 Chapter 20 The Goose is Plucked It is 1846 and the morning of the 4th of July, Thomas-Anges Devere wrote in his journal, the politicians have entire control and I am not invited to speak at the celebration twelve miles from Albany, hard driven to get the paper out. He was at work in the anti-rinter office early that morning when two or three young men entered. Are you going to the celebration, one of them asked? Yes, I'll start by nine o'clock, he said. Don't trouble about a conveyance, we have a carriage and we'll call for you if you say so." Devere agreed and worked on, but waited in vain until he came to the conclusion that they were trying to deceive him and keep him away from the meeting. At that thought he closed his shop and set out for New Scotland on foot, walking across lots, through fields that rose and fell with the wavy hills and shadowed glens, toward the hazy outline of the Helderbergs. As he swung along he stopped to eat wild strawberries showing red in the grass. He was in no hurry and he had much to ponder over. He was at a new crisis, and glad to feel earth under his feet, for the love of nature was still the strongest force in his life. He knew why he had not been invited to join the Albany County Anti-Renters Observance of Independence Day, the first time since 1842. The politicians were trying to get rid of him. When the anti-rinters had become strong enough to swing the balance of political power in the state, orders had gone out to local politicians to take over, and Whigs and Hunker Democrats had wormed themselves into the movement. Seeing Devere in their way, they had taken away his newspaper and told him to get out of Albany. But he had started his own paper and stood his ground for a year, in the belief that there could be no glory except in an emancipated working-class. To the sordid politicians, as he called them, he knew that he seemed a stubborn, bull-headed, disorganizing evil. Devere turned aside to a path that led into the woods. The shade was cool and the damp forest air was sweet, cleansed by a shower the day before. A partridge thundered from the underbrushes he passed. Thinking back, he now saw Ira Harris as a treacherous opportunist, willing to sacrifice a man's basic rights for his own political profit. In a sense the man seemed more vicious than the feudal barons Devere felt, for they had always frankly exploited the people. But Harris tried by doling out half-measures to keep their faith and at the same time satisfy their masters. Harris could not forget the dazzling prospect of political power. Although he favoured free soil and progressive labour legislation, he dared not advocate them for fear of frightening away his industrial, commercial and financial support. Devere raged at the duplicity of Harris's repeated warnings to the anti-rinters. The work of reform in which you are engaged involves a question too broad for any platform of party politics, interests too sacred to be committed to any political organisation, but which address themselves to the whole people, to every patriot. Harris simply wanted to keep the fat goose of anti-rent votes to pluck at will, if opposition to this conspiracy against the farmers made Devere a disorganising evil he was proud of it. The old parties were based on sand in Devere's opinion, and their lack of realism was a threat to social stability and progress. The Whig protection of industry would bring monopolies, speculation and showy prosperity, an end in overproduction, depression and national and individual bankruptcy. On the other hand the free trade offered by the Democrats was a doctrine fraught with ruin, placing no restriction upon ambition and cupidity. Devere was convinced that equal rights could be secured only through a new party that would create a landed democracy, elevate labour and labouring classes, subordinate capital to industry, and equalise the compensation for time and labour in the varied departments of life. He bitterly resented Ira Harris's efforts to undermine his prestige with the farmers, and to brand him as an interloper and intruder in the anti-rent movement. Devere had come to the farmers when anti-rentism was weak, and many of Harris's latter-day supporters were doing their best to choke it off before its voice could be heard beyond the Helderbergs. Then with Dr. Bouton and a few idealists he had done more than any other man to strengthen the movement. He had kept his pledge with the farmers, helping them in their local war, in exchange for their support of free soil. He had never asked any return for himself as an individual. Now Harris, in trying to remove the stain from his own hands, was attempting to brand him a charlatan. With such thoughts as these running through his mind, Devere arrived at the celebration grounds under the brow of the Helderbergs in New Scotland. The speeches were not yet finished, and his four years of work among the farmers had been too important, generous, and self-sacrificing for Lawrence Van Dusen to let him go unrecognised. Van Dusen called upon him to speak, and if the Helderbergs did not tremble that afternoon it was not Thomas Devere's fault. One of the mountain towns let us perform the mission to which we are appointed. Let us this day renew the pledge that you war not only for the freedom of your own fields, but for the freedom of the wide field of the whole republic. Tell the world that at the bottom of the local struggle lies a principle as deep as the foundations of the earth, broad as the earth's surface, enduring in its application as the earth itself. On a day like this will our sympathies not go forth to the oppressed, the houseless, and the degraded? Shall the cry of their distress go up from the cellar and the garret? Shall the poverty of our brothers, the rags of their wives, the hunger of their children find no answering sympathy from the men who first flung to the breeze the standard of man's earthly redemption? Shall our watch light go forth a beacon and a hope to all nations on earth? Or shall it smoke and flicker and perish where it arose among the Helderberg mountains? Let us bind together the men of the east and the west, of the city and the country. If the Boston men had struggled for themselves only, if their whole energies had been confined to a repeal of the Boston Harbour Bill, if they had been desirous of making their own peace regardless of the welfare of the country, who would have helped them, and what could they have effected, nothing. But when the voice of patriotism went forth, when it echoed over the middle states and into the Carolinas, when the struggle ceased to be a local one and became national, the fate of despotism was decided. Devere continued his impassioned address for an hour, pressing the farmers to choose between a long-range crusade for reform and the short-range program urged upon them by spineless politicians. He left the platform more than ever determined to see the fight through. He went up on the mountain at once and accompanied part of the time by Alvin Beauvais, journeyed from town to town, stressing the need for a meeting of national reformers and anti-rentors to explore the possibilities of a national free soil party, into which the abolitionists too could be drawn, to merge the strength of all the progressive forces. Patronus Greeley gave his strong private approval, but refused to support the move publicly until the actual merger had been achieved. He was too cautious to sacrifice his link to Wigory until a third party was strong enough to ensure his political survival. Patronery is dead, Devere kept telling the farmers, dead as a doornail. Not all the quack doctors in the country could blow life into it again if they were puffing at it till their sides grew sore. The only consolation we have is to know that it will not long remain above ground. In fact the only fear is now that Patronery will be buried out of sight, forgotten, before that great national measure is carried out which will free the entire Republic, and preserve it free in all future time from the curse which we are now getting rid of in New York State. Politicians envied him the ability to mingle with back country farmers as one of them. After speaking at a meeting he would go home with a farmer for the night, making himself one of the family, amusing the children with tall tales about the bad boys of Donegal. An entry in his journal tells how one morning he went to the woods with his host with a gun over one shoulder and an axe over the other. Finding no game they took to axe and wedge, and let nobody hereafter tell us a willing man cannot hew down a hemlock tree and split it up into stakes and firewood, he wrote. Each night he spoke at a new meeting, and the next day, if there was time, he worked in another farmer's field. At several meetings Devere's overzealous friends, as he modestly called them, voted to consider anti-rent and national reform identical. At one meeting Abraham Onderdonk, annoyed by Harris's treatment of Devere, introduced a resolution calling Devere's removal from the free-holder a gross usurpation of the farmer's rights, contrary to the wish of the vast majority. It was unanimously approved. Meeting after meeting cheered Devere. When he returned to Albany he had gained not only widespread support for free soil, but at least one personal endorsement. Resolved that the anti-rentors of Rensselierville, in public meeting assembled, do present to our brethren throughout the county of Albany, Thomas A. Devere as a proper and deserving man to receive their support and ours for member of Congress at the approaching election. Has any man labored in our cause? He has labored more. Has any man sacrificed? He has sacrificed more. Has any man produced results? He has produced greater. For this, therefore, and in consideration of his eminent ability to discharge the duties of the station, we make this presentment of our first choice. Ira Harris, meanwhile, had been grooming John Slingerland, a Whig who as a Van Rensselier tenant had known what it was to pay wheat rent and stand hat in hand awaiting orders for his day's labour as a manor-surf, and had not hesitated to share the platform with Devere and Beauvais. Devere was so upset by Devere's activities that he had Alexander Johnson issue a warning. If the anti-rentors court defeat and disgrace let them nominate Thomas A. Devere, the freeholder would publish none of the resolutions. Devere had organized a national reform association in Albany with Hugh Scott as president. Scott's willingness to serve was a singular triumph for Devere, as he was a Jeffersonian Democrat in excellent standing, and had been organizer and secretary of the first anti-rent meeting in 1839 and president of the First State Convention in 1845. To offset Devere's advantage the Whig anti-rentors with Harris as their spokesman moved with the skill of old political generals to disorganize the tenants. More evil than good would come of anti-rent association with agrarians they predicted darkly. There is a violent prejudice against the national reformers in many parts of the state. We shall incur less odium, we shall meet less opposition, we shall accomplish more if we act singly and apart. When Alvin Beauvais explained, frankly, that the chief object of Devere's proposed free soil meeting was to test the anti-rent leaders and induce them to speak out one way or the other, the freeholder demanded angrily, what right have they to question our leaders, what right have they to try them by any test? We advise all anti-rentors to stay away. True, the national reformers had given support to anti-rentism when it was most needed, but is that reason why we should amalgamate with them? They were masters of mere clap-trap phrases and their programme was a half-formed disjointed caliban of a moon-struck doctor. The proposed free soil meeting was a trick to entrap the anti-rentors. Thomas Devere had spread the net, aided by his co-worker in mischief Alvin Beauvais. Free soil resolutions had been thrust upon the people and allowed to pass without any opposition. Not a line about these meetings addressed by Devere and Beauvais would appear in the freeholder. When the abolitionist patriot, defending