USA > New York > Dutchess County > The revolution and the common man : farm tenants and artisans in New York politics, 1777-1788 > Part 9
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19
28. Wilder Spaulding made this point in reviewing Yoshpe's book for the American Historical Review, XLV (1940), 899-900. Yoshpe's conclusion as quoted is at op. cit., 115, and his Westch-ster evidence at ibid., 5 :- 63.
121
pickings primarily in scattered, urban or unoccupied parcels. . In Dutchess, speculation was much more significant after the initial sale of the confiscated land than during it. In the original sales, absentee purchasers were few, although Buch Anti-Federalist politicians (none of them resident on confiscated farms) as John Lamb, Zephaniah Platt, Jacobus Swartwout, Mathew Patterson, John Morin Scott and Melancton Smith each picked up a farm or two. It was after the initial act of preemption, when as in Westchester many tenant purchasers "were obliged to encumber their holdings with mortgages in or- der to raise the money needed for the discharge of their debts, "09 that the small farmer often discovered he had escaped the clutches of the landlord only to fall into the waiting hands of the money-lender.
Such a man was Daniel Hunt. "We the subscribers, " ran a 1761 petition on his behalf, "beg leave to represent the cir- cumstance of Daniel Hunt who is now eight -seven years of age. He lives on a small farm that did belong to Col. Robinson [, ] not more than twenty acres of improved land. He has always been friendly to the country [, ] he has lived on the place twelve years. If you will be pleased to order that the place may not be sold but let him continue the few days he has to live it can't be long and he is not able to buy it. "
59voshpe, Disposition of Loyalist Estates, 56. 7041sc. Mas. Dutchess County, N. - Y. H. S.
122
In many cases Dutchess tenants had declared an intention to buy their farms simply because the alternative was dispos- session. In 1781 ninety-four tenants of Fredericksburg Pre- cinct, heart of the 1700 rising, explained to the legislature that they could not possibly pay the back rents required by the final version of the confiscation law. "By Law, " the petitioners stated,
they are obligated either to Purchase, or Quit their different Houses and Lands on which they have liv'd for a Number of Years, which by their Industry 18 brought to some degree of perfection (and] in which consiste their little all. Thrice happy would they be, if their circumstances did admit of their buying their Dwelling, but such le the Case A very few ex- cepted that were they to sell every thing they own nay even borrow of their Friends they could not get a sufficient Sum to pay for their Places.
These tenants, like th ir counterparts in France a dozen years later, concluded by asking to lease their farms from the gov- ernment. "Your Petitioners beg leave to point out their truly deplorable situation in haveing no Alternative but Buying the Lands or be turned out of their Homes They would be content in being Tenants to the State whereby they could raise Grain and Provisions to supply our Army. " Other south Dutchess petitions71 described the plight of "this poor Precinct" in similar terms, a plight readily understandable when one recalls that as of May 1777, Beverly Robinson's tenants had owed him two-and-a-half years' back rent. In 1782, the legislature eased the situation by permitting preempting tenants to meet half their obligations in securities rather than cash. 72 Most
71As cited above, n. 58.
72Laws of New York, 5th Session, Ch. 45.
19
123
of the securities paid in under this procedure were the hitherto-worthless "Barber's notes" distributed during the
war in exchange for requisitioned supplies. 73 But even this procedure apparently did not suffice, for in the mid-decade new petitions requested permission to pay half the sums due in beef or flour rather than cash. 74 Finally, the Hessian
fly added to the trials of those farmers who (as almost all did) raised wheat: sixty-nine south Dutchess tenants in 1780 asked the legislature to grant more time for payments "By Reason of that Insect so . . . Rageing amongst us and Totally Preventing us from [Growling of Wheat as we Where Accustomed To Do. .75
The upshot was that many tenants who had been compelled trather than to lose the farm to purchase at public Auction. 70 failed to meet installment payments to the state, or mortgage payments to a money-lender, and lost the farm anyway. Thus one finds Robert G. Livingston's son writing in 1781:
I received a letter from my father Saturday, desiring me to acquaint you that he had a mortgage on the farm late the property of Abraham Payne amounting to about -300. The commissioners sold it to Payne who not being able to make pa ment on it was obliged to leave it.
Trading in south Dutchess farms continued brisk throughout the decade. We catch a glimpse of six or eight purchasers after
73"Abstract of Public Securities od. into the Treasury by Danl. Graham . . March 24th, 1785,' Revolutionary Manuscripts, XLIV, N. Y. S. L.
74Assembly Papers, XXV, N. Y. S.L.
