 CHAPTER XIII. IN THE GOOD CAUSE. Days dragged into weeks and weeks into months, for the man whose word might at one time have put an end to united resistance. While his friends were battling posseys all over the mountains, Dr. Smith A. Bouton remained in his dark lonely cell in the Hudson Jail. Columbia County officials were wishing they had never tangled with him. Boycotted merchants complained of ruin, farm produce had to be imported at almost prohibitive costs, and sales dwindled as the farmers refused to do business in Hudson. Despite profligate spending of public funds, twenty-four thousand dollars on the military occupation alone, police officers still dared not enter the back-country towns on landlord missions, and the Livingstons were worse off than before Big Thunder was jailed. And still nothing was done about the man himself. As Spring approached, without any sign of release, he wrote a letter to Thomas Devere, in which there were overtones of reproach, as if such prolonged inactivity and solitary confinement were almost more than he had bargained for, and he found it hard not to blame the man at whose instance he had come to Columbia County for not giving him more effective aid. Hudson Jail, February 20, 1845 Dear Friend, It is with extreme regret that I communicate to you the unfortunate intelligence that I have been incarcerated in Hudson Jail for nearly ten weeks. I was invited to this county by some of the most prominent and influential men to assist them in organising, when unexpectedly I was taken by force and placed in confinement, in irons, the jail guarded by one hundred men, while troops poured in from all quarters. I was treated with every indignity. While this large military force was here, they kept me ironed, shut up in a small room. The want of exercise and hard usage broke down my health, and nearly brought me to the grave. Consciousness of not having violated the law, and not having disgraced the anti-rent cause kept my spirits unbroken. The most scandalous reports relative to my having confessed and of betraying my friends were a source of great affliction to me, but truth has prevailed and will prevail. It was said, too, that I had been an opium eater which was totally unfounded. But the current has turned against them. They are now quarreling among themselves who shall pay the necessary expenses. We hope it will fall on the principal actors, the landlords and principal men of Hudson. How the legislature will dispose of it I do not know. The people of the county are very indignant about it. My friends applied three times for bail, but it was refused, a thing unprecedented in this country. Even a writ of habeas corpus was frustrated by their misrepresentations to our executive. You must know, for all my friends do, that the aristocratic landlords of this state have long been wishing to make me their victim, because I boldly and fearlessly proclaimed that the injured tenantry were deeply aggrieved and their constitutional rights trampled on, and have often called upon them to arise and assert their rights through the medium of legislative interference and rear the standard of true democracy and equal rights. For this I have been torn from my once happy home, an only child on whom I doted with all the affection of a parent, a tender and affectionate wife, thrown into prison, heavily ironed and reduced almost to the grave. But while the spirit of Smith A. Bouton animates his body, he will still boldly assert that equal rights is the only true legacy of American citizens. You once proclaimed in an anti-rent meeting in our county that you had worn shackles in the cause of liberty. This now has been my lot, and how long it will continue and what will be the result heaven only knows. If I can have an impartial trial I have nothing to fear, but my enemies are making a desperate effort to sustain themselves. My counsel fee has been and will be enormous. Ambrose L. Jordan, whom I was advised to employ, taxed five hundred dollars, Henry Z. Hainer of Troy two hundred dollars, for my examination three hundred dollars was expended in trying to procure bail on the writ of habeas corpus, besides various other expenses. It will be a dead loss to me of twelve hundred dollars or more. All this I have as yet had to sustain. To raise this I have been obliged to pledge my home, and if my friends do not assist me it will have to go and my wife and child will have to be turned into the street begging, and I perhaps lose my liberty for a number of years. The money must be raised in three months to meet the payment in the bank. For myself I do not care, but my heart bleeds for my only child. There's till death, in the good cause, Smith A. Bouton. Nothing in this letter was news to Devere, who had made Dr. Bouton's release a rally and cry for the national reformers. Any answer he may have written is not known, for none reached the doctor. On March 1st Bouton wrote again, fearing that his letters were being intercepted, he took the precaution of stating for the record, though he knew that Devere knew better, that he had never assumed or warned disguise and had constantly advised against such practice. He made a more direct appeal for funds, explaining that the voluntary contributions of the anti-rentors came in too slowly. I am willing to suffer, he wrote, but to see my young wife and child turned into the street is the greatest affliction. This time he received an answer. And by you, in your adversity, I, if there be one spark of true-sold republicanism yet among us, if the spirit that tore the stamp-act to pieces and threw the fragments into the face of the blockhead George III, if the zeal and energy that dished up the salt-water tea long ago yet rekindles in the American soul. Both the national reformers and the anti-rentors responded readily, and Devere soon announced that Dr. Bouton's home was safe. At last, in the middle of March, Bouton was brought to trial, in the Hudson Courthouse, on a charge of robbing Sheriff Henry Miller of papers at Copaque. Mortimer Belden and Samuel Wheeler, arrested at the same time, were not to be tried with him. The presiding magistrate was Justice Amasa J. Parker, a former resident of Delhi, who at thirty-seven was already a former assemblyman, a former congressman, and a powerful force in the Democratic Party. Governor Wright sent Attorney General John Van Buren to help the prosecution, and a parade of witnesses took the stand to identify Bouton as the masked big thunder. Bouton's defense was handled by Ambrose L. Jordan, old Aquafortis, who had come up from New York City. Sheriff Miller, who bore the brunt of Jordan's famous fire, no longer seemed the astute fence-mender, especially when he tried to explain his fraternizing with the Indians. Judge Parker presided with commendable fairness, but the jury, after deliberating all night, filed into the courtroom to report they could not agree. Parker urged them to try again, as they stood eleven to one for acquittal, but the foreman protested there was no chance of agreement. The one dissenting juror rose and stated that if he were out two