the free soil proposal, charged that land reform was being betrayed by lying deceptive wiggory, the freeholder leaped to the defense of the wigs, attributing to the patriot vulgar taste and hateful envious passions. Devere fought gallantly and tirelessly, but more than energy and determination was needed to unite the anti-rentors with the other reform forces. Ira Harris offered immediate success and political power. Devere could promise only struggle, a clear conscience, and a chance of ultimate victory. The free soil meeting fizzled out. Afterward, by offering political endorsement to a few carefully picked anti-rentors, good friends of Thomas Devere, like old Lawrence Van Dusen, loved as the George Washington of anti-rent, Ira Harris gained control of the Albany County anti-rent nominating convention and unseated Devere and Hugh Scott by refusing to admit contending delegations from the city of Albany. Harris had carefully measured his strength, and although he had a majority, his margin was slim. John Slingerland, with his good anti-rent record, gained the congressional nomination by only four votes out of a total of forty-four. Lawrence Van Dusen fared a little better, winning the nomination for county clerk by seven votes. The hardest blow to Devere's hopes was still to come. Traditionally the county meeting was followed by local meetings at which delegates to the state anti-rent convention were named. Harris knew that if these town nominations were permitted, Devere would be assured of many sympathetic delegates from Albany County. At the end of the county meeting, after many farmers had started back to their farms for the evening chores, Harris's friends pushed through a resolution designating delegates to the state convention, thus Ira Harris triumphantly gained control of the powerful Albany County block. Now his only problem was to keep the tenants in line until election. The freeholder warned them unceasingly against Devere's influence. We are aware that exertions will be made to get up split tickets. We know enthusiastic meetings can be got up, but beware of traitors. An evil was abroad among the farmers, which real friends of anti-rentism, the Ira Harris Whigs, were in a position to eradicate. This evil is disunion, and its persevering progenitor we believe to be the restless spirit who conducts the anti-renter. And then, directly to Thomas Devere, subordination is a feature in the tactics of anti-rentism which deserves the careful attention of all volunteers. You were carefully reminded of the importance of this during your brief sojourn with the freeholder. You have been told by the people of the county that they would much rather dispense with your services. The citizens of Albany told you the same thing, respecting that scurvy illegitimate the Albany workman. Your retreat from the old world was a mere accidental escape. Your next expedition may be a good deal less fortunate. It was at this juncture that bands began to blare whenever Devere attempted to speak. At every meeting and convention, and I attended all within reach, I was met by a storm of sordid politicians he wrote in his autobiography. They went to the extreme of ordering their band to strike up to drown out my voice. That voice so broke that for days after I could not speak louder than a whisper. At a large protest meeting on the Helderbergs he was compelled to give up after fifteen minutes of desperate effort to make himself heard. Though the editor must have known that the band had been dispatched for that very purpose, the freeholder rebuked Devere unctuously. You petulantly told the veterans of the mountain towns that if that was the highest tribute of respect that they could pay you would not address them. You have time after time obtruded yourself into the meetings of the farmers. You have continued to persist in your obsequious course until you have entirely exhausted their indulgent patience. They have said that it would be expedient for them if you would go away, for if you go not away the comforter will not come. Deere described those days as an incredible and painful dream and the behavior of his foes as treason paralleled only by that of their great prototype Benedict Arnold, but he was not a man to give up easily. Party bigwigs across the nation were watching Silas Wright's political star when the New York State Democratic Convention in Syracuse renominated him on October 1st, 1846. The prestige of a second term as Governor of New York, added to the nationwide reputation he had gained in the United States Senate, would make him a powerful presidential contender in 1848. Already some newspapers had raised the right for President Banner. On the whole the Democrats were optimistic, as in spite of wrangling by the hunkers and the barn-burners the convention ended in good spirits and a feeling of cordiality. Seeing that the biggest obstacle to his re-election was anti-rentism, Wright appealed to Martin Van Buren for men sufficiently anti-renter and of sufficient intelligence and discretion to stump the tenant towns for support. Soon a Democratic drive was in full swing to capitalize on the farmers' resentment of Ira Harris's attempt to turn them into Whigs. At the Whig New York State Convention in Utica on September 23rd, Harris had taken over Whig leadership by dictating the gubernatorial nomination of John Young over Millard Fillmore. With his fat anti-rent goose, as Devere always called it, added to his own party strength, Harris held the controlling votes, and when he released them to Young on the third ballot he automatically inherited Thurlow Weed's mantle as party boss. Weed walked out of the convention, old-line Whigs were glum over Harris's coup. Even the choice of Hamilton Fish for Lieutenant Governor failed to mollify the conservatives. A considerable portion of the party cannot swallow Young, even with his fish-sauce, Bennett Pund in the New York Herald. They were afraid that Young was too much a man of the people. Only their alarm was unwarranted, for he stood halfway between the conservative and the radical elements of the party. His warmth for labour was genuine, but by no means a dominating force. He was ready to adjust his politics to events. Both Young and Wright had been asked to clarify their position on pardon for the anti-renturs. For months the farmers had sung lustily, our next chief magistrate shall be him who sets the prisoners free. Silas Wright would promise nothing, save that his duty should be discharged to the best of his ability. This non-committal statement was hailed by the Democrats as worthy of the man, worthy of the governor, but it was hardly calculated to deflect the artillery Ira Harris had trained against him. If Wright had held privately to his public repudiation of the vile means which demagogues employ to win public favour, he might have commanded respect for consistency, at least. Or had he publicly reversed himself and admitted his earlier error, his record would have been clear. In the final crisis, however, he lacked the courage either to be consistent or to confess. Without retreating an inch from his moral rejection of anti-rentism, he bartered behind closed doors, offering off-the-record pledges as a bribe for tenant votes. He pardoned young Anson Burrell, Silas Tompkins, and Charles Knapp, who had been sent to Sing Sing by Delhi Justice in May 1845, hoping, no doubt, that this would be taken as an indication of the consideration which the rest of the anti-rent prisoners might expect from him if re-elected. Having extended this left-handed sop to the tenants, he rushed to Alps to offer Mary Bouton his secret pledge of a pardon for her husband if she would persuade Big Thunder to support his re-election. Mary Bouton remembered sitting day after day, years it seemed to her, in the Columbia County Courthouse, her heart torn with helpless agony, while Silas Wright marshaled his power to destroy her husband. He could deny responsibility now, but his own party newspapers had ruthlessly assured the public that in the prosecution of Dr. Bouton Wright had used the full extent of his authority. The doctor himself had warned her that Silas Wright was his most bitter enemy. Unimpressed by the governor's promises, she told him that if he wanted her husband's support, he would have to ask him for it himself. She would not intercede for him. Wright then turned to Mary Bouton's father, Amasa Bailey, one of the leading citizens of Alps. Bailey was so bitter over Harris's tactics that he was glad of an opportunity to work against Harris's candidate, Chinwhisker John Young. Wright convinced Bailey that he did not wish the anti-rent nomination but only wanted to keep John Young from getting it. Governor Wright became sufficiently worried to swallow his pride and carry his candidacy directly to Clinton prison. In early October he wrote to the keeper, "'It is at length agreed that the comptroller and myself will make the promised visit to your prison.' He explained that he would not be able to wait until after election when John Van Buren could join him, as it will be too late in the season. It was the political season, not the early Adirondack winter, that accounted for the governor's haste, and the anti-rent prisoners at once saw through the move. In what Brisbane called chaste and elegant language, Wright told them that they were a class apart from the mass of convicts, that he did not look upon them as felons, but as political prisoners who had risen up against civil government. Among other things he said that in all civil commotions the innocent generally suffered the most. If I had heard this doctrine in Europe I would have thought it nothing strange, Brisbane wrote dryly, but to hear the American Cato defending it I thought it strange indeed. He told us he deeply sympathized with us, and that as soon as public opinion would justify him in liberating us he would gladly do it. But Wright got no endorsement from the skeptical prisoners. The anti-renters met in their second state convention at William Beardsley's in Albany on October 6, 1846. The meeting was small, only thirty-four delegates, as compared with the one hundred and fifty of the Great Burn Convention of 1845, but the once depraved and degraded anti-renters balanced the fortunes of the major parties in their hands. The tables had been turned. In other years they had had to beg for support. The only answer they got in those days was, go home you are a deluded people. Now the ableist wigs and Democrats were in their lobby ready to bargain for a nod of their approval. When the meeting opened Ira Harris was able to deny seats to Thomas Devere and his friends by forcing the convention to recognize his own block of delegates. Thus Harris not only controlled the vote of the large Albany County delegation, but he also had a letter from Dr. Smith A. Bouton, written from Clinton Prison, urging the endorsement of John Young, our warm advocate, and a letter from Young himself. Geneseo, 29 September 46. My dear sir, the convictions for offenses growing out of the manner difficulties have been generally, if not all of them, convictions for offenses quasi-political. It has been the practice, I believe, of all wise governments, when harmony has been restored in cases of rebellion or popular outbreak, to pardon the convicted, and by some general act of the government to protect offenders that had not been convicted. This seems to me to be a wise principle in the administration of government, and applicable, I think, to the offenses growing out of the manner difficulties. John Young. The letter was carefully worded, but it confirmed Harris's pledge to the tenants that his candidate would open the prison doors to all who have been convicted of any offense against the laws, no matter of what character, growing out of anti-rentism. Nevertheless, in the face of Silas Wright's behind-the-scenes activity, and the tenant's natural suspicion of Whig maneuvering, Ira Harris had hard work selling John Young to the thirty-four-minute Beardsley's. After four bitter hours they gave the candidate the endorsement, but a third of the delegates walked out when they learned the result of the vote. Men like Russell