 Section 3 of Tin Horns and Calico by Henry Christman. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 3. Seward takes the Helderbergs. Early in October Sheriff Archer let himself be talked into invading the Helderbergs in person. Three deputies accompanied him, the whole party traveling on horseback. Before they were half-way up the autumn-draped hills they heard the tin horns, and at Reedsville, on the crest, they found the narrow, twisting road blocked by a wall of determined men. Archer spurred his horse toward them, but a broad-beamed farmer caught the reins, yanked the sheriff's horse around, and with a hand as big as a ham let go a resounding thwack across the beast's flank. The horse reared and bolted down the road toward Albany. The deputies followed close behind their leader, with the