75.1 Ibid., XXVI.
70 Quoted from petition in ibid., XXV.
77Henry G. to Gilbert Livingston, Mar. 4, 1751, Gilbert Livingston Papers.
124
one Fredericksburg farm in 1735; of William Duer selling another at L1200, probably five or six times the price he paid for it; of a mill and 100 acre farm in the same precinct renting at the very substantial sum of L200 per year. 78 The volume of sheriff's sales and mortgage foreclosures is diff- icult eren to estimate, but newspaper advertisements indicate it was increasing as late as 1788. 79
If the outcry over such conditions was not greater, it was due in part to the "safety valve" of the frontier. Samuel Munroe and William Prendergast carried their grievances out of the county, and so did countless others who had followed them in the pre-Revolutionary tenant riots. In 1783 and 1784, 1501 Dutchess petitioners - well over 20 per cent of the county's adult males - asked the legislature for frontier townships, not for "land jobbing" but for immediate settlement. 30 Hopefully the preceding chapters have shown that the internal class con- flict of the Becker-Beard thesis was real and continuous in Revolutionary Dutchess County. Had it not been for the access1- bility after 1783 of the frontier, the struggle over who should rule at home might well have had a different ending.
7John McAulay to James Mckesson, Dec. 24, 1785, Mckesson Papers, N. - Y. H. S .; Udny Hay to William Duer, June 26, 1784, Duer Papers, N. - Y. H. S. ; advertisement in New York Daily Adver- tiser, Jan. 3, 1786. The price Duer paid for the farm he sold in 1784 can be guessed as follows. The average size of farm was 1-200 acres (see above, n. 59). The price paid for confis- cated farms tended to run under bl per acre: thus 38,000 acres of Roger Morris went for L24,000 ( "Abstract of sales of forfeited lands, belonging once to Roger Morris, ' Assembly Papers, XXV).
79 Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 21.
Petitions of Oct. 23, 1783 and Jan. 7, 1784, Senate Leg- islative Papers, IX. The county's white population between 16 and 60 was 6,973 in 1786 (New York Daily Advertiser, Dec. 26, 1786).
125
Conclusion
The confiscation of Loyalist land in Dutchess County was forced by popular pressure from tenants as well as by the necessities of financing the war. Although confiscation affected only the Tory landlords of south Dutchess and not the Whig landlords of northern Dutchess, although speculators obtained part of the land at the initial sales and more of 1: later, nonetheless the confiscation permanently altered the balance of power in the county. The tone of south and central Dutchess was set after the Revolution by the free- hold farmer: the "wealthy husbandzan" who, as Gouverneur Morris described him, worked a 200 acre freehold with his son and two hired laborers, possessed eicht horses and six- ๗ ) teen head of cattle, and had a house with fourteen windows. No longer did the atmosphere of landlordism hang over the county like a heavy cloud. Fifty years later a Livingston told the inquiring Alexis De Tocqueville that after the Revo- lution "the strength of Democracy was so paramount that no one attempted to struccle a ainst it. 4 .82
Not that the Revolution wiped out tenancy in Cutchess completely, as several county historians assert. 33 The sur- vival of Dutchess landlordism after the Revolution is illus-
BILetter No. 1 "To the Inhabitants of America, ' n.d., Gouverneur Morris Papers, Columbia U.
32 Alexis De Tocqueville, Journey to America, ed. J. ?. Mayer (New Haven, 1900), 20.
=3Thus Mccracken, Old Dutchess Forever, 425, 430, 433, and H. W. Reynolds, "The Story of Dutchess County, " D. C.F. s., Yearbook, XIII (1933), 32.
126
trated by that hardy perennial, Robert G. Livingston. During the Revolution, Robert G. was a Tory sympathizer and carried on business somewhat gingerly, collecting his rents by news- paper advertisements. 34 His son, Henry, wrote to his ne- phew, Gilbert (who transacted the clan's legal business ), that several suits involving tenants were "rather disagreeable [and] I would not wish to have any concern in it at these times. 125 With the coming of peace, however, father and son
perfunctorily took the oath of loyalty, 86 and resumed their customary manner. Their letters of the 1790's bristle with such phrases as: "I must order him to be arrested please to write him a line threaten him perhaps that may prevail on him to do something, 1 and: "Poppy desired me to turn him off as he used him ill by sending hiz insolent messages such as re- fusing him rent and saying he would pay to the King etc. etc. " On August 5, 1792, Henry Livingston would feast five hundred of his southeast Dutchess neichbors on roast ox to celebrate the ratification of the United States Constitution.
Thus post-war Cutchess presented "a checkered pattern of land tenure with numerous leaseholds interspersed among the
84See above, ... 2.