Doar, Burton Thomas, John Evans, editor of the Equal Rights Advocate, the Columbia County Anti-Rent Paper, and, of course, Amasa Bailey. Devere's anti-renter hastened to protest the endorsement. His God, he wrote, as his friends in the convention fought for an independent nomination, I will put some of them in possession of the facts before I leave, brief as will be my stay. He exposed the high-handed ruse by which Harris had captured the Albany County block. The Albany delegates were mere sheer, drummed-up party men, he said, and the true, the tried, the sterling men of the movement refused to consummate this regular swallow and rebelled against this wholesale transfer of anti-renters into the capacious maw of John Young. For a year Devere told his readers he had done little but grapple and tug and wrestle with the imposters who had seized on anti-rentism for the purpose of hugging it to death and laying its carcass as a sea-store to feed them on their political voyage. He confessed he had been no match for these wary and practiced old swordsmen, backed by a perfect organization made up of venal office-beggars. He had always considered the duel an inglorious one against a hundred snakes of every hue and color, and unless the tenants redeemed their political independence in this election he was ready to quit and permit the political knaves to swarm over the field of anti-rent as thick and pestilential as the frogs of Egypt. His high-flown editorial had some effect. A general meeting was called on the Helderbergs to demand the reopening of nominations. Ira Harris was too close to victory to permit this defiance, however, and when the meeting assembled all efforts of the anti-Harris farmers to speak were drowned by the blaring of a band. On October 22 the rebellious Nucleus held an uninterrupted meeting in Albany City Hall and organized all the progressive forces for a free soil ticket, which was unwittingly to pioneer for Martin Van Buren's third and unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1848. The Free Soil Convention was hopelessly late for the 1846 campaign, but its resolutions bespoke the rising anger of an independent yeomanry. The new party aimed to draw all honest patriots from the humbuggery, conservatism, and demagogism of the old parties. It called for abrogation of the feudal leases, freedom of the public domain, and laws equalizing the rewards of labour. Hugh Scott, who was elected president of the convention, traced the history of anti-rentism, which he said had not only vindicated its right to be heard, but combined within it a power capable of changing the political destiny of the state. This had no sooner been realized than men who traffic in votes set on foot a conspiracy by which they hoped to turn anti-rentism into the dry channel that leads to their own political mill. The plotters, he asserted, never came among the farmers, never assisted them, never spoke or wrote a word in their favour, until they were tempted by the advantage to themselves and their party. For Governor the Free Soilers nominated the Pamphleteer Socialist and Utopian Louis Masquerier, and for his running mate William Chaplin an abolitionist. Thomas Schaefer was nominated to oppose Ira Harris for state senator. A dirt farmer Schaefer had done able work as an anti-rent assemblyman in the last session of the legislature, but Harris had pushed him aside because he would not turn wig. John J. Gallup, who two years earlier had urged a joint program of national reform and anti-rentism, was nominated for the assembly. Devere received a token assembly nomination, but he spent his time campaigning for Gallup and Schaefer, who with their democratic support had some chance of success. Harris launched the campaign by reaching down into Columbia County to have John Evans removed as editor of the Equal Rights Advocate. This drives the last nail in Devereism and disorganization, wrote Evans's successor, a wig. Fears once entertained are banished now, the anti-rent party is safe. Yes, answered Devere in the anti-renter, safe to be used as a lever for their own destruction. Ira Harris unblushingly played a dual role in the campaign. In the up-rent districts he assured the voters that inside and out he was nothing but a wig, but in down-rent towns he was a thorough anti-renter. The freeholder, finding it harder and harder to defend the nomination of John Young, finally admitted that he was no anti-renter but only less objectionable than Silas Wright. Quite aware that the free soil ticket could make only the weakest showing, and trying desperately to head off a Harris victory, Thomas Devere made the error which has tripped up many a reformer. He allowed his wish to best the enemy within the anti-rent party to become stronger than his determination to defeat its outright opponent. For some time he held to his stand that a vote for Silas Wright and company would be as damaging to the tenant cause as a vote for John Young, but later he began to fill the columns of the anti-renter with letters supporting Wright. Many, published without an identifying signature, bore the unmistakable imprint of his own phraseology. One such letter assured his readers that Young would not be any more likely to free the prisoners than Wright, not at all so likely. Mr. Young can only exist by the backing and support of a very aristocratic body of men in New York. If these men say no, as they will say, Mr. Young would not dare to set one of them free. Mr. Wright, on the contrary, is a man of such influence as to be able in some degree to lead his party, and if he determines to act in this matter there will exist no power behind the throne greater than the throne itself. Toward the end of the bitter fight, Devere frankly asked for votes for Silas Wright. If John Young and the Slate are successful this journal goes down, he wrote. If John Young and the Slate are beaten down goes that skulking, navish free-holder. Horace Greeley observed in the Tribune that Thomas Devere, aided by extreme radicals, was doing his utmost to re-elect Silas Wright by holding anti-rent meetings to denounce and execrate John Young. Greeley, who roamed the fields of radicalism at will during the off-months but regularly returned to the wig-fold at election time, described Devere as a well-known and thorough agrarian and the free-holder as moderate. He neglected to say, as he once had, that Devere's was the only reliable anti-rent paper or that he himself was an agrarian and had told Devere and Beauvais informally that he favoured the free soil-party. Ira Harris, who alone stood in the way of such a party, was at the moment in Greeley's estimation one of the purest and ablest men in the state and one of the truest and wisest of our statesmen. Devere answered Greeley by denying that he was campaigning to secure the triumph of Wright, unless spelt R.I.G.H.T. He was doing it for the purpose of effecting all I may under the circumstances to avert the consequences of the vile treachery and corruption that has been practised. As he ranged the manor towns, battling against Higuery, everywhere he found resentment against John Young and Ira Harris, but Young's promise of pardon for the prisoners was too strong an argument. From Delhi, the classic ground of log-pen prisons and pitch-fork guards, Devere sent his last appeal to the Helderberg farmers. Men of the mountain towns, I feel lonely and almost sad when I reflect that I am among strangers, that I am not where I can grasp the hand of an old fellow soldier in every man I meet, as I could do when I was among you. But we will meet again, meet before long, meet as brothers, once certainly. But remember that whether we continue to meet and commune together and labour together will depend upon your action at the ballot box. Citizens may so shape themselves in this county that I will not be able to meet with you before the election. Lest they should, I will write down what I think the honour of yourself and the good of the cause demand. Mr. Lawrence Van Dusen, Mr. Valentine Treadwell, and Mr. Robert Watson, have each of them done things which they should not have done. But after all their faults are of a venal nature compared to the deep plottings that stole the free-holder, that tried to dress us all up in a dish to be swallowed by John Young. But the issues were hopelessly confused for the average tenant. Readers of the political press found them none too clear, either. In New York City the Whig papers damned Silas Wright as an anti-rinter. With equal disregard for fact the democratic press laid the identical lash to John Young. As defeat loomed the democratic journals found themselves in the ridiculous position of castigating the Harris faction as radicals who had encouraged tenant rioting in the face of opposition from Thomas Angel Devere, who the Democrats now found had zealously urged the mitigation of the evils of the leasehold system without violence, bloodshed, or anarchy. An editor of the strongly democratic Brooklyn Eagle, Walt Whitman, who now himself the son of Hardy Farmers, called the anti-rinters the most violent faction which has disgraced the state since laws were heard of in this hemisphere. It was the duty of true patriots to vote for Silas Wright, uphold the dignity of the law, and defeat the Whigs who were openly in the field with a candidate whose hope and success mainly depends upon his supposed sympathy with a spirit of social disorganization and rebellion. John Young had been chosen to win the votes of this mammon of unrighteousness, let the people of the state themselves judge Whitman urged whether the Indians shall again rise with their fiendish cries, their fires blaze forth anew, and the blood of legal functionaries again be shed. The future good-grey poet was not yet ready to say, as he did later, that the true American free men holds in reserve for ever a stern power, which though it lie asleep for scores in fifties of years because no occasion compels it, must never be given up altogether, if you want to know what it is I will tell you in plain terms it is the iron arm of rebellion. With his wife by his side Governor Wright received the election reports at the home of a friend in Albany. As the returns swelled against him his companions could detect in his round florid face not the least appearance of mortification or disappointment. It was a complete rout for Silas Wright. The tower of strength of 1844 fell before John Young's majority of more than eleven thousand. The defeat was even more humiliating to Wright because Addison Gardner, his running mate, who was endorsed by the anti-rentors, won by thirteen thousand votes, polling nine thousand more than Young who headed the winning Whig ticket. It was not the Whig party that won the election, but the anti-rentors, and with the exception of John J. Gallup, a Devere man, Harris picked anti-rentors at that. Harris himself was elected to the State Senate and John Slingerland to Congress, but there was no real Whig majority in the state. In Albany after the election former Governor Seward wrote in his journal, Today I have been at St. Peter's and heard one of those excellent discourses of Dr. Potter. There was such a jumble of wrecks of party in the church that I forgot the sermon and fell to moralizing on the vanity of political life. Well halfway down the West Isle sat Silas Wright, wrapped in a coat so tightly buttoned to the chin, looking all philosophy which is hard to affect and harder to attain. On the East side sat Daniel D. Barnard, upon whom anti-rent had piled Ossa, while Pellion only has rolled upon Wright. In the middle of the church was Croswell, hunker editor of the Argus, who seemed to say to Wright, You are welcome to the gallows you erected for me. On the opposite side sat John Young, the saved among the lost politicians. He seemed complacent and satisfied. Silas Wright may have looked all philosophy, but his experience had been bitter. He wrote to Martin Van Buren that he could say with perfect truth that he felt no shock of disappointment, but when he was asked to explain his defeat his reply was revealingly tart. I have neither time nor disposition to speak of the causes of our overthrow, he said. The