defeated. 34 In between these two elections, however, the most important radical legislation of the Revolution in New York was passed: the bills for confiscat- ing and selling the land of attainted Loyalists.
In that stormy winter of 1779-1780, what was at stake for the tenants of south Dutchess was the hope of winning the free- holds they had failed to secure in the rebellion of 1700. For the leaders of the popular party in the county, the problem was the conversion of sentiments toward violence into votes for reform. As for the conservatives, their need was by fair means or foul to prevent a war for independence from turning into a social revolution. "Take a Survey of the Ground you have to act on, " Morris admonished Livingston. "here are the Eminen- ces? They must be gained. They must be gained Will not
32Livingston to Jay, Mar. 4, 1779, Jay Papers, Columbia U. 33Benson to Jay, June 23, 1779, ibid.
34Benson to Livingston, June 28 and July 28, 1780, Robert A. Livingston Papers.
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some of their Forces revolt? . Take Ceres Bacchus and Minerva to your Aid. . 35
The Crisis of 1779-1780
In addition to the opposing leadera, Benson and Brinck- erhoff, Dutchess County sent to the 1779-1780 Assembly Brinton Paine, Stephen Dodge, Henry Luddington, Nathaniel Sackett, and Ananias Cooper. Henry Luddington was the militia colonel of south Dutchess, already several times en- countered; Brinton Paine was a relative of Ephraim Paine, the Revolutionary first judge; Stephen Dodge would be one of the new trio of commissioners appointed to sell Loyalist lands. They made up a good sample of the middle-class country gen- tlemen who officered the Dutchess militia, and represented Dutchess at Albany throughout the Revolution and the Cri- tical Period.
The Loyalist land problem, the question of inflation and price control, and the deperate need for funds for the army, naturally dominated both the fall and spring sessions of the New York legislature. "The Confiscation & Tax Bill are the great Objects of Controversy,' Governor Clinton remarked in October, "& occasion the Delay of all other Business. .36 During the next session, Benson reported to Livingston that the Assembly was continually wrangling from morning till night. 37
The achievement of the fall session consisted in a tax
35Morris to Livingston, Jan. 21, 1779, Robert R. Living- ston Papers.
jó clinton to Jay, Oct. 5, 1779, Jay Papers, Columbia U.
37 Benson to Livingston, Feb. 20, 1780, Robert R. Living- ston Papers.
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bill (further discussed below) which gave county assessors the power to discriminate against suspected Tories; and the law of October 22 (Third Session, Ch. 25) which attainted for treason a long list of persons, including the Dutchess landlords Beverly Robinson and Roger Morris, and confiscated their lands. Sequestration thus gave way to confiscation. This was the most important single piece of radical legisla- tion passed throughout the war.
Meantime, a struggle over whether Loyalist land so seized should actually be sold had already begun. As in the French and English Revolutions, 38 conservatives sought to blunt the conser effect of confiscation by delaying and preventing the actual division and sale of the appropriated land.
Egbert Benson of Dutchess led this effort. On Sept. 14, he moved to delay the sale of forfeited lands until the next meeting of the legislature. 39 He lost, and on September 16 a bill for immediate sales was reported. A motion was made to strike out a provision prohibiting the sale of unimproved lands. Benson opposed it but lost azain. 40 In each division, a majority of the Dutchess delegation as well as a majority of the Assembly was against him.
No doubt because of the parallel attainder bill, however, the bill for immediate sales was returned to committee and did not come up for final action until the spring, just as Benson had desired. Then it could no longer be put off. As
38See above, Chapter IV, n. 6. It has been estimated that as little as 20 per cent of the land confiscated in the French Revolution was actually sold. Likewise in Dutchess, of forty-five persons whose property was sequestered under the 1777 law in Poughkeepsie precinct, only one finally lost his land (Platt, History of Poughkeepsie, 301).
39Journal of the Assembly (Fishkill, 1779), 26.
.40Ibid., 23.