85Henry G. Livingston to Gilbert Livingston, Aug. 1, 1782, Gilbert Livingston Papers.
30 Same to same, Oct. 15, 1782, 1bid.
37 Same to game, Feb. 1, 1735, and Robert G. Livingston to Gilbert Livingston, Oct. 23, 1735, ibid,
38 McCracken, Old Dutchess Forever, 32.
127
90
predominant freeholds. m=9 The county's stormy days were over. South Dutchess would vote Clintonian and north Dut- chess Federalist through the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson, but there were no tenant risings in Dutchess in the tin horns and calico riots of the 1840's. By then, the incorrigible pre-Revolutionary tenants whom a British captain had called "levellers by principle # 91 had been transformed into the sturdy freeholders of blithe Dutchess. The continuing possi- bility of movement to the frontier seems to have assuaged what frictions still existed after 1793.
The essentially different nature of the post-Revolutionary scene was not immediately ap arent to contemporaries. Looking out over the sea of post-Revolutionary politics in 1782, Robert A. Livingston's brother-in-law wrote him: 'This state has a strong Democratic Spirit prevailing that will some day not far off Five a stab to its happiness The people . want nothing but to be a little more impoverished to prepare them for it. The first stroke would be at the Tenanted es- tates. $92
39David Maldw:n Ellis, Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson- Mohawk Region, 1790-1950 (Ithaca, 1940), 28. See to the same effect, Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, o. The electoral census of 1790 lists 1, 115 tenants in Dutchess County. 30 See Mccracken, Old Dutchess Forever, 447, 454, 472. 71-Callaghan ed., Documentary History of New York, III, 595-596. 32 .-; Thomas Tillotson to Robert A. Livingston, June 17, 1782, Robert A. Livingston Papers.
128
CHAPTER VI
STALEMATE: 1781-1783
The years between Yorktown and evacuation (October 1781- November 1783) were a period of stalemate between the now clearly distinct and antagonistic wings of the whig party. In the spring of 1720 it seemed for a moment that the Continental Congress might move into the centralized economic regulation which characterized the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution. Instead, eight days after the New York bill for immediate sale of confiscated Loyalist land, Congress devalued the Continental Currency and embarked on the conservative program of financial measures: devaluation, impost, and national bank rather than orice regulation, confiscation and paper money. - The economic and political measures pushed through by the conservatives in 1737-1733 and the first Washington administration were matured 2 in all essentials by the end of the Revolutionary War. In early 1733, a combination of Congressional conservatives (notably the New Yorkers Gouverneur Morris and Hamilton) and Army officers ( including the erstwhile New York radical, Alexander McDougall) very nearly engineered a Cromwellian coup to enact the conserva-
-A full account of the conservative financial program 1s now available in E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse, Ch. o and 334-335.
2 'As Merrill Jensen, contrary to John Fiske, has long in- sisted. See Jensen's "The Idea of a National Government During the Revolution, " Political Science Quarterly, LVIII (1943), 356- 379.
129
tive program with the leverage of army grievances. But this program, too, failed to materialize, frustrated (as will appear) as much by the disinclination of the common soldier as by the patriotism of General Washington.
In New York, too, the second half of the war was a pe- riod of confusion and lack of clear direction. Price-fixing, having been blocked at a national level, proved ineffective as a merely local measure and faded out of politics. Confis- cation too was discredited by an awareness that "like many other of our Laws [ it] had been applied to purposes entirely ilfferent from, if not opposite to the Design of it. '3 Radi - cal Whigs, we shall see, carried on confiscation quietly and effectively by control of the machinery for taxation.
But 1: the radicals, after 1779-1730, no longer had a plan, they still retained the power. Early in the war radi- calism had been strongest in Congress, conservatism in the states. Now matters were reversed, and conservatives like Robert R. Livingston could only attempt to undo at Philadel- phia the damage perpetrated at Poughkeepsie and Albany: central government, as Ferguson puts it, became for the conservatives "a refuge against majority rule. : 4 In July 1792, the New York conservatives ( Schuyler drafting the resolution, and Hamilton
3John Holt to John Lamb, June 10, 1781, Lamb Papers. The letter goes on: "Thus have a great Part of the Estates which were in the Nature of a Bank Security to this State, been squandered away to the advantage of a few Harpies who prey upon the Vitals of the State, and leave the Soldiers unredressed, and dissatisfied. "
4 Ferguson, Power of the Purse, 337. For Livingston's changing attitude, see Dangerfield, Chancellor Livingi con, Part II, Chapter IV.