time will come when they must be spoken of. It will be a painful duty and one which I do not want to perform. The freeholder explained it simply in its parody, Cato's speech to Prince John, Had I but served the state with half the zeal I served thee, it would not in my age have left me naked to my enemies. On November 6th Wright wrote to a political friend, I have no time to write a letter, you see we are overthrown. The papers will in due time give the public the influences which have produced this result. You will understand them when I say they were the same which defeated Mr. Van Buren in 1840. Antirentism became an instrument, but the conservativism of 1837-38 was the agent. I tremble for the consequences to the union of this universal triumph of the Whigs in the state. I go to my quiet home in January, and it really seems to me that I can enjoy private life, freed as I shall be from the perplexities and responsibilities of public office. Amasa Bailey had kept his bargain by campaigning for Silas Wright, but when he called upon the Governor at the Executive Chamber for his promised pardon of Dr. Bouton, Wright refused it. John Young can pardon your son-in-law, he said. Thomas Devere was at last discouraged and beaten. As he had warned he was ready to quit. It is November and I am without resources, he wrote in his journal. I am driven to an extremity that I will not write down here. He had spent his money, his energy, his time, in a hopeless struggle to convince the farmers that they were appointed to save the Republic from oppressors. A friend in Williamsburg sent him money to carry him through, and when it was gone he wrote for more. Send me six hundred dollars, or five hundred, which you please, and take the deed of that house now held in joint stock between us in Williamsburg. Not a cent came the answer, utterly ruin yourself in the service of men who will not furnish you even with rations and ammunition to keep in the field. Strike tense, come down here. You have worked for the public long enough, now do something for your family. Devere obeyed this friendly and wise summons, but not without regret. A mirage of great usefulness rose before me, if I could hold out for another year, but I had already held out so long that while it was difficult to go it was impossible to stay. He went to Edward Lawson, a former schoolmaster from England who had been in the Chartist movement. With forty dollars from Lawson he was off down the river just before the ice closed in, taking with him most of his printing materials. After his return to his wife and children in Williamsburg the hardest task of his life awaited him. He had to report to the National Reform Association, those brave-hearted men struggling against the forces of conservatism and reaction. I believe I have not done the best for the national cause, in casting in my lot with the anti-rentors, he told them, and it took all his courage to admit it. My expectations have not been fulfilled, and I believe I should therefore leave them. Within the next few months he was busy once more. He started the Williamsburg Morning Post and at night lectured on land reform. Often his lectures continued from one night to another, for his opinions and his own wide experience gave him so much to say. He had not changed, and he would never swerve from his conviction that all the evils in society stemmed from land monopoly. Enderistocrats, shallow, stupid, ignoble men, actually not knowing how base it is to riot in the excess that is extracted from a fellow creature's work, the great primal criminals of the earth and yet not even know that you are criminals. Chapter 21 The Prisoners They Come On New Year's Day of 1847 John Young took Silas Wright's place on Capitol Hill. The anti-rentors had put the winded nag to rest, and they had a new song. Tis easy told, and thus tis done, they all did go for Johnny Young. Silas Wright, get out of the chair, sir, make room for honest men, sir. Get out of the way, you Silas Wright, sir, make room for Johnny Young, sir. On leaving the executive chamber Wright revealed to his political friends his deep fear for the country now that John Young was elected, he saw little likelihood of anything but ruin ahead, a prediction in which the landed aristocracy fully agreed. The two van Rensselaer brothers went promptly to the legislature to petition for repeal of the taxes on their lease holds. Stephen IV protested bitterly that he had spent one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars to maintain and restore order since the first revolt of his tenants. The widow Mary Livingston, mistress of the estate called the Hill in Columbia County, joined the van Rensselaer's in their appeal for relief from unjust unequal and oppressive taxes. The lawmakers, more sensitive now to the temper of the farmers, and bolstered perhaps by the presence of more anti-rentors among them, were not so moved by special pleadings as they might once have been. In desperation Stephen van Rensselaer slashed his selling price to a dollar an acre, but there was little response to his offer. The Albany County tenants still hoped for a complete victory. In Scoherry County William H. Seward's friend John A. King bowed to progress and set free one of the anti-rent strongholds. On January 6, 1847 he accepted a joint proposal whereby the farmers on Blenheim Hill became the owners of fifteen thousand acres for a cash settlement of twenty-five thousand dollars. In sharp contrast the Livingstons stubbornly refused to accept defeat. Downriver from Albany they renewed their efforts to rekindle violence. Charles Livingston sent deputies from Hudson to Teconic to sell Calvin Finkel's cattle for unpaid rent. When the cautious farmers refused to resist the sale, the deputy sheriff dressed six of his own party as Indians, so that he could go to press with reports that the farmers were again resisting the law in disguise. When this device failed, Charles Livingston imported four strong-armed men from New York City to lick the Finkels, Calvin, Peter, and John. With his attorney, Edward P. Cowles, who in 1844 had served the landlords in Hudson as captain of the light guards, Livingston rode out to Teconic to see that his mercenaries did a thorough job for the two hundred dollars he was paying them. Calvin Finkel was at dinner when Livingston's four ruffians stormed into his house guns drawn. If you make a move we'll blow you through. Charles hardened in Calvin's broad shoulders as he pushed back his chair and rose to his feet, ignoring the gun-muzzles. Get out of here, you, he roared. As he started toward them, Livingston's men fired wildly. Finkel was wounded slightly in the arm, but he charged them and joined by his brothers made a sorry sight of the invaders. Mr. Livingston and company retreated at full speed, wrote one newspaper reporter, and Calvin was just behind alone in pursuit on a horse without saddle or bridle, and he himself bareheaded with a club in his hand. Livingston escaped with only a few bruises, but the press predicted that Ed Cowles, a big broad-shouldered man, would have business mending his bruises and repairing his eyes that will last a month. When the hired bullies got back to Hudson, they demanded more than the two hundred dollars Livingston had promised them. They said that Livingston had misled them by describing the Finkels as cowards, whereas actually pistols pointed at their breasts did not scare them. Calvin Finkel went down to Hudson and swore out a warrant for the arrest of Charles Livingston for assault. Instead he and his brothers were arrested, convicted of assault by a jury on which no anti-renter could serve, and sentenced to three years in Sing-Sing prison. The tenants were outraged at such a penalty for fighting in self-defense. Lords, pomp, wealth, and politics were arraigned against them, and everything common or humble and justice and even decency were lost sight of, reported the free-holder. Charles Livingston departed hastily for New York City, beyond the reach of Finkel's warrant. Weeks later when he returned to his manor, a constable who was sympathetic to the farmers made a vain attempt to take him prisoner as he was out walking with Joseph D. Manel, the lawyer. God damn you shouted Manel his hand on his gun! If you put your hands on him again, I'll kill you on the spot. Up in Albany an anti-renter sat down and wrote for the free-holder, we had hoped that the Hudson clique had been dispersed, but if one half we hear is true, no wonder Hudson decreases in population and respectability. Think of this, ye millers and Manels. Manel was described as a leech who had sucked all the substance out of the tenants. He looks upon labour with contempt and would be glad to go south where he could abuse, whip, sell, and trade in human cattle. He could not bear that a human labourer should be his equal. For months the politicians had been warning the anti-renters to suspend publication of their newspapers. Uprenters in Delaware County even tried to force the courts to suppress the aggressive voice of the people, which had been published in Delhi since 1845. Now pushed by their defeat at the polls, the politicians raided the newspaper office and scattered the type on the floor in the vain hope of destroying its influence. The farmers suspected that these new provocations were designed to divert John Young from his pre-election promise to free the anti-rent prisoners, and when the new governors first messaged to the legislature ignored anti-rentism they began to fear that Thomas Devere was right and they had been blindly led into the great maw of Higuery. Their concern mounted as Thurlow Weed's Evening Journal tried to show that Young could have been elected without anti-rent support. Other Whig papers adopted the weed line and attacked the anti-renters' malignity of feeling toward those who are invested with certain rights, appealing to its own masses by the fraudulent hope of obtaining without consideration the property of another, and offering its vote in solid column to the highest bidder. To prove that anti-rentism was still militant the farmers deluged Governor Young with petitions demanding freedom for the prisoners, although drawn up on a few days' notice they bore eleven thousand signatures. Jolted from his political timidity, Young sat down and wrote a message ordering the pardons. Every enlightened government meets out punishment solely upon the principal that it shall be sufficient to remove the danger, he wrote, pointing out that the anti-renters had already been more severely punished than any one in any American state for offences of a similar nature and degree. Amnesties for political offences are so frequent and harmonize so well with the sentiments of actual justice and the principles of enlightened policy that they are always approved by mankind, and there is no measure of censure for governments which refuse them when the danger which threatened has passed. The Governor did not have to defend his action, for the public rose in almost unanimous approval. Horace Greeley called it a great liberal move, and in Washington the Democrats were frankly annoyed that Silas Wright had left an act so wise, humane, and politic to a wig. Sue sympathized with Martin Van Buren's alarm over the debauchery of the public mind that permitted them to bear without apparent shock the pardon of people convicted of the darkest crimes. The time has, I hope, never been, wrote the former President, when my mind would not have revolted at the mere contemplation of such dealings with such subjects. This was Martin Van Buren writing for the record, for posterity, and not Martin Van Buren the ambitious politician, who had sent discreet men into the Manor towns to pledge that the Democrats would free the prisoners if the tenants would help re-elect Silas Wright. The fourteen men in Clinton prison on the northern rim of the Adirondacks had been exuberant when their friends smuggled in newspapers reporting the election of John Young. They had waited expectantly for him to take office, and then for his message to the legislature. When the message failed to mention the pardons, the prisoners gave way to despair. One day toward the end of January a friendly guard spoke to William Brisbane. �Brisbane, why do you look so sad?