years he would not change his mind. It seemed he was a miller employed by the Livingstons. Judge Parker agreed to fix bail pending a new trial, but left Hudson without carrying out his promise. When one of Dr. Bouton's counsel followed him to remind him, the judge hedged and stated that he would send his instructions to the recorder of Hudson who would take the bail. On being questioned, however, the recorder said flatly that Judge Parker had advised him not to accept bail. I think he meant to act honorably, Bouton wrote generously some years later, but he was surrounded by bad influences. Bouton was returned to his small dark cell to await a new trial. He was no longer shackled, but the sheriff instructed the guards to shoot if he attempted to escape. The doctor's health declined further, and he nearly suffocated with smoke let into the room from below. Plans for a jail delivery were revived, and in his discouragement Bouton was, at first, amenable. The iron bars of his window were sawed through, and relays of horses were stationed every seven miles, but at the last minute he backed down. There was nothing to prevent my escape but my own will, he wrote afterward. But fleeing was a tacit acknowledgement of guilt. I considered I was perfectly innocent. I had acted within my natural and constitutional rights, trying to save my fellow citizens from utter ruin. I was determined to leave legally or not at all. At this point Thomas Devere could no longer stay away from the battle area. Convinced that he would be more useful if he were there, he addressed a final appeal to the anti-rent committee. Need I again remind you that the press is the most formidable weapon of the nineteenth century? This is a truth of which your enemies are well aware, and of which they take a powerful advantage. Let us have a press established at once, not in the mountains of Scoheri, not in the city of New York, but in the capital, the fountain of legislation, in the center of the patriotic counties. There and only there can a press render efficient service to the cause. The rill that whispers down the rocks of Stephen Town, the stream that meanders through Columbia, the deep strong current that sweeps through Scoheri, all, all must be joined in the sublime cataract that thunders from the Albany Hills. These and all the other tributaries throughout the state must unite to form one broad, majestic river that will carry our noble cause triumphantly to its destination. At last his words were heeded, and at the insistence of the Helderberg farmers he was called to Albany to launch the Freeholder for Ira Harris and Charles Buton, who were subsidizing it. The first week in April found him busy over racks and forms in a smelly little print shop above Ford and Grant's store at Hawk and Washington streets, with heart and hopes high. The crusade against anti-rentism had reached a new pitch of violence, and as Devere worked, first at the editorial desk and then at the print rack, he heard the roll of distant drum, the measured march of armed men. It was as though English border strife had been transplanted to the New World, as though Albany were transmuted into a Northumberland stronghold and the Helderbergs into a darkened frown of the Cheviot Hills. The first copies of the Albany Freeholder, a full-sized four-page newspaper, came off the press on April 9, 1845. The press in Albany was on the whole cautious, but the Nickerbocker was frankly approving and predicted that the tenants would decide the next gubernatorial election. The press will make more converts in their cause than all the big thunders in creation. We say they are now pursuing the right course, and will accomplish all they desire if they only stick to it and burn their Indian dresses. In England the radical Northern Star found the tenant paper infinitely superior to the entire American press, with a few, too few exceptions, and urged Devere to send more copies so that the workers of England and Scotland might know the whole truth about the anti-rentors. Devere's audacious and satirical editorials made his readers feel that success on every reform front was a matter of days. In one of the early issues he poked fun at the landlords for pleading poverty and dryly suggested that the legislature might arbitrate. If the beggarly helplessness of the patroons is taken into account, we are not sure but that the state may award them a trifle, say a quarter of a dollar per acre, with which as capital to enter into some honest business. To some arrangement of this kind the farmers would agree in order to save trouble, but to think to breathe life into the carcass of patroonery and hang it about the necks for all succeeding time, we might just as well be plain and honestly write the thing as impossible. Devere constantly reiterated his favourite theme of independent political action. He could see no way of achieving real reform except by breaking completely with both major parties. He is no Whig who looks on contentedly while landlordism usurps the soil and deals it out to our citizens on the most degrading and oppressive terms, he wrote in an editorial, he is no Democrat who will not go for a man's free right to the soil. Regularly, after the free-holder was in type, he would set out toward the Helderbergs, by wagon or on foot, on the systematic tour of the rural districts, to win new friends and strengthen old ties. He had the touch of the common man and a genuine interest in the everyday happenings of the community. His account of one such journey explains in some measure his success as an organiser and a propagandist. He stopped first at the farm of Lawrence Van Dusen, the grand old man of anti-rentism. Next, at John Jay Gallops, he was sorry to hear that the farmer's aged father had been hurt in a fall from a fence the day before, and a neighbour had been run over by a team of horses yoked to a road scraper, but he took the time to put in a few words about land reform. In Byrne, he heard that the anti-rent cause was never in a position so proud and commanding as it is now. Heading south-west to Rensselaerville, he stopped to talk with Robert Hayes in the fields. Devere was never more struck with the loathsome injustice of patroon greed than on seeing Hayes, the father of a flourishing family, bent toiling heavily in that heavy soil, his industrious family employed within, all employed, preparing wool for use and market. To see this and then think that lazy, loafing, useless, burden to himself and everybody else patroon, should carouse and drink and grow fat and merry in his laziness, on the cream of Mr. Hayes's toil, skimmed by that long-handled ladle sheriff-batterman. Moving down the valley, Devere looked in on Major Joseph Conner, who said he hoped to live till the standard of King Charles and the petticoat of Queen Anne were lowered from above those feudal manners, and the last hill in Hollow reposed under the stars and stripes, an integral part of the American Republic. From Major Conners, Devere turned down the beautiful secluded ravine along the creek to Livingstonville, where he talked with his old friend