130
lobbying it through) actually persuaded the state legislature to pass a resolution calling for a national convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. 5 But this was the hich-water-mark of conservative influe .: ce in the New York legislature during the second half of the war. More often, Schuyler (as his son-in-law put it) was "exposed to the mor- tification of seeing important measures patronised by him · miscarry. "
In the following chapter the ebb and flow of this essen- tially stalemated struggle will be blocked out, but only in rough outline. These involutions of state and national poli- tics are not the central concern of the present study. They must be glanced at, however, in order to understand the tran- sition from the years 1777-1780, when the radicals rode high, to the years after 1783 when a conservative and nationalist current steadily gathered force.
1780-1781
Abraham Yates, Jr., the leading Anti-Federalist pamph- leteer of New York, later charged that from the moment the French treaty released conservatives from "apprehension about the Event of the Controversy" - that is, from early 1778 on - , they set shout planning to dominate and transform the national government. 7 This dating seems too early. As late as March
See Thomas Cochran, New York in the Confederation (Phila- phia, 1931), 137-138.
6 Alexander Hamilton to Robert Morris, Aug. 15, 1782, Sam- ilton Papers, Columbia U.
7 "Essays on Various Political Subjects, ' Yates Papers, 1. Y. P. L.
131
1781, Robert 3. Livingston wrote Philip Schuyler: "Have you devised any plan to extricate us from our present difficul- t1087 or are we still to blunder on without object & without System?ǻ w When the two most powerful New York conservatives expressed bewilderment, lesser men could hardly have had a surer sense of purpose. "It would be the extreme of vanity in us, " Hamilton wrote in July, "not to be sensible, that we began this revolution with very vague and confined notions of the practical business of government. '9
Among the vague and confined notions which Hamilton set himself to combat was the visceral opposition to government economic intervention of such conservatives as Gouverneur Mor- ris. Hitherto it had been radicals, not conservatives, who favored a managed economy. Marinus Willett, for instance, wrote to John Jay in 1777 that he approved New York's embargo on the export of flour. "I am not unaware, " Willett explained, "of that common argument that trade will regulate itself [ but] a virtuous private trader appears to me as rare in this day as the Phoenix; trade is got into the hands of I don't know who : but am sure it is not in the hands of men of public virtue. "-
Only as the economy began to drift toward chaos and as conservatives began to envision the possibility that they could control Congress, did men like Morris heed Hamilton's mercantilist arguments. Hamilton's "Continentalist" essays explicitly in- "Livingston to Schuyler, Mar. 28, 1781, Schuyler Papers. 9"The Continentalist No. I", Papers of Hamilton, II, 649. 1Millett to Jay, Dec. 17, 1777, Jay Papers, Columbia U.
132
voked the example of Colbert in maintaining that governmental power, while dangerous, should not for that reason be spurned. Public banks, for example, "like all other good things are subject to abuse and when abused become pernicious, " Hamil- ton wrote to Robert Morris in April 1781. "But no wise states- man will reject the good from an apprehension of the 11l." .11
In the troubled eighteen months between the fall of Charleston (May 1780) and the triumph of Yorktown, Hamilton, Livingston, Schuyler all bordered on calling for dictatorial moves in the national Congress. We must, Schuyler wrote Duane, "lodge dictatorial powers either in the Commander in Chief, or in him, conjointly with a small committee of Congress"; he went on to suggest names for the committee. In November 1780, 12 Schuyler suggested a dictatorial central committee for New York as well. 13 Hamilton told the same correspondent that Cor- gress had been too literal in observing the letter of its in- structions : "they should have considered themselves as vested with full power to preserve the republic from harm. #14 Some- time in 1780, Robert R. Livingston as chairman of a committee of the Continental Congress for Increasing the powers of Con- gress used identical language in calling on that body to assume
-- Hamilton to Vorris, Apr. 30, 1781, Papers of Hamilton, II, 017-613.
12Philip Schuyler to James Duane, May 13, 1760, Duane Papers. 13Robert R. Livingston to same, Nov. 12, 1780, 1bid,
14 Alexander Hamilton to same, Sept. 3, 1780, Papers of Hamilton, II, 401. Later in this long and important letter (ibid., II, 407), Hamilton presents a constitutional convention as a second and probably more acceptable means of accomplishing the same end: more power for Congress.