� he asked, �because there's no word yet. Keep up your heart. Two weeks from today you are a free man.� Words sped through the prison, but the men were afraid to let themselves hope again. The next Sunday, as Brisbane lay in bed reading a lecture on agriculture, word reached them that the pardons had arrived, and also a four-horse sleigh to take them home. I thought I was philosopher enough to listen to such intelligence without feeling any extraordinary emotion, Brisbane wrote, �So I lay down again to read, but to lie was impossible, so I got up still trying to read, but the thought of freedom, of meeting again with my wife, my children, my friends, all crowded upon my mind in such rapid succession that my feelings fairly overpowered me and I burst into tears.� On the first day of February the anti-rentors were called to the prison office to receive their pardons. �I blushed to write the word,� wrote Brisbane. �As a pardon I could have trampled it beneath my feet, for a pardon implies previous guilt, but as an act of justice I respected it.� John Young had kept his promise in part. But his pardon failed to restore citizenship to Smith Bowton, Moses Earl, Edward O'Connor, and John Van Steenburg, who had all been disenfranchised because they had received a life sentence, and now even Ira Harris could not calm the farmer's anger. His own mouthpiece, the free-holder, was forced to admit that the governor's motives were suspect. We do not like this half-way work. It looks as if the governor was not quite sure he was right, and shrunk from the anticipated censure and clamour. When you are doing a good thing you lose credit by doing it partially and grudgingly. When the prison gates opened after the long confinement the prisoners were turned out, without hat, cap, or handker chief, and without mittens. It was the dead of winter, and without the caps and cotton-hanker-chiefs furnished by a friend, Jack Frost would have sent us home minus our ears. Four dancing grays started the happy men on their way. By way of variety after our incarceration reported Brisbane, the driver upset us in a snow bank. We all got up in good humour, shook the snow from our locks, and started off again more jovial than ever. As the horses trotted across the ice of Lake Champlain, the moon rose and threw her mellow light around them. Brisbane remembered it as one of the finest scenes he had ever witnessed. All the way through Vermont the anti-rentors were warmly and kindly received. Dr. Bouton, who left the party at Troy to be driven to his home at Alps, was touched as the people greeted him with ovations and rejoicing. He was soon reunited with his young wife and little son, and then triumphantly welcomed by the farmers east of the Hudson. At a meeting in Churchtown on the Livingston Manor, the farmer's spokesman hailed with gladness the return of our friend and brother, the advocate of the tenants, a benefactor of equal rights, and a redeemed martyr to the anti-rent cause. Bouton responded with what the Secretary described as more than his usual eloquence. I have endured mental agony and physical pain, he told them. My limbs have been shackled. My body has been confined to the cold and narrow cell. I have been exhibited to the gaze of others as a monster in human form. My body has been debilitated. Yet my feelings are the same. My sympathies the same. My mind is unshaken in the belief that the cause is founded on the immutable principle of justice. Speedy and sure retribution not only awaits my persecutors, but the enemies of the cause, those who have robbed the masses of their natural inheritance by monopolizing the earth. The rest of the returning prisoners crossed the Hudson to Albany, where they were greeted jubilantly by the farmers who swarmed down from the Helderbergs. The next morning anti-rentors brought teams to carry the freed men to Young's Hotel in Clarksville, where a public dinner had been arranged. Although the morning was bitterly cold, crowds from the hill farms assembled in the road three miles below Clarksville. When the prisoners drove up at eleven, the farmers gave a tremendous outburst of hearty congratulation in three times three as never before made the welkin ring or the vault of heaven resound. In Clarksville, under the brow of the Helderbergs, the main street was so densely thronged that the crowd had to be pushed back to make a path for the horses. The prisoners climbed out amid deafening shouts and soul-stirring music from the burned brass band. Young's Hotel was gay with color and a festive table spanned the long room. Dr. William Holmes greeted the returned men. We bid you welcome. Ah, how poor is language to express the joy, the proud exultation we feel at again meeting you, hearing your voices and grasping your hands. You are returning after a long incarceration to your families, your firesides, and your friends, not as in ordinary cases of liberated convicts covered with infamy, objects to be pointed at and shunned, but as innocent sufferers in the sacred cause of human rights. Your fellow citizens rushed to embrace you and shouts of joy proclaim your passage. The almighty voice of public opinion hath proclaimed aloud, Set them free, and you are free. What more triumphant vindication of your honor or condemnation of the injustice of your sentence can you require? The people have prevailed, and today, while we are rejoicing, our oppressors are sitting in sackcloth and ashes. Deem not yourselves unfortunate that you have suffered. The car of reform in its onward progress has drawn many a victim. You hath it prostrated, but thank God not crushed. You survive, and your names shall live and go down to posterity and be remembered and cherished as household words when land-barrens shall long have been extinct and forgotten. May your return be as joyous as your departure was sad, and may your future years be crowned with every success and with every blessing, and may we soon see the final consummation of all our labors and sufferings in the complete expulsion of the last relic of feudal tyranny from the soil. Cheers rose from the crowd that pressed into the dining-hall and spilled out into the street, and the prisoners enjoyed the festive dinner amid good cheer, conversation, sentiment, jokes, and music. Twill be a long time ere we see its like again, the Secretary noted in his report. The sun moved toward the snowy domes of the Catskills, slays were brought to the hotel door, and the procession escorted the former prisoners four miles up the Helderbergs to Reedsville, for the same road that Sheriff Archer and his citizen army had traveled in 1839. At the spot where Archer was turned back by the anti-rentors, leave was taken with full heart on the part of the prisoners and benesons on that of the multitude. At Pratt'sville, in the Uppersko-Harry Valley, Colonel Zadok Pratt, who as congressmen and neighbor had befriended the tenants, came to greet them, he ordered dinner for all, paid the bill, and when the party was ready to leave sent a four-horse team to take them down the valley. It was late evening when they reached Roxbury. William Brisbane was anxious to go on over the mountain to Dingle Hill that night, but the townspeople insisted on his staying over till morning, refusing to let him steal home in the night like a thief or a robber. The next morning when a four-horse team started for Andes, prisoners fell in behind all along the road. Oh, how my heart beat wrote Brisbane as I listened to the wild music of the mountain streams of Delaware! About four miles from Andes the horse-train was met by two men on horseback, who had been sent out as heralds, to tell the returning men that their friends were on the way to meet them. As they were speaking, the flags came into sight, Brisbane reported, while we heard the shout both loud and long. The prisoners, they come! Our meeting can be more easily imagined than described. Dozens of hands were held out to shake at once, and dozens of voices all inquiring at once after our welfare. Hats waved in the air, the very horses pranced and snorted with joy, the sun shone bright and clear, and woodpeckers with their gay plumage decked the withered trees like so many blossoms lent by the hand of nature to make the scene around us harmonize with our feelings. The procession formed, or rather continued forming all the way to the village, for we came upon them entirely unexpected. That day when we drove up to Hilton's hotel a perfect forest of arms were held out to receive us. I threw myself into the midst of them, and if I came very near being choked by prejudice in Delhi, I came very near being suffocated by caresses in Andes. The first burst of joy being over we went up into the large room of the tavern, where I and my homely way delivered a short address to my townsmen. After this welcome William Brisbane left the party for the four mile trip up Dingle Hill in gallant style with a four horse team accompanied by horsemen with banners. I hope you will spare me the delicate task of describing my meeting with my family, otherwise then by saying that I found them all well, with the exception of my wife Brisbane wrote to Hogue, her troubles had borne hard upon her, and the excitement of the moment had thrown her into a high fever, but thank God she is now enjoying good health. Thus I was restored to my family after eighteen months imprisonment. The story of the reunion of Edward O'Connor and Janet Scott may be apocryphal, but people in Bovina Valley, including their daughter-in-law, tell it as fact. They relate that in the first week of March Janet reluctantly went down to Bovina to celebrate the homecoming of the anti-rentors from Clinton prison. The men in Singsang had not returned, and there was no news from Edward. Janet, disconsolate, struggled to keep back the tears as she watched the joy of her neighbors. As the festivity reached its height, a rich voice sounded loud over the laughter. Her beautyous form and humble mean so rarely found, so rarely seen, lights all my soul with fire. When Janet recognized the song as Edward's farewell, her tears of sorrow turned to tears of joy. She pressed forward to the door as he came in singing. The party had already been arranged when the anti-rentors of Bovina got word that Edward O'Connor and John Van Steenburg were on their way home, but they had kept the news a secret to surprise Janet. John was unable to join the festivities, for his health and mind were in a much-impaired state, and the mention of the Delhi jail would set him in tremors. When the first tints of green lightened the drab winter-brown of the Catskills, Warren Scudder, who had led the Indians at the Earl riot, could no longer stay away from his family and the Roxbury Hills. On an early April day two men sighted him walking toward his home, and remembering the reward offered for his capture demanded his surrender. I am on my way to see my family, Scudder said. I will report to you on Monday. The men became insistent, and so Scudder drew a gun. I will never be taken alive now, he said grimly, but if you permit me to go and see my family I give you my word of honour I will surrender. They had to let him go. Scudder sent word to the district attorney and the sheriff that he was home and ready to stand trial. They ignored him then, but the following fall when he attended the anti-rent political convention in Bloomville he was promptly arrested on the old charge of murder and lodged in jail. However, as soon as his friends insisted on an immediate trial and a complete erring of the case, the charge was dropped and he was released for good. Former Governor Silas Wright left Albany and went back to his little farm in Canton, where he enjoyed the returning spring, the quiet beauty and sweet fragrance of the flowers. For him flowers were strikingly emblematic of human life, all bloom and fade and die. In June he worked in his garden, leaning on his hoe to talk with the neighbors. Every day and every hour he was glad to be relieved of public cares, perplexities, and responsibilities. In mid-summer he completed a speech for the New York State Agricultural