David Sternberg, whose big house still stood empty. Near Preston Hollow he found a group of anti-rentors raising a house of prayer and heard from them that the prospect for free soil was never better. At Cooksburg under the Catskills he talked for an hour with a farmer, and then dropping a double sixpence in the toll-gate headed back toward Rensselaerville. Shortly after he paused to chat with some men building a road, a sharp, showery rain swept along the hill and played patter-leap on the trees. As he drove along he thought to himself that if the Patroon only knew the endless labour of the farmers to make a scant living, he might relax his grip on their pockets. That night, still fresh and buoyant, Devere shared a platform with Valentine Treadwell, and the next night spoke at David Saegers in New Scotland. Thanks to these visits with the farmers Devere was well qualified to speak for them. The Reverend Hezekiah Pettit of Green County wrote that he was thankful to kind providence that Devere was placed where he was. You are a stranger to me and I to you, but your views on the anti-rent subject have made me partially acquainted with you, and I wish you to know who I am in that respect. While I truly subscribe to your views, in addition I am by profession a Baptist minister and have been for more than forty years, and in politics a Democrat. But if we have had a Democratic administration in the winter past, I have all my life been mistaken about their principle, and I despair of anything better, until we the people will learn to send people to the legislature. As Devere's influence increased and the farmers began to pass resolutions that they had no regard for either the Whigs or the Democrats, every party politician who sought to rise to power on anti-rent votes began to turn against him. Only then did Devere learn that he was fighting not land monopoly alone, but also the very men who had subsidized his paper. Charles Buton and Ira Harris had not wanted him in Albany in the first place, and appointing him editor of the Free Holder had only yielded to the threatening demands of the Helderberg farmers. Harris had been elected to the State Assembly by anti-rent and Whig votes. Both he and Buton, a hunker Democrat, believed in the tenant's rights, but they were politically ambitious. They were working toward an alliance of anti-rent, Whig, and hunker votes that would give them actual control of the state government rather than a temporary advantage such as John Young had previously achieved. The greatest barrier to Ira Harris's aspiration for the governorship and their joint pursuit of power was Devere's formidable honesty, for as Harris knew Devere would never let the farmers compromise for the sake of any man's personal ambition. Meanwhile Devere, who was never cautious, was laying himself wide open to criticism and misrepresentation. Following the policy established by the Byrne Convention, he carefully avoided any encouragement to violence in his own writings, but he frequently reprinted radical editorials from Young America, which was the new name of Evans's working man's advocate. It would not be out of character for him to have written them for Young America for the express purpose of quoting them in the Free Holder. One of them ran as follows. Some of the anti-renters are denouncing any violent resistance to injustice, and resolving that they will resort only to peaceable and constitutional means. This is bad policy, and may be the means of producing the evil they aim to prevent. In surface matters it might be best to rely on peaceable remedies. But when inalienable rights are concerned, those who are robbed of them are daily losing part of their existence and should never voluntarily resign the quickest way of recovering their rights. It may be well to suffer where wrongs are sufferable, but reserve by all means the right to decide when they are sufferable. If you leave this matter altogether with majorities, majorities may rob you till death. If a man were to preach non-resistance to slaves, would he not be deficient in intellectual honesty? Further, thus damning himself as a leveler and a destructive radical, Devere went to New York City in May as the anti-rent delegate to a National Reformers Convention, which was attended by such men as Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, Charles A. Dana, William H. Channing, Jared Smith, and Park Godwin. Plans were laid for a National Industrial Congress in the fall and a preliminary Congress in Albany, the centre of feudalism and lordly insolence. Devere returned to Albany to meet a flood of abuse. He was accused of leading the farmers to destruction on the rocks of free soil and agrarianism. His record in the Chartist movement was recalled in an effort to destroy his prestige. Horace's friends charged that the anti-rent cause was being betrayed by the very radicals who failed in England through unwise councils, rash measures, and inefficient means, who could not wait till time should work out the needed reform. They had not learned that petitions, remonstrants, and the ballot box, agitation, ceaseless agitation, would accomplish more than the sword and the gun. Thomas Devere was fully aware that the issues were being distorted and his objectives were being deliberately misunderstood because he refused to step aside while Harris and Bouton, as he expressed it, fattened the farmers as political geese to be plucked at will. Consequently he was not too surprised to find his name removed from the masthead of the free-holder. On June 25th in the midst of Devere's adversity, Dr. Bouton wrote him a graphic description of his own tribulations. Dear sir, once more through the will and pleasure of an all-wise providence I have the opportunity to communicate to you all the horrors and sufferings by which I am surrounded and daily endure. My health is extremely bad, I am raked with pain. Night and day the air of the prison is so bad that even our enemies who visit us declare that they could not endure it for one week, and when night comes the air of ourselves is so close that I many times think we shall all be suffocated. Of this we have often complained but got no relief. The reply is, let the damned anti-rentors die, for they have caused us trouble enough already. But very few of our friends are permitted to see us to administer any consolation or comfort, and all the outbreaks committed by men who act with the mistaken notion that there is no other way than an appeal to arms are immediately visited on us as the instigators in cause, and I verily believe that we shall be charged with the commission of every crime in this country. It is cheering in the gloom of my imprisonment that my friends have not forsaken me, and may God grant that I may still live to repay them for all the efforts they have made in my behalf. Although broken down in health my spirits are buoyed up with the fond anticipation that all our efforts are not in vain, and that I shall live to meet you all who contribute in the glorious work of emancipating an unjustly wronged and insulted people from a state