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assemblymen made their way to Albany in heavy snows and temperatures which ( on January 29) reached eighteen below zero, the northern army was enduring a winter "perhaps even more fearful than the one that had seen it freezing and sick- ening at Valley Forge. 41 Even before Christmas the comm-
anding general, William Heath, had been writing Governor Clinton that the troops had gone eight days without bread, "a universal uneasiness prevailed," and mutiny seemed imman- ent. On December ló Heath wrote that two-thirds of one Dutchess regiment had simply gone home, but recommended len- lency for the mutineers because of the food shortage. 42
Politicians of both parties voiced alarm. 'I have not felt equal distress at the situation of our affairs at any period since the commencement of the war," Governor Clinton wrote to Livingston on January 7. "Notwithstanding the great exertions made by the State, it is with the utmost difficulty wo feed the troops They have frequently been days
together without bread. .43 Philip Schuyler concurred: "The garrison of Fort Schuyler has been on half allowances, that of Fort George so distressed that they have been on the point of evacuating it. " 44 Livingston's mother wrote that the
people of Dutchess had so little bread she feared a famine, and John Sloss Hobart summed up the general feeling in the
41 Dangerfield, Chancellor Livingston, 119. For the weather, New York Journal, Jan. 10 and Feb. 21, 1780. Tro years later the contractor Jacob Cuyler wrote to James Duane about 'seventy nine eighty when they were ready to disband for want of provisions" (Duane Papers). 42 Heath to Clinton, Dec. 3 and 16, 1779, Jan. 25, 1780; Clinton to Heath, Dec. 23, 1779 (Clinton, Public Papers, V, 396-398, 421-422, 429-430, 463-467). 43
Clinton to Livingston, Jan. 7, 1780, Robert R. Living- ston Papers.
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words: "this winter . is the most important to us of any that will fall within our are. .45
Alexander Hamilton, sometime between December and March, wrote: "The present conjuncture is by all allowed to be po- culiarly critical. Every man of reflexion employs his thoughts about the remedies proper to be applied to the national dis- orders. 46 The remedies which occured to conservatives were heavy taxation and devaluation of the Continental currency. The radicals, however, came back to their platform of price- fixing and land confiscation, and this time they carried the day.
On February 4, 1780, the Assembly committee in charge of the bill for sale of Loyalist land reported that memorials had been received from every county imploring immediate action. The Assembly again voted to proceed with immediate sale, with Benson again opposed, and the Dutchess majority (always inclu- ding Dirck Brinckerhoff) in favor. 47
Throughout February the struggle continued over critical amendments. The sale of unimproved as well as cultivated land was again approved. A key clause excusing loyal tenants from all arrearages of rent was inserted. An attempt to prevent the sale of farms where refugees were living, a matter (as we have seen) of great moment in south Dutchess, was defeated. 48
Then once again, as in the spring of 1779, the bill rar into trouble in the Senate. On March 10, the upper house urged
44Schuyler to Livingston, Jan. 18, 1780, Robert A. Livingston Papers. 45 Margaret Beekman Livingston to same, Fec. 1780, and Hobart to same, Feb. 15, 1780, ibid.
40 Hamilton to -- , Papers of Hamilton, II, 236.
47 Journal of the Assembly, 95. 48 Ibid,, 105, 112, 113.
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that sale of lands be postponed until further attempts to raise money by loans had been exhausted. The Assembly then voted for the last time on the bill. Once more Benson (in company with John Jay's brother) was on the side of delay; once more Brinckerhoff, with the Dutchess majority, voted for immediate sale. On March 11, 1780, the Senate bowed and the bill became law. 49
The contest had not been one of good against evil. Dirck Brinckerhoff, who led the fight for the bill, in the same 808- sion moved to defeat a law to free Negro slaves who enlisted in the army for three years with the consent of their masters. In this he was opposed by Benson, leader of the effort to block confiscation and sale. 50
For better or worse, however, the battle over Loyalist land had crystallized the party division which had been maturing since 1777, and which would endure until 1788 and beyond. "The Session," Benson lamented to Livingston, "certainly is the first in which I have known either Men or Measures lay under the Imputation of Disaffection. At our first Sessions the De- bates ran high . . . but we still believed each other Whigs and so far there was a perfect Confidence; at the last Meeting, how- ever, our Proceedings were poisoned by a Distrust, and without Cause, if not of Tor: 1sm at least of cool dispirited Whiggery. "5 This suspicion, thus planted in the minds of radical Whigs, proved long-lasting. The Whig coalition was permanently split.