Society. He saw the future of agriculture as full of cheering promise, and the safest repository of freedom and free institutions, he declared, was a well-educated, industrious and independent yeomanry. He never delivered this message, for he died suddenly in late August 1847. Walt Whitman wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle, We confess that we loved Silas Wright as a true democratic friend of the people with a love which was not exceeded by any man who ever adorned our party, not even our love and respect for Jackson. Silas Wright was a man, alas we fear we shall indeed never look upon his like again. He loved truth, right, and justice. Theodore Miller, one of Dr. Bouton's prosecutors, charged that the anti- renters were responsible for retiring from life a statesman of highest order, because he had refused to destroy the sacredness of contracts. It is a sad commentary on the fortune of public servants that one of his high attainments and purity should be thus stricken down and the country deprived of his service by the action of a mere faction because of a strict adherence to his sense of duty. Philip Hone wrote in his now celebrated diary that he was inclined to think that the most sensible thing Silas Wright ever did was to die. As a United States senator, Hone wrote, Wright maintained a high rank, a strong debater, a bold party leader of respectable talents and tolerably honest, but as governor he proved to the dearly beloved people that their idol was not what he was cracked up to be. CHAPTER XXII. THE END OF MANNER ARRISTOCRACY Despite the opposition of Dr. Bouton and other prominent anti-renters who had learned to suspect Harris and would never have sponsored the American Jeffries, both Ira Harris and Amasa J. Parker were elected Justices of the Supreme Court in the first judiciary election of New York State, held in June 1847. Harris had found it necessary to plead that it was vitally important to anti-renters to stand by their nominations and not let party bias or any other cause prevent their voting the whole anti-rent ticket, and in the end he had succeeded in swinging the election. By driving the last nail into Devereism, Harris had destroyed the anti-rent party as a unified political force, even though he could not eradicate Thomas Devere's influence toward national reform. Dr. Bouton was still disenfranchised, but he continued his political activities, taking the stump to tell the farmers that their war would never be won until freedom of the public lands had been guaranteed. On November 27, 1847, just as the farmers were about to go into convention, Governor John Young restored full political rights to the anti-rent leaders, for again he needed anti-rent votes. Dr. Bouton was immediately elected a delegate from Rensselaer County, but he walked out of the convention when he found that by foul play and the most damnable hypocrisy and pipe-laying Harris's friends had wrecked the union of anti-rentism and national reform. Bouton was soon followed by most of the radical anti-renters, leaving in the Harris camp a group of farmers, of stubborn will but little effective leadership. At this stage many of the younger farmers and some of the ableist of the older anti- renters left the Manor Counties, feeling like Devere that the cause had been betrayed by men of narrow vision and selfish interests. Smith A. Bouton was one of the few radical leaders to remain in New York State. Most of them were no longer interested in anti-rentism specifically, but only as part of a larger struggle. As Harris became more occupied with his duties as Supreme Court Justice than with the tenants' cause, the free-holder found new independence. His editor demanded an immediate end to land speculation, which made the rich richer and the poor poorer. From local issues the paper jumped into national politics and spoke strongly against slavery. Let us thwart south in their darling and damnable scheme. Let us humble the proud spirit of this intolerant and imperious slave- ocracy. Let us, as we love liberty and hate slavery, proclaim every northern man who shall directly or indirectly promote the extension of slavery, the betrayer of his constituents and a traitor to his country and to freedom. Radical farm leaders talked equal rights and drew up a new manifesto setting forth broad objectives, winnowed from many reform philosophies. We believe that all men are equal, sovereign and independent. We believe that every man has a right to live, and consequently a right to use and enjoy the means to produce that result. We are in favour of an inalienable homestead, and the freedom of the public lands to actual settlers in limited quantities. We believe that all power reposes in and emanates from the people, not the few but all. We denounce legal and self-constituted monopolies as destructive of natural rights and at war with the true principles of social happiness. We believe it is the first duty of the people and their agencies in authority to provide for the education of all their moral and social improvement, their happiness and prosperity, not a few or a particular class but the mass, without let or hindrance. In religion we would be silent, enjoying our own and permitting others to do so undisturbed. In Delhi, from the very bench where Judge Parker had demanded the heads of anti-rentors, Dr. Bouton called for a combination which should be as impregnable as the rocks of Gibraltar and which would defy the clandestine attacks of the enemies of the working class. When he finished, Edward O'Connor, now married to his Janet, rose from his seat, and from the same spot where his death sentence had been pronounced, pledged Delaware County Farmers to boldly and fearlessly advocate the freedom of the public lands. The meeting further agreed that the Democratic and Whig parties had failed to meet the expectations of the people, and now the people were ready to form a political combination that would excel the old parties in numerical strength. Efforts to crush the last vestiges of the anti-rent party before it merged with the growing national free soil movement finally trapped the politicians. The Whigs intended to deny John Young the renomination because of his party irregularity and his anti-rent connections. Knowing this the Governor saw that his best hope of heading off political annihilation was to build a solid progressive front. He discarded his opposition to a test of title, and suddenly appeared before the 1848 legislature to ask authority for the Attorney General to begin legal action to recover the manners for the state unless the landlords could prove ownership. While the bill was pending, the landlords first tried ordinary lobbying methods, then reverted to old and tested tactics, rent-collecting agents scurried over the hills creating riot and rebellion, and then filled the press with accounts of new anti-rent outrages. Tenant violence was resumed, deputy-sheriffs were shot at, tarred and feathered, and a deputy was booted out of a church on the Helderbergs when he interrupted a religious service to serve rits under orders from Stephen Van Rensselaer. George Clark, a newcomer among the landlords who had succeeded to large tracts in Delaware, Schoharri, Herkimer, Montgomery, and Otsego Counties, where he was a neighbor and good friend of James Fenimore Cooper, stated that he was willing to spend twenty-five thousand dollars to defeat the bill. He paid men two dollars a day to solicit petitions against it. A man calls at a groggery, hands the barkeeper a dollar, tells him to treat the company all around, and then asks the boys to sign, reported the free-holder. In spite of the flurry of opposition, however, John Young again appeared to have executed a masterful coup. Politicians anxious to destroy him and anti-rentism were backed to the wall. If they refused to grant the test of title, they would provide the anti-rent leaders with the one issue which would reunite the organization. Believing the test of title was far less dangerous than the re-election of Young and a resurgent anti-rent party, they passed the bill with amazing speed by a vote of more than two to one, and no one was more surprised than the anti-renters themselves. Most of the landlords sent forth doves of peace, offering to sell their equity in the leases at ridiculously low prices, but there was no great rush to buy. Several actions were brought by the state, and shortly after the passage of the bill, in response to pressure from the farmers, Governor Young advocated the disposal of public lands in limited quantities to actual settlers. In a report which might well have been written by Devere or Evans, Dr. Jonathan Alibon, the Delaware County Anti-Renter, induced a New York State Legislative Committee to recommend the limitation of land holdings, homestead exemption from debt, and freedom of the public lands. In August of that year, reformers, abolitionists, and dissident Democrats and Whigs gathered in Buffalo to unite in a national free soil party behind the candidacy of Martin Van Buren. The radical elements wrote the party platform. Van Buren was to swing the barn burners into line. Although Van Buren was cautious in his commitments, he ran on a platform calling for free land grants to settlers. But owing to his fundamental lack of conviction on the issue, the free soil ticket was for doomed to defeat. And Thomas Devere accused those imposters at Buffalo of stealing the very name that his party had used in 1846 in opposing Wright and Young. Knowing that they could not lose, with the Democrats split, the Whigs hastened to proclaim the time propitious to deal with the foul spirit of anti-rentism. John Young was dropped, and reaction climbed swiftly back into the saddle of Whiggory. Hamilton Fish was put up for Governor, and a Whig spokesman predicted, this fall's election will annihilate the anti-rent party, we shall have no more trouble from them. John Slingerland, too, paid dearly for supporting anti-rentism and free farms. The Whigs discarded him, and he suffered a political eclipse for some years. On the advice of Samuel J. Tilden, the tenants brought an independent suit to test the legality of the quarter-sale reservation in the leases, and it reached the Supreme Court. In 1850 Justice Amasa J. Parker held the quarter-sales unconstitutional. On the heels of that decision Justice Ira Harris ruled the van Rensselaer title invalid, with the full session of the Supreme Court concurring, manor aristocracy was tottering. The landlords proposed, without success, that the state appropriate $250,000 a year for two years to pay them for their rights in the leases. In 1852 they tried to appeal from Judge Parker's decision, but the Court of Appeals upheld it in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Charles Ruggles, who, like Parker, had long been a bitter critic of anti-rentism. Judge Ruggles' opinion found the quarter-sales still legal in leases drawn up before the Revolution, but illegal in any lease after 1787, the year when the state had outlawed restraints on the transfer of title. In the belief of many this decision established the tenants as the owners of their land, for if the quarter-sale was invalid, then the transfer of a lease was legally a sale, and subsequent rents were invalid. William P. van Rensselaer's counsel for the East Manor admitted that the contest was ended. The anti-rentors are proved to have been right in their hostility to the system. I do not regret their success, for it is, after all, another step in human progress. Josiah Sutherland, long a lawyer for the Livingston's, considered the decision a legitimate close to the anti-rent controversy. But the last bolts of the landlords had not been shot. There were still legal loopholes. A Court of Appeals decision reversed the Harris invalidation of the van Rensselaer title, pointing to a landlord-sponsored statute of 1830, which specified that land titles had to be questioned within forty years. The Court also ruled that conceived in fraud or not the ownership of the feudal estates was safe from question, so long as that 1830 statute remained in effect. This decision threw the whole issue of title into the field of