of slavery and land-ridden tyranny which would be a disgrace to modern Russia, and let it be transmitted to posterity that a free people dared to rise and vindicate their rights instead of basely crouching to a money-darestocracy who would rob them of the dearest gift of heaven, the anticipation of that happy day has pierced the gloomy walls of my prison, and made my fellow sufferers clank their chains for joy. The health of my fellow sufferers is declining apace, but their spirits are still unsubdued. How long a free people will suffer this kind of martyrdom, God only knows. The farmers of this country ask for nothing but what is consistent and right. The most substantial of the yeomanry deprecate and deplore the outrages that have been committed in this community, as much as any friend or well-wisher of the cause of equal rights would. But a brave and free people cannot bear everything. They are willing to meet their landlords on the ground of equal rights, and have the long and perplexing question of title investigated. But all overtures of this kind have been treated with insult and disdain, and accompanied with this threat we have the power to crush you and we will do it. May God in his goodness bring about that happy state of things that everyone may sit under the vine and fig-tree of his own planting is the constant prayer of your unfortunate friend, Smith A. Bouton. Dr. Bouton's brief reference to the declining health of his fellow prisoners was, in the case of Mortimer Belden, an understatement, little thunder's body was riddled with consumption. Nevertheless, taking his confinement philosophically, as the Hudson Gazette put it, he cheered himself and his companions with songs he improvised to the accompaniment of his fiddle. One that he sang with gusto gave a vivid glimpse of their life in prison, their feet fast in irons chained down to the floor, and spoke bitterly of Hudson's law and order officials who bring the prisoners in guilty if they prove themselves clear. The district attorney is a handsome young man. He spends all his time in laying some plan. As for the sheriff, he is a man I despise. He goes to the governor with mouth full of lies. He seizes upon property, I like to forgot. Still he is the meanest of all the whole lot. He says he will cure them for half they possess, and when they are dead he will sue for the rest. July came. While Dr. Bouton chafed at his confinement, every anti-rent association held its usual Independence Day rally on July 4, 1845. In Delaware County, five thousand farmers gathered in Peter's Grove from all directions. Forty heavily loaded wagons came from Bovina and a large number on horseback. Daniel Squires, who was making his first public appearance since his release from the Delhi Jail, led the Roxbury contingent in a procession of sixty-three wagons, some hauled by four-horse teams. The principal address was made by General Erastus Root, who said, Franklin and Washington were great men. They broke the scepter of a great tyrant. Let us little folk try to break the scepters of little tyrants. The meeting was closed by a new song, ridiculing the late law and order war and threatening the tyrants with the ballot box. Scoheri County held its rally under the very noses of Sheriff Brown's posse of one hundred men. The meeting was in Treet Durant's Grove on Summit Hill, northwest of Blenheim. His had tried many times to serve notices on the hill, but each time George Ferguson lifted the window of his shop in Lake Store and blew his tin horn, and the Indians sprang to action with such effect that the deputies never completed their mission. By mid-morning on the fourth all roads leading to Summit were clogged with horses and wagons. One carriage-train seating sixty people and drawn by sixteen yoke of oxen lumbered into the grove, where anti-rent banners and flags hung from an improvised platform. Behind it came a three-car train hauled by six horses. The Sheriff's posse reached the hill near Summit about noon, but kept well away from Durant's Grove. They spotted one farmer who was riding to the meeting in full Indian rig, but when they ordered him to halt he spurred his horse. He did not draw rain even when a shot from the posse carried away two of his fingers. Instead he took refuge in a friend's house. When the posse closed in he jumped from a second-story window and disappeared into the woods. Fearing that their escaped quarry would arouse the assembled Indians to vengeance, the posse retreated rapidly from the neighbourhood. At noon George Ferguson fired the cannon, signalling the start of the meeting, and while the band played, three thousand men, women, and children proudly watched the drilling of fifteen hundred Indians, the women wept as Thomas Peasley opened with a prayer relating the brutal outrages committed by Schoharri's Law and Order posse. In the oration of the day Ira Harris told the farmers their cause was as just as that of the Patriots of the Revolution. Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof, he quoted, may this motto inscribed upon the old bell in the State House at Philadelphia, rung at the Declaration of Independence, be rung from valley to valley and hilltop to hilltop, until liberty shall not only be proclaimed but enjoyed throughout the land. The Reverend Hezekiah Pettit of the Lexington Baptist Church was there, too. The Secretary reported his remarks as very appropriate and with honour to the station he holds in the Christian Church. The doctrine he taught, the advice he gave, was very much like those who feared not to stand up against wicked kings and rulers and plead in the defence of the oppressed and lead them from under the hand of tyrants. In conclusion a new anti-wrench song was sung to the air of Bruce's address. Hardy tillers of the soil, men of sweat and dust and toil, awake no longer be the spoil of Petrunary. Rally organize anew, old politics keep out of view and stand like brothers firm and true against Petrunary. Doubly armed your cause is just, in the ballot place your trust, and triumph in the end you must, or Petrunary. That night, on the way home, one of the anti-rentors observed sagely, I think the day is not far distant when the child of European government, land monopoly, will be no longer nursed amongst us at the expense of the hard earning of the yeomanry. Albany Counties' celebration in New Scotland began at dawn with a three-gun salute that thundered against the rocky brow of the Helderbergs and echoed over the valley, but the people kept coming all morning. A gigantic moving platform drawn by eleven yoke of oxen crawled in from Clarksville, bringing a hundred cheering anti-rentors. This phenomenal conveyance, which was reported to cover a good part of an acre, carried two banners. We are true to our principles, and, united we stand, we are a bold determined band, and will drive all despots from the land, down with the rent. Ornamenting each ox was a small flag carrying a warning to Stephen Van Rensselier IV, no rent. From Bern came a thirty-passenger train of carriages drawn by six sorrells, over the heads of the horses