----
133
all necessary powers "by the authority which the nature of the trust reposed in them vests with them. .15 This language was far removed from the stolid opposition to energy in government still expressed in February 1781 by Gouverneur Morris. "Re- strictions of Commerce," Morris wrote to Livingston, "injure the State without serving the general Cause and undue Exertions of Government like the Convulsions of Delirium exhaust the Patient in unproductive Efforts. "lo
The temptation to effect a conservative coup d'etat passed. In the spring of 1733 it would present itself again, and again Just fail of execution. The impulse was neither more nor less Vicious than the compa. able revolutionary centralization of the French Jacobins. Its motivation was not narrowly self-interested or economically motivated in the Beardian sense. On the con- trary, Tom Paine, the voice of the Revolution, quite agreed that the crisis of 1779-1730 called for centralized government in the hands of businessmen. "While the war was carried on by emis- sions at the pleasure of Congress, " Paine wrote in June 1780, "any body of men might conduct public business, and the poor were of equal use in government with the rich. But where the means must be drawn from the country the case becomes altered, and unless the wealthier part throw in their ald, public mea- sures must go heavily on. "17
15Quoted in Dangerfield, Chancellor Livingston, 124.
loMorris to Livingston, Feb. 21, 1781, Robert a. Living- ston Papers.
17. Thomas Paine to Joseph Reed, June 4, 1780, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philly Foner ( New York, 1945), II, 1186.
134
If conservatives did not drive harder for dictatorial power in 1730-17-1, it was in part because they seemed to be accomplishing their objectives by other means. Abraham Yates, in his manuscript history of the movement for the United
States Constitution, 18 summarized conservative thinking at the time as follows:
Some were of opinion that Congress like the Decemvri among the Romans ought without any other ceremony to assume the powers of government . . and make use of the army to enforce it. Others preferred the doing of it more circuitously by geting Congress invested with the appointment of some principal officers in Each state, an Impost, a Pole Tax, a Land Tax, an Excise upon all spiri- tuous Liquors all to be collected by officers in the appointment of and under the Laws of Congress.
in view of the fact that Yates presumably had no access to Hamilton's private correspondence, this was an astonishingly accurate estimate. Devaluation in 1780 and still more Robert Morris' appointment as Financier in 1751 must have appeared to Hamilton and his associates &s giant steps toward centrali- cation by the second, "more circuitous" route.
The New York conservatives played a key role in bringing about the Morris appointment. "Finance my friend," Gouverneur Morris exclaimed to Jay in 1781. 'The whole of what remains in the American Revolution grounds there. The New Yorkers 8.419 had shown their awareness of this for the previous three years. Regulating our finances, Gouverneur Morris wrote to Livingston in 1778, "is an object which I shall not lose sight of. 120
18. As cited above, n. 7
19 Gouverneur Morris to John Jay, Mar. 31, 1761, Jay Papers, Columbia U.
20Gouverneur Morris to Robert R. Livingston, Aug. 28, 1778, Livingston-Bancroft Transcripts, N. Y.P. L.
135
James Duane, that 'intriguing industrious body" as his 21 friend Vorris called bim, was a particularly central figure in the New Yorkers' efforts to strengthen continental fi- nances. "I was obliged to secure my place at the Treasury, " Duane wrote to Livingston early in 1779, "no other member having knowledge of our money matters sufficiently comprehen- sive. " He continued in the same letter: "Let the present debt be properly financed and the good Sense as well as the monied Interest of America will be one our Side. " Later, Side . 8 2 when Morris' appointment had been secured, Duane called his Ferime "the plan for the Administration of our Affairs, on which I hazarded my political Reputation. .23 Hamilton, of course, had been recommending both the plan and the man to anyone who would listen. 24
Thus in national affairs during 1?30-1781, conservative businessmen moved into the seats of power. The change made for & certain brisk efficiency. When in May 1780 money was needed for the army, a subscription of patriotic businessmen (which, symbolically, both Tom Paine and Robert R. Livingston 11 claimed to have suc.ested">) filled the zap. Again, after Morris' appointment in February 1781, he wrote a revealing letter to Philip Schuyler. I need, the Financier told the
"-Morris to Livingston, Sept. 22, 1778, Robert R. Living- ston Papers.
22Duane to Livingston, Jan. 3, 1779, 1bid,
23 Duane to George Washington, Aug. 7, 1782, Juane Papers. See also in this collection: Cuane to Mrs. Duane, May 26, 1779; Schuyler to Duane, Dec. lo, 1779; Livingston to Duane, Mar. 13 and Nov. 12, 1780.
24 Papers of Hamilton, II, 409, 605-606.
25Livingston to Schuyler, June 17, 1780, Bancroft Tran- scripts, Schuyler, N. Y. P.L.
136
Patroon, one thousand barrels of flour for the new campaign; I assume your credit as a private gentleman is good for this amount; proceed accordingly, and bill me. 11 me.26 By thus harness- ing the energies of private enterprise, supplies were obtained for the campaign of Yorktown.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.