controversy again. In the minds of many lawyers, however, it did not help the landlord's position, because the decision of 1852 confirming the tenants as the owners of the soil stood unchallenged. Stephen van Rensselaer IV was ready to surrender. When he offered the West Manor to speculators, many of the leases were bought by Walter Church, son of a wealthy landowner of Western New York who was related to the Skylors. Church paid an estimated two hundred and ten thousand dollars, gambling on a substantial profit before the grave of feudalism was finally dug. At forty, hard, tall, with the dark skin and the rugged features of an Indian, Church began to move in the best political circles. As the new owner of a great estate he was carefully devising means of turning his speculative investment to vast profits on the assumption that legislators, judges, and even governors could be bought. Church's handbells flooded the West Manor, where he owned many leases, and the East Manor, where he acted as agent, declaring that all who did not arrange to settle back rents and all who contested payment would be charged a sum which at six percent interest would produce the rent, making a difference of one fourth in the cost of a release. The handbell informed the tenants that he was going to sue immediately and indiscriminately for all rents in arrears, having waited until every question of title raised by honest doubts or dishonest demagogues had been settled. Now decide whether you will settle your rents without cost or purchase your releases at an honest rate or be fooled by politicians, pay heavy bills of cost, and twenty-five percent additional for your soil. Many farmers compromised, discouraged by the long and confusing struggle, but some hard-willed men who had talked over their dinner tables with Thomas Devere ten years earlier would never be browbeaten into submission. After Lawrence Van Dusen's death in 1852, the mantle of leadership of the Helderberg Farmers fell on Peter Ball of Turn, a small man, quick of action and speech, who wore his snow-white hair in long-flowing locks. Ball was stubbornly determined to see justice done even if he lost the harvest of his life's toil, and many a farmer was seared by his contempt for anyone who let himself be intimidated. He flatly refused to pay rent in forming church that under the decision of 1852 Stephen Van Rentselier IV had sold him the land, not leased it. I have no obligation to pay rent, he insisted. I am not a tenant. Church brought court action against him, and the week's preceding election found his agents working feverishly with well-lined pockets for judge so-and-so. I don't care who else his elected church said. In the meantime his home in Albany became the meeting-place of judges and politicians. He spent lavishly and his efforts were well rewarded in 1858 when the Supreme Court, including Justice Ira Harris, ruled against Peter Ball and the decision was sustained by the Court of Appeals. Both courts reaffirmed the 1852 decision which outlawed the quarter sales, reiterating that the land was not leased but sold and that Ball was not a tenant. However they argued, in 1805 the legislature had realized the imposition of rents as a condition in a contract of sale. The rents were therefore legal. This reasoning said Andrew Colvin, a tenant lawyer, shocked the public conscience. But if the tenants were bewildered and the public shocked, Walter Church was neither. Evidence adduced at a later investigation indicated that he knew what the decision was going to be, and on the strength of advance information he had bought the East Manor leases from William Van Rensselaer to add to his previous holdings, the highest price paid Alexander Johnson revealed in a pamphlet had not exceeded twenty-five cents on the dollar, and the lowest had been down to five. Our courts, he went on, have been not merely ignorant, inconsistent, they have been guilty of injustice and judicial robbery. He pointed out that in 1850 Ira Harris had written an opinion denying that rent could be due without privity of contract or estate. But after resuming amicable relations with Van Rensselaer he decided that a rent might hang upon a single vendition. Johnson had had his own day at playing politics with anti-rentism between 1845 and 1848 when he was editing the Free Holder as Harris's agent. But now as he turned on his old political ally he was not alone. His position on the Supreme Court decision was supported by many able lawyers, in books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles. Some newspapers charged that there had been political and financial manipulation of the decision. The tenants might have expected such a decision from some of the Supreme Court justices. One was notoriously a friend of speculators and landlords, elected by no-nothing effervescence. But Ira Harris's stand needed some explanation. A likely clue was disclosed by Alexander Johnson. Not long after the decision Justice Harris sailed to Europe on the same boat with Steven Van Rensselaer. Perhaps it was also significant that Harris never returned to the bench, but after a year abroad turned to national politics. The decisions of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals, however, arrived at, proved of little help to Walter Church. The farmers still refused to pay, and vigorously petitioned the legislature to repeal the 1805 Act, legalizing rents as a condition in a contract of sale. Church, pressed for money and aiming at political results, took on three partners, Peter Kagger, James Kidd, and Dean Richmond. Richmond was chairman and Kagger was secretary of the New York State Democratic Committee. In 1845 Kagger had been one of the political strategists who, with John Van Buren and Michael Hoffman, had helped map Wright's suicidal program against anti-rentism. Alexander Johnson charged that all three belonged to a class of men whose business it was to hang around the Capitol and manipulate legislators. They bought under belief that courts and judges can be influenced by the arts and appliances that influence legislators. We do know that the sale of the Van Rensselaer's has brought around our courts and in close companionship with our judges, men who have boasted of owning senators and buying legislators. Church's lobbying efforts failed to check the rising sentiment for the repeal of the Act of 1805, however, and finally he reverted to the old method of violence. He tried to get up another anti-rent commotion and panic the public with bold-faced type, another anti-rent outrage. On February 17th, 1860, while the legislature was still discussing the repeal, he rode to the home of Peter Ball at the head of a large posse. The day was cold and blustery, and snow swept across the Helderbergs. Church led the posse into the house and drove Ball and his family out into the storm, a wife, a son, a sick daughter, and an old-colored woman known as Suk. The household effects, the winter's supply of fuel, and the cattle feed were thrown into the highway to be sifted and raked by the wind and the snow. Although nearly five hundred farmers were looking on, they uttered no complaint and made no resistance, for they knew that Church wanted a riot so that he could carry a few anti-rentors to the capital in chains to convince the legislature. The farmers exhibited great forbearance under this great provocation, and when Church left they quickly set to work to re-establish Ball in his home. In the legislature John Slingerland, again in politics after a period of oblivion, took the floor and told how Walter Church's demands on Ball had risen from one hundred and fifty to nine hundred dollars. The sum would have been paid, he said, had it been just. On the most inclement day that has been experienced during this past winter, the sheriff and his posse proceeded to the residence of Mr. Ball. Some idea may be formed of the state of the weather, and of the propriety and humanity of executing process at such a time, when it is stated that the sheriff and some of his party returned with frost-bitten cheeks. The Ball family was left exposed upon the highway to the tender mercies of a driving snowstorm. I ask you in the name of freedom, in the name of humanity, will you permit a similar scene to be enacted? The act of 1805 was promptly repealed, and Church began his legal struggle all over again. Walter Church did not allow the outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861 to turn him aside from the pursuit of profit. He was a leader in the strong copperhead faction in Albany, which included many prominent Democrats, and since most of the younger farmers and sons of the old anti-rentors were away fighting for the Union, his best course was to dispose of anti-rentism before the war ended. In this phase of his efforts, Church relied on his partner, the state Democratic boss, Dean Richmond, who had advanced him money and expected to be repaid out of the profits from the manor properties. In 1863, tenant leaders told the farmers that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation liberates you just as certainly from your servitude as it liberated the slaves of the South from theirs. But Judge Henry R. Selden of the Court of Appeals, an old and intimate friend of Richmond, upheld the landlord's right to collect rent. He ruled that the act of 1805 was not relevant, and relied instead on the tenant one act of 1846, taxing leaseholds and abolishing distressed sales for unpaid rent. Although Stephen IV was no longer legally a landlord, Selden ruled the 1846 act entitled him to collect rents. As in many cases in our courts between parties similarly situated, he wrote, they have been spoken of and treated as landlords and tenants, and the decisions in the cases can be sustained on no other ground, as they depend entirely upon a statute applicable only to parties holding that relationship. In other words, countered a legal analyst, the parties in the case were not landlord and tenant, and cannot be landlord and tenant, but the court speaks of them and calls them such, and the Court of Appeals must so speak of them or it cannot affirm the judgments, and for the purpose of affirming the judgments, it does and will call them landlord and tenant. Alexander Johnson wrote, We are free to say that we think judges and courts need watching as closely as legislators. Judges and senators have been bribed for gold. What chance has the poor and isolated farmer in litigation against the combination of speculators, who can draw on Dean Richmond for money, and who can employ in their cause the plausible and winning approaches of kid, the pertinacious manipulations of cagar, and the unblushing impudence of church? Seldon's support launched church on a ruthless military campaign to crush anti-rent opposition. He elected his friend Henry Fitch as sheriff, had Peter Cagar named legal advisor to the sheriff, and secured his control of law enforcement by obtaining for himself the Colonelcy of the National Guard. In 1865, without authority from the Governor, Colonel Church ordered the troops to the Helderburgs, traveling in a caravan of wagons, some loaded with pork, beef, hams, bread, crackers, cheese to eat, and beers and liquors generally to drink. Peter Ball was again ejected, and his family and furniture piled into the road. This time old Suk, the Negro servant, refused to budge, but sat transfixed in a Boston rocker. Four soldiers had to carry her into the road, chair and all. Taking over the house as his headquarters, Church directed raids against other farmers, forcing the tenants to sign and pay at the point of a gun. When the guardsmen were not raiding, they were drinking, carousing, and singing. We hated church like poison, said the wife of an anti-renter. It finally got so he was scared to come up here, because they shot through his plug hat, and another time through his buggy seat. Although Church was omnipotent in Albany, on the return of the troops, the Albany Express remarked that the people were shocked that the Democratic Party leaders in the state, whatever they might do to the black, would use the militia to make serfs of the white race for the mere love of gain. As the months passed, more