49 Journal of the Assembly, 150. See also 122, 129, 144-145.
50 In Brinckerhoff's precinct of Rombout, 501 of 5,941 per- sons in 1790 were slaves (Reynolds, Eighteenth Century Records, 7).
5-Benson to Livingston, Mar. 20, 1780, Robert R. Livingston Papers.
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Commenting on Benson's letter, Robert R. Livingston wrote to Duane: "It is much to be lamented that internal factions should break out before we had driven the enemy from our doors. . 52
Administering Confiscation
It used to be assumed - in regard to the English and French as well as the American Revolutions - that land con- fiscation, the most radical measure of each of these revolu- tions, produced a democratization of the countryside. It was taken for granted that confiscated land was divided and gold to small farmers.
Now it is asserted for England that most confiscated land found its way back into the hands of the original owners, and for France, that bour eois proprietors stepped into the shoes of the aristocratic or clerical owner. 54
53
In America also, the one adequately detailed study, dealing with the Southern District of New York, seemed to show that as in France s eculators rather than small farmers cot the bulk of the spoils. 55
The confiscated Loyalist lands of Dutchess County were dis-
52Robert R. Livingston to James Duane, May 2, 1780, Duane Papers.
>>Joan Thirsk, "The Sales of Royalist Lands during the Interregnum, ' Economic History Review, 2nd Ser., V (1952), 188- 207, and "The Restoration Land Settlement, " Journal of Modern History, XXVI (1954), 315-328.
54Frederic Braesch, 1789, L'annee cruciale (Paris, 1941), translated and quoted in The Economic Origins of the French Re- volution, ed. Ralph Greenlaw (Boston, 1958), 80.
55Harry 3. Yoshpe, The Disposition of Loyalist Estates in the Southern District of the State of New York, passim. See also Catherine Snell Crary, "Forfeited Loyalist Lands in the Western District of New York - Albany and Tryon Counties, " New York History, XXV (1954), 239-258, where the literature on con- fiscation in New York is crisply summarized.
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5.
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persed in a variety of ways. , Sometimes, as in England, a Loyalist proprietor contrived to regain His property. Thus Bartholomew Crannell of Poughkeepsie made use of his Whig son-in-law Gilbert Livingston to recover a farm; and George Clarke, "not wishing to lose . vast landed property [in northeastern Dutchess] sent his son to America to take charge of it and at the same time to profess deep sympathy with the Thig element. . 56 Again, as in France, speculators took a
share. Most of the county's leading Anti-Federalists ob- tained a farm or two to be leased in turn to tenants, and two of the nation's leading economic adventurers, Robert Morris and William Duer, picked up a pair of farms on which they ex- pected a 200 per cent profit upon re-sale. 57 As in France,
too, tenants finding themselves unable to buy their farms "demanded that they be leased out at the lowest rent possible" by the government. 58 Yet the fact remains that the ledgers of the commissioners charged with these sales in Dutchess County bear out the oider view that most of the confiscated land went to small farmers, and so contributed to the destruc- tion of aristocracy in New York.
56James Smith, Dutchess County, 214.
57Except where indicated, the following analysis is based on the Abstract of Forfeited Lands for Dutchess County, N. - Y. H. S., a volume exactly corresponding to Ledzer A of Deeds in the base- ment of the county clerk's office at Poughkeepsie. For Morris and Duer, see East, Business Enterprise, 112.
58Georges Lefebvre, Etudes sur la Revolution francaise (Paris, 1954), translated and quoted in Greenlaw, op. cit., 78. For Dutchess, see the petitions of Reuben Ferris and 93 others, June 26, 1781; Alexander Kidd and 102 others, Mar. 1782; and ol residents of Philipstown, Mar. 1782 (New York Senate Papers, X, Box 2, and XI, Box 1). These petitions are further dis- cussed below.