a banner fluttered, anti-rent forever, we pay rent, no never. Another read, a free soil burn is coming. Banners hung across the road through the village. It was a festive spectacle, crowds of men in every house and around every door, boys exploding fireworks with great expedition, whilst last and best numbers of ladies from the windows and balconies reigned influence on the scene below. Near Sager's rambling frame hotel under the brow of the mountain, the farmers had erected a large platform. Rows of benches fanned out in front, above hung flags and banners reading, Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God. When white-haired old Lawrence Van Duzan mounted the platform and called for order, all the seats were taken by women, with the men standing in rows at the back. Even if the men of the hills took it into their heads to recede, said Van Duzan gallantly, these very ladies would push them on and not permit them to falter till old Petrunery is hunted out. Dr. William Holmes read the Declaration of Independence. The reverend statesman Sanford was to have offered prayer, but thought better of it, so Squire Wilcox filled his place just as well. The Rensselaerville Utterpean band played patriotic marches, and not one but two new anti-rent songs were sung, one to the air of the boatman's dance. Our feudal lords in Coch's ride puffed up with vanity and pride, their boasted wealth they do forget was purchased by the tenant's sweat. Proud haughty barons ye may spy the tempest gathering in your sky, the storm ye once thought would not last, ye may discern has not yet passed. We sons of Patriots sires now swear, your loads we will no longer bear, a thousand hearts now beat as one to finish what we have begun. But shout, brothers, shout! Oh, shout, brothers, shout! Loud sound the horn upon the mourn of Independence Day. Thomas Devere arrived as Robert Watson, a hunker Democrat, began an hour-long oration in full sonorous and musical voice. The rich legacy of freedom and equal rights that was bequeathed to you by the blood of your fathers, shall it be taken by fraud? In all your efforts to obtain your rights, let your sentiments and actions be what the sages of the Revolution and founders of our free government would have done under similar circumstances. Act with firmness, caution, and determination. The people contending for rights that they are entitled to by the Constitution and by a just government and by every character of human freedom cannot be conquered. The voice of the people when founded on right and reason and truth must prevail. Devere cheered with the farmers as Watson stopped to draw breath and mop the perspiration from his brow. But when he resumed, his voice lost its music for Devere. For the success of your cause very much indeed depends upon the character of the papers that are your organs. If either your papers or the organs of your sentiments in the legislative halls assume extravagant, indefensible, unreasonable grounds, your cause is incalculably injured. No agrarian-leveling doctrines should be presented. For while they will destroy the cause, they are not the sentiments of the tenants. This position cannot be too fully presented to the people. The tenants are not destructive, not levelers, not agrarians. Thomas Devere was so enraged that he hardly heard the next speaker. Then Lawrence Van Dusen called upon him to address the meeting. What he said, according to his own report, breathed less of methodical arrangement than the unrestrained feelings of the heart. His whiplash phrases were as unsparing of the politicians bent on getting rid of him as they were of the old wrinkled hell-hog of Petrunery. The Secretary did not record his words, but he must have acquitted himself well, for the farmers unanimously passed a resolution complimentary to his handling of the freeholder. The meeting broke up on a note of fine fervour and sharpened consciousness of the strength of anti-rentism, which prompted Devere to write, If the plowing under of old mossy-faced Petrunery and the sowing of reason and truth among the people that was done there, if these do not harvest a crop of anti-rent votes in the fall, then we will renounce all knowledge of political farming. Devere forgot for the moment the widening rift. We have rarely seen a more beautiful sight than that long line of ladies as they followed the winding mountain path, canopied with a perfect ceiling of gay and various colored parasols. Of course with these before us we had no eyes for the army of men which preceded, followed, and accompanied them. After the day's demonstration of Devere's undiminished personal influence, Harris and Bowton tried to placate him. They permitted him to tell the readers of the freeholder that it was regrettable that Robert Watson should give countenance to the absurd impression that there is an agrarian movement going on. The national reform movement has for its primary objective the freedom of the public lands to none more than a farm, Devere wrote, for its secondary object the breaking down of all feudal tenures in the state. To describe free soil agitation as agrarianism was a miserable contemptible device of the enemy which should be scouted with dignity by every man engaged in the glorious work. It was only a temporary reconciliation, as Devere continued to resist corruption, and in another two weeks he was locked out of the Albany freeholder. Meanwhile, Silas Wright had learned that one fourth of July speaker after another had traced the disturbances in the Manor counties directly to the Governor's mansion. Groups of farmers had waited on him threatening widespread insurrection as their only recourse against his implacability. Moreover, another election was only four months away. The Governor began a strategic retreat. His first move, two weeks after Independence Day, was to send Russell Dorr's successor to Hudson with specific instructions to fix bail for Smith A. Bouton and his two fellow prisoners. After seven months, four and a half of them spent in heavy irons, the doctor was free again. Word of his release spread rapidly, and jubilant anti-rentors escorted him over the roads that twisted through the uplands to the higher hills of Alps. A horseman galloped ahead with the news, and scores of East Manor farmers converged on the village to greet him. As he drew near, his friends trooped down the road to meet him, along with his own wife Mary, whose sweet face was suffused with tears. Dr. Bouton was deeply touched by the warm welcome, but when the farmers asked him to speak he begged off, saying that he did not have the strength to speak of his ordeal. A few days later, after he was rested, he was the guest of honour at a dinner served by the Alps House under a beautiful bower nearby. Anti-rentors from miles around had responded to a rhymed call, which concluded with the following lines, "'In the evening there will be a splendid dance, and Alps will have gathered then. Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright the light will shine, or fair women and brave men. A thousand hearts will beat happily, and when music rises with its voluptuous swell, soft eyes will look love to eyes that speak again, and all go Mary as a marriage-bell. On with the dance, let joy be unconfined, no sleep till morn when youth and pleasure meet." After the dinner in the bower, everybody walked out to a nearby orchard in a natural amphitheater, where only a year before Dr. Bouton had addressed a conclave of Indians. Much moved to find himself once more the leader among his neighbours, the doctor mounted the platform and spoke briefly. As they listened, the farmers sat on the lately shorn grass or stretched themselves on their elbows eastern fashion. There were other speakers, too, friendly politicians from Albany, and Alvin Beauvais, fresh from New York City to represent the agrarians. As darkness fell, the young people went back to the ballroom in the tavern, which was practically across the road from Dr. Bouton's house, while the older farmers turned homeward. One of the latter wrote, as my dancing days had gone by, and I had some three miles to travel home, I did not stay to see the closing of this gala day. End of Section 13, Recording by Maria Casper. Section 14 of Tin Horns and Calico by Henry Christman. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. CHAPTER XIV. FOR THE LAND IS MINE. Alvin Beauvais had been on hand to welcome Dr. Bouton, because George Evans had sent him on a speaking tour of Albany, Rensselaer, and Columbia Counties, as much in the larger interests of national reform as to give Thomas Devere moral backing in his fight to maintain his place in the anti-rent movement. The energetic Irishman had no intention of being pushed aside. Instead of leaving Albany as the politicians hoped he would, he went up into the Helderbergs at once, striking back at intrigers and drumming up support and subscriptions for a new anti-rent paper. Through the pages of Evans's young America he told the farmers that Bouton and Harris had robbed them of the free-holder and were using it as a personal political sounding board without regard to basic anti-rent doctrine. Refusing to sell the paper to Devere on the ground that it might be directed from the purpose for which it had been got up, they gave the editorship to Alexander Devere G. Johnson, a law-partner of one of the members of the Whig Party Policy Committee. Johnson was a friend of Ira Harris and used to boast freely that if he had control of the anti-rent paper he would make Whigs out of the farmers in less than two years. Benedict Arnold's Devere called these political opportunists, and when Johnson retorted that Devere was never pleased with anything they did and had set out to ruin them Devere did not deny it. In the course of his campaign to win the farmers' support he joined Alvin Beauvais for many of his thirty-two scheduled appearances in the Manor towns. For three days they also shared the platform with Dr. Bouton, who was still pallid and weak from his long term in jail. By the end of July Devere was back in his print shop in Albany, for as he had once written in the Free Holder, our field is the editorial table. On the sixteenth of August he brought out the first issue of his own paper, the Anti-Renter, with the words from Leviticus that he had used in 1836 in his pamphlet Our Natural Rights. For the land is mine, saith the Lord, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me. He promised that the new paper, unlike the Free Holder, would be the forthright foe of feudalism in all its aspects. Whether over-gorged and gouty in the old world or lean and hungry in the new, wrinkled with age in the gray castles of Europe, settling down like a suckling calf on our own public lands, or scouring over New York State under the name of Patrunary, you may depend I will be down upon it like a sledgehammer whenever I get a chance. He called for a strong union of all working men against the exploiting classes. May this heart become cold, this right hand palsied, when the one will not feel and the other strike home for the cause of the working men. Indeed our greatest object shall be to unite the farmer, the laborer, and the mechanic in one solid phalanx. Their interests are the same, their hearts and their votes should be united. Toward this end Devere started a second paper, the Albany Workman, aimed at the disgruntled laborers of the pasture and the docks, but it did not last more than a few weeks. Meanwhile the young school teacher Alvin Beauvais was proving a good ambassador for both Devere and the national reformers. He was far more cautious than either Evans or Devere, for he knew from his own rural background that the farmers were not by nature radical. He never asked more of them than he knew they would willingly do, and the resolution he offered at every meeting was temperate enough to be adopted later in part as government policy, resolved that we are in favour of freedom of the public lands to actual settlers with the quantity limited forever. His letters to George Evans from the anti-rent towns were filled with careful observation, understanding, humour and common sense. On August 3rd he had written from Rensselaerville, I have fairly opened the campaign in the Helderbergs, and if I do not misjudge the signs of the times it is going to tell in favour of the national movement. In these parts I have heard but one expression of the farmers toward the great measure for which we are contending. From the first to the last with whom I have talked they are in favour of the freedom of the public lands. The first impression I know is the most favourable, but the readers of young America must understand that they are not always to receive so cheering an account of my labours in these regions, for this many must know is far ahead of most sections of the oppressed counties in radical doctrine. Agrarianism is not here quite so much used to frighten children with and the old women of both sexes as in other parts, but there were and perhaps are yet some few even here who turn a little ghostly at the mention of the awful word. No matter the hearts of our friends were cheered by the elucidation under this head and the terror of agrarianism is pretty much departed from Renssel Ervill. I undertake to say that the anti-renter who will not set his face like flint against the recurrence of land monopoly in the West does not deserve success in his own behalf, that the national reformer who will not go heart and soul for the upheaval of the same abominable monopoly here is but a poor apology for a reformer after all. Beauvais attended a meeting in Albany on August 7th, at which candidates for the November election were discussed. Devere was there, and also big and little thunder. Beauvais wrote of the two released prisoners, both are weak, one and emaciated, belden to the last degree, and it is supposed that the treatment he received at the Hudson Jail, such as I did not suppose was inflicted on any human being this side of the empire of Morocco, had thrown him into hopeless consumption. I do not write this for effect. I write nothing for effect. But I greatly fear the odious prison is killed, belden. He is a young man, not more than twenty-two, I should say, and he assures me he was a perfectly sound man at the time of his incarceration. God knows he is far enough from it now. The Albany conference was a real success in Beauvais' estimation. He was a most intelligent and determined body of men, and for the first time, except in our own meetings in New York, I heard the name of anti-rent spoken with respect and conscious pride. Beauvais was delighted to find that Devere's loss of the editorial post with the free-holder had not affected the farmer's regard for him. They would still stand by him to the last gasp, and so they ought, for he is worthy. Back in Rensselaerville, on August 10, after having addressed seven meetings in seven days, Beauvais wrote again to Evans in New York City. He found the village of Rensselaerville rather too sanctimonious. The people smothered down their beard with a good deal of self- complacency, and rather thought we could not have one of their churches. Anti-rent wasn't so bad, but agrarianism, oh, that mustn't be tolerated upon any consideration. Well, now we can have any church they have got, certainly, but we won't. His letter continued. All things looked charming in the Helderberg country politically, but physically, bless me, it looks as parched and dead as if the destructive Samuel had passed over it. The drought never was so biting within the memory of the oldest inhabitants. Beds of streams are destitute of water. Meadow and pasture are dry as stubble. All nature stands agape for water. So far as my knowledge extends this seems to be the case in all parts of the county, and still I believe there is a tolerably fair yield of most kinds of agricultural products. Just about here decidedly the best crop raised this year, though others are good, is that of anti- rent. This probably never was in any former season more flourishing. Wherever I go I meet the most cordial feelings. National reform is received with open arms. The great principle of limiting individual domain over land, after much of that confused and fragmentary discussion which always precedes the audible utterances of a momentous truth, is very generally adopted in that part of Albany County. In seven meetings not a voice or a hand has been raised against it. On the contrary, the universal expression from the ladies and all is affirmation. While speaking at Smith's Corners near Renssel Earville, Beauvais saw his first calico-Indians. A celebrated chief called Yellow Jacket was understood to be in command, and about the strangest show I ever witnessed. Cooper might do it justice perhaps, but I can't, and therefore I shan't try. Of the forty disguises, no tube or the least resemblance to each other. The chief made a speech full of fine sense, declaring the ability and the determination of the Indians to watch over and protect the people of these counties so long as present circumstances exist, penal laws to the contrary, notwithstanding. After the speech, about eleven o'clock, the children of the forest returned amid whoops and yells and blowing of horns, on horseback, to the rocky mountains from whence they came. On August seventeenth, when Beauvais wrote from New Scotland that he was staying over to attend a sheriff's sale, he gave some amusing side-lights on anti-rent methods. This is a mountainous broken country, divided by gulfs, dark passes, and deep ravines, and you should know that it is one of the most perverse parts of the United States for officers bearing declarations, rits of ejectment, etc., to travel in. They rarely meet with any irreparable accident, but the moderate-sized stone in the road, and there's enough of them no doubt of it, over which citizens' carriages will pass harmlessly, is almost sure to upset a sheriff and break his thills perhaps. Accidents of this kind are said to have been quite common up here in the time past. Indeed, I passed a spot lately where something of this kind happened not very long ago. The circumstances were related to me by a veteran as we rode along. The sheriff had carefully tied his horse, as he supposed, to the fence, and had gone into the lots to drive off a flock of sheep. Suddenly a gust of wind arose, tipped over his carriage with a terrible crash, frightening his horse, and causing him to swear prodigiously. Well, a little boy who was just passing along with a basin of salt in his hand, taking fright, as was natural at such strange sights, and being greatly shocked by the impiety of the sheriff, ran with all the might he had in him. And the sheep, as sheep will do, attracted by the salt, ran after him. Before the sheriff got his broken vehicle on its legs again, of course boy, sheep, and all had disappeared. So there was nothing left for him to do but limp his bootless way back to Albany. It is a pity, but it can't be helped that I know of. Furious winds will upset sheriff's carriages, especially up this way. Little boys will be afraid sometimes and run away. Sheep like salt in a moderate degree. And we must make the best of it. The good old custom which so generally obtains among the farmers elsewhere, of blowing tin horns for dinner, is here an obsolete idea. The delicate instrument is now only used in these parts on great occasions of state, such as the grand entry of the sheriff of Albany, and perhaps the same honour is paid to one of his inferiors, when the august minister of the law appears on Capitol Hill, taking his course toward the setting sun. The first farmer, as in duty bound, sounds his horn. Straightway then, family after family, hamlet after hamlet, and village after village, take up the sound, and throw it forward until it climbs the Helderberg, sweeps through the valleys beyond the passes, on to the borders of Schenectady, Schoharry, and Green. For a minute every hill and veil and quiet recess in the twenty-four mile square resound with delectable music of the tin horn. Then all is silent as the grave. The hammer is dropped on the anvil, the scythe in the field, the plough in the furrow, and all is busy preparation to honour the approach of the sheriff. Soon again a single horn is heard. It indicates the road by which this gentleman proceeds. He passes another farmhouse, and the eternal horn rings forth his progress. The sale that Beauvais witnessed was Sheriff Baderman's third attempt to sell Conrad Matthias's stock, to satisfy Van Rensselier's claims. But as he later described it for George Evans and the readers of Young America, it was a fairly tame affair. The people came in great numbers, the sheriff came, but the horses, the cows, and the sheep, did not come. In short, it was a sale whereat nothing was sold. No obstruction, no indignity of any kind was offered to the officers. They patrolled for two hours or so, in search of the horses, etc., which were advertised for sale. But so especially dry was it, we have had a beautiful rain since, that the animals had probably wandered off in quest of water or more pleasant pastureage. The fates were adverse, the fun was spoiled, the sheriff drove away his own team and nothing more. The crowd slowly closed up