and more farmers gave in. But old anti-renters like Peter Ball, William H. Gallup, and Robert Hayes still held grimly to their principles, calling their weaker neighbors copperheads and secessionists from anti-rentism. Friends were pitted against friends. Anti-renters rode in the dark, intimidating their neighbors. Men who paid rent were in constant danger. One night five barns were burned on property from which church had ejected the tenants. Many a horse on the road had a clipped stub for a tail, as a symbol that its owner was a secessionist. After the war ended, on April 9, 1865, the farmers drifted back home to take up the anti-rent fight where they had left off. But this time men who had fought side by side in the rebellion were lined up against each other. In July of the next year, Colonel Church led his army again to the Helderbergs. They are all veterans, having seen service during the war the Albany Evening Journal reported, and understand guerrilla warfare to perfection. The progress of the army up the Helderbergs was marked by demonstrations of bitter feeling, particularly on the part of the women. Pump handles were removed, and the troops were refused drinking water. The men, however, kept comparatively calm, according to the journal, until Church himself arrived, when the sight of this object of their hatred rendered their wrath almost uncontrollable. Between seventy and eighty farmers had assembled at Peter Warners in the town of Knox, where the first ejectment was to take place. The farmers scattered as the army approached, but Church's skirmishers worked well and eight prisoners were taken. Shots were fired at the fleeing farmers, and at least one was wounded. Peter Warner and his family maintained the most stoical indifference in the face of the disturbance, even when Colonel Church and his soldiers broke into the house. Church told Warner that if the process were executed against them they would lose all their crops, the produce of three hundred acres in the highest state of cultivation. He said they could prevent the loss by a settlement, but the Warners received the proposition with contempt and made no effort to stop the men from moving out all their furniture. Domini Daniels, the pastor of the Lutheran Church, who occupied one side of the house, was also ejected, and his furniture and library dumped into the highway. It was a sultry July afternoon, and storm clouds began to gather swiftly. The officers volunteered to carry the furniture to any place of safety the Warners might desire, but the offer was refused with stern resolution. The thunderstorms swept over the mountain, drenching all their household goods and ruining the books. Ruin and desolation were never more calmly received, reported the Evening Journal. The most malevolent hatred seems to inspire them against Colonel Church. On the way to Albany that night the eight prisoners and their guard made a stop for food. If it is to be paid for by Colonel Church, snarled one prisoner, a blacksmith, we will not eat a mouthful, we will starve first. All were freed the next day. The army moved into the Warner house, and for a week made thrusts against belligerent farmers in the neighborhood. When the holiday was over the conquerors of the Helderbergs returned to Albany, looking gay and gallant as ever, but the populace did not hail them as heroes. The Evening Journal remarked that Colonel Church and Sheriff Fitch had spent five hundred dollars a day to intimidate the anti-rentors into an acceptance of terms rather than because it was necessary to ensure the public peace. Church made one or two additional raids during the remainder of the summer. In the fall, when the bill of more than six thousand dollars for the purpose of subduing the late unholy anti-rent war was submitted to the Albany County Board of Supervisors, including an item of one hundred and fifteen dollars for Church's personal services as Colonel, the day when Church could have a militia at his call was over. After that he had to pay his own army. Walter Church could manage without the militia, however. There was an anti-renter on the East Manor named Martinez Lansing, who had a large farm worth twenty-five thousand dollars close to the Hudson. In eighteen sixty-six he owed eight hundred dollars in back rent, which Church had increased to six thousand dollars by tacking on legal and other expenses. Lansing paid four thousand, but did not settle for the rest promptly enough to suit Church. Although he subsequently offered to pay it, the payment was refused, and Lansing and his family were ejected by a posse led by Willard Griggs, a deputy sheriff. Griggs had been an anti-renter twenty years before, but was now serving principally as an agent for Church, more than ten thousand miles below contempt. The great farm, with all its buildings and other improvements put on it by Lansing's forefathers, with extensive additions and betterments by Mr. Lansing himself, wrote Andrew Colvin, anti-rent spokesman, was immediately taken possession of by the chief speculator, and he is today occupying the fine dwellings and fine barns, and planting and reaping the broad acres, and pocketing the fruits, rejoicing in the great acquisition, and making exhibitions of it to admiring friends. Martinez Lansing died of heartbreak a few years later, poor and penniless. Lansing's downfall was the final sad end of anti-rentism, observed the Troy News, who warned that the same fate awaited any farmer who resisted Church. Anti-rent put itself above the law, it went into politics and was ruined, it elected governors, judges, congressmen, senators, legislators, and town and county officers, ruined the Van Renssel ears, and worried them out of their handsome estate, was petted and patronized as long as it had votes to give, and now, after long years of struggle, the law finally put its broad hand upon anti-rentism and hopelessly squelches it. But it was still not the end. There were more farmers, like Martinez Lansing, who would rather lose all and die than surrender their hard-earned rights. William Whitbeck, who lived near the Lansing farm east of the Hudson, was one of these. An old man, Whitbeck, had been an anti-renter for nearly thirty years. He had been one of Thomas Devere's best friends, and had sided with him in the lost struggle against the political conspirators. In 1869 Church set out to acquire Whitbeck's big farm, which was valued at fifteen thousand dollars. After the adverse court decision, Whitbeck paid all claims, but Church found a supplementary item, and presented a bill for a hundred and fifty dollars, the cost of an early suit. He made no effort to collect, but explaining that Whitbeck had been contumatious and forfeited his right to the farm, he secured an ejectment order, and sent Deputy Sheriff Willard Griggs to drive the farmer out. When Griggs appeared, Whitbeck offered him the one hundred and fifty dollars. I can't take it, said Griggs, I have no right to take it. Whitbeck thereupon drove the deputy away. Still determined to get possession of the farm, Church rounded up a posse in Albany. He insisted the posse had been voluntary, but several of the seven deputies later testified that they had been forced into service and illegally taken across the river into Rensselaer County. Church trailed about a half hour behind the posse, so that he could take possession as soon as his roughs had ejected the farmer. Whitbeck met the posse at his gate with his sons John and Benjamin at his side. He had a pistol in his hand. Whitbeck, said Griggs, I have come to take possession. I am ready to pay, replied the farmer. Before I give up the farm you'll have to carry my dead body from the field. One of the deputy sheriffs pulled a gun and the shooting started. William Whitbeck fell with a wound in his head. His sons opened fire and the deputy went down with a wound in his side. A dozen farmers rushed out of hiding in the barn and sprang into action their guns blazing. Griggs fell with five bullet wounds, another deputy was clubbed to the ground, a third dropped, and a fourth screamed as blood gushed from a bullet hole through his hand. The rest of the posse leaped the fence and fled. When church arrived the field was clear. The wounded men had already been helped into a wagon by the tenants and hauled away. Deputy Sheriff Griggs died soon afterward. The newspapers criticized church's illegal use of the posse, but he had his way. With the Whitbeck's in jail charged with the murder of Willard Griggs, he took possession of the farm. He did his best to shift the moral guilt from his own shoulders, but the Whitbecks were tried in Saratoga County beyond his reach and they were acquitted. The Whitbeck battle, bloodiest of the whole thirty-year war, was church's last successful action. No more large possees moved against the farmers. He sent a few men to dispossess Palmer Gallup on the Helderbergs, but Indians came, hitched the posse to a wagon, and forced them to haul Gallup up and down to amuse the farmers. The last blood flowed in the early 1880s, during a brief but violent episode remembered today by old men of the Helderbergs. Deputy Sheriff Leonard Chamberlain was sent to Eastburn to dispossess John Frederick for church. As Chamberlain jumped from his wagon, shotgun fire from Frederick's window caught him full in the body and killed him. According to farmers who saw the body, it looked like a pepper box. In Walter Church's most active period, between 1855 and 1870, he had doggedly pursued the farmers, clogging the courts with as many as two thousand suits, without the loss of a major case. The bitter struggle, which was the longest and hardest in Van Rensselierwick, where it started, cost Albany County an estimated million dollars in lost trade, and men like Ball, Whitbeck, and Lansing were pauperized. But feudalism as a living institution was destroyed. Fewer and fewer names were called each year on rent day. Most landlords had settled immediately after the adverse decision of 1852, when the Van Rensseliers turned their estates over to hungry speculators. By 1880 the majority of the leases had passed into the hands of the farmers. In three of the principal anti-rent counties forty years after the first revolt, only two thousand one hundred and thirteen out of twelve thousand three hundred and forty-four farms remained under lease, including normal short-term leases made by individual owners. Despite his long success in the courts, Walter Church died in 1890 in virtual bankruptcy. The few reservations he still held were saddled with mortgages held by the banks and individuals who had financed his gamble to turn a dying social system into a gold mine. Today some upstate farmers still pay in cash the equivalent of the old reservations of wheat, fowls, and dais service. Many a landholder wishing to sell or take out a loan has been shocked to find that the old leases which originally bound his farm were never adjusted, and that unpaid feudal tributes amount to more than the farm is worth, but these are usually adjusted for a small fee. John Burroughs paid the DeBrosa's heirs twenty-five dollars a year in tribute on the Burroughs homestead above Roxbury, until his death in nineteen twenty-one, after which the farm was bought by Henry Ford. As early as eighteen sixty the glories of the manner of Rensselaerwick had departed, and the family that had once assumed to be lords and hoped to perpetuate their wealth and social position had sunk in the general mass into all obscurity, William P. Van Rensselaer had spent few comfortable hours in luxurious beaver-wick on the east bank of the Hudson. In the early eighteen fifties he had put all pretensions to lordship behind and moved to Rye, New York, where he died in eighteen seventy-two. When his older brother Stephen died in the Manor House in Albany in eighteen sixty-eight, the minister who attended him in his last days observed that he had never known a Christian who felt more deeply his own unworthiness. A writer in the New York world, noting the death, spoke romantically of the end of the landed aristocracy and the miserable subterfuges of the farmers who had destroyed the Manor to escape from obligations of contract.