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Although the Council of Revision had warned that "all the property to be sold under this bill must be sold into the hands of a few speculators," several of the bill's pro- visions were designed to keep this from happening. The con- fiscated land was to be sold in parcels generally of five hundred acres or less, a figure not too much larger than the one- to two hundred acre farm typical in Dutchess and through- out the state. 59 Above all, tenants on the land at the time of confiscation were to have first chance at acquiring their farms. This important feature of the bill is thus summarized by Yoshpe:
In the interest of those tenants who had "at conside- rable expense made or purchased the improvements' on the lands in their possession and who had 'constantly, uniformly and zealously . . endeavored to maintain the freedom and independence of the United States, the Commissioners were to offer them preemption of their lands at an appraised price .. Until the fee 81m- ple of such lands sold, the tenants were to continue in possession at their former rente. Three appraisers, one chosen by the Commissioners, another by the tenant claiming the benfit intended by this clause, and the third by the other two appraisers, were to evaluate the property "exclusive of the improvements thereon." When the tenant had paid into the treasury the sum at which the lands were appraised, "within three months after the making of such appraisements," together with all arrearages of rent due thereon, the Commissioners of Forfeitures were to convey the appraised land to such tenant "in like manner as if such lands had been sold at public vendue, and such tenant had appeared and been the highest bidder for the same. "00
Throughout the 1780's details of this law would be altered by successive Assemblies, usually to the disadvantage of the tenant. Thus in March 1781, the Assembly voted to give tenants
59For average farm size throughout the state, see Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 52.
dovesipe, Disposition of Loyalist Estates, 20-21.
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only four rather than eight months in which to apply for their right of preemption. ol Four years later, in March 1785, the preemption clause was done away with altogether. 62
Of the 490 forfeited lots in Dutchess County sold under the law, 455 were in southern Dutchess and 414 had belonged to Beverly Robinson or Roger Morris. Charles Inglis was deprived of lo lots in Charlotte Precinct, and Henry Clinton lost 41 lots in southern Dutchess near the Connecticut border. Thus 471 of the 490 lots had belonged to four men.
The 455 lots in southern Dutchess were sold to 401 per- sons: rarely, obviously, did a purchaser acquire more than one farm. These lots, moreover, were almost without exception under the five-hundred-acre limit specified by the law. The average lot price, after prices levelled off in 1782, was under L10 :.
Not only were the lots cheap, small, and shared among many hands. The purchasers were very often former tenanta actually farming the land at the time of confiscation. Of the 401 purchasers of forfeited farms in south Dutchess, loc had paid taxes in these precincts in 1777. 03 of 40 tenants actually in possession of a group of Robinson's lots offered for sale in July 1780, 20 purchased the land that they were
olJournal of the Assembly ( Albany, 1820 [ for the year 1781]), 86.
22 Journal of the Assembly (New York, 1785), 90.
-The assessment rolle for southern Dutchess are printed in Pelletreau, Putnam County, 122-128.
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farming. 04 Pelletreau is certainly very near the mark in his conclusion that "in a large number of cases, in fact a majo- rity, the lands were sold to the parties who were already in possession of the various farms, as tenants of Beverly Robinson and Roger Morris. .05
Thus, the confiscation of Loyalist lands in Dutchess County was fundamentally democratic and did work to destroy "the aristocratic flavor which everywhere permeated society" before 1775. 6 Whether confiscation had this result else- where in America remains to be determined empirically. Of course, where land was already in the hands of small farmers, the confiscation of Loyalist property did not basically change the social structure. 57
? Yet Yet Yoshpe's own evidence for West- chester suggests that there, too, in contradiction to his overall conclusion that "patriotic profiteers contrived to get the bulk of the Loyalist estates into their own hands, '
many tenants acquired their farms. The Dutchess and West- 68 chester evidence, taken as a whole, suggests that where confis- cation involved large tenanted estates the results may have been substantially democratic, while speculators found their
04New York Journal, July 24, 1780. 35Pelletreau, Putnam County, 92-93. ocBecker, History of Political Parties, 14.
07 For such a case see Ruth M. Keesey, 'Loyalism in Bergen County, New Jersey, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XVIII (1961), especially 564-568.
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