the passage after him, and all was still. No, all was not quite still. The thirty or forty women on the lawn commenced to laugh, cackle, and make other feminine noises, indicating, I should say, a rather dislike for Sheriff Baderman and his companions. The sheriff is a very good-looking man himself, but he is on the shady side of forty and married. And not satisfied with this demonstration of ill-will they called out to the men, why don't you cheer? But it wouldn't do, they answered only by a sullen shake of the head, and had determined, not a word, not a word. Up to this time I was a silent spectator of the scene, had witnessed the passive resistance of the people, like that which the atmosphere offers to a cannon-ball, giving way when it was pushed aside and closing in immediately after. And I was glad that it was so. But now I was called upon to provide part of the entertainment. Barn doors were thrown open, men and women arranged themselves around, sitting, kneeling, standing on the floor and earth outside, clinging to the margin of the Hamo, suspended from every beam and pin, hanging all silent there and still, they waited for this individual to open his mouth in speech. To my knowledge none of the unrivaled core was present, wherefore I must be content that what was then spoken on the mountaintop is never destined to reach the swarming world below. The ever-recurring resolution was passed, patriotic songs were playing, hope sat on every countenance, joy beat in every heart, and we went on our several ways. The Helderberg anti-rentors were the only ones who were actually successful in resisting without employing the Indians. When bidders came from the city, the tenants sometimes kept the bidding going all afternoon and into the night, up to several thousand dollars for a single cow, until the sheriff had to give up trying to conclude the bidding and called off the sale from exhaustion. Or, if a sale was completed, the city buyer heading out of the mountains would hear unearthly voices and the animal would be frightened and stampeded into escape. In some instances the cow was shot from ambush while being led away. Occasionally women took part. Once, as Baderman's horses jogged along in the mountain coolness, bound from Albany into the hills beyond Renssel Irvill, two women appeared, one mounted and the other on foot. They followed him, alternately blowing tin horns vigorously and pouring out the vilest abuse imaginable. Baderman pretended not to notice them, but their signal was heard, and as usual he had his journey for his pains. He finds it impossible in almost every case to serve a declaration. The sharp twang of the warning horn precedes him, and ere he arrives the birds are either flown or are safely locked within their domestic castles. Beauvais' next destination was the anti-rent towns of the East Manor. In a letter from Dr. Bouton's home he furnished vivid glimpses of the country around Alps and of Big Thunder himself. This is the center of Renssel Irr County, a forbidding Alpine region, but inhabited by a people generous, hospitable and patriotic. Here reside the two most notable individuals in some respects of the present time, perhaps, the famous Hudson prisoners of frightful name. Bouton is nearly restored, belden far otherwise, and now seeing that such folios of lies have been printed about Bouton, representing him as every description of villain from the callous murderer down through intermediate grades to the weak, skulking, and treacherous coward, I will give my impression of him from an intimacy of three days' duration. I should say he is a cultivated man of fair natural abilities, having the domestic and social affections large, with a considerable shade of generous romance pervading the whole character. There is nothing of the thunderer in his appearance, his stature is middling, his voice mild and musical, his eloquence touching and persuasive. He has been the object of excited prejudices of a senseless tyrannical mob and of a more senseless tyrannical core of public officers, all of whom will live to discover and repent them of their wicked injustice? But can a lifelong repentance in dust and ashes, can a thousand pilgrimages to holy sepulchres raise the dead? How then shall they atone for the inhuman, torturing, inch by inch murder of Belden? That's the question, can they raise the innocent dead? While in the East Manor Beauvais visited Burton Thomas at West Sand Lake, a nice little country village, rather elite of country villages about here, built upon a small plain, surmounted by a gay irregular amphitheater of hills covered with cultivation or wild waving Boschage, and possessed, I am told, of a considerable degree of refinement. At East Sand Lake, Beauvais wrote to Evans, I made the acquaintance of that terrible man, Rance Coyle, who is indicted at Troy for various and grievous offenses against the laws, as an Indian chief under the name of Red Jacket. He is a glass-blower by trade, has not withstanding the adverse circumstances with which from the first he has been surrounded, attained a considerable degree of cultivation, has collected about him a library of rather remarkable books for a man in his position, and spends his hours of recreation from physical labour in intellectual pursuits. How dangerous to sheriffs he may be, I know not, but he does not look precisely like the man who shall shortly put on the stripes of the penitentiary. The speaking tour ended when Beauvais had to return to New York City to report to the national reformers on September 10. By that time serious trouble had broken out in Scoheri and Delaware counties, and Dr. Bouton was no longer a free man. Yet Beauvais felt that the situation as a whole was encouraging. He had travelled several hundred miles through the anti-rent districts, and at all places had been hospitably received. He was, however, strengthened in his conviction that the farmers were not generally radicals who had dug deep into the science of political economy. When their chains began to gall they determined to throw them off, but as might be expected in the incipiency of such a movement, their measures were fragmentary, and when something more radical was proposed, as might be expected, their leaders held back, fearing in some cases that radical measures might interfere with their own project of overthrowing the patroons. His report summed up. The result of my experience in these counties is a conviction that the anti-rent cause is destined to be a most triumphant success. In seven counties their union is perfect, and there is no such thing as a Whig or Democrat among them. They are all anti- renters, their banner is equal rights, and under it they will not go back but advance. They are strong enough to hold the balance of power and force the attention of the people to a consideration of their grievances and the feudal titles they are determined to alter, modify, or abolish. They are too completely organized to think of giving way, and their movement, in connection with that of the national reformers, will yet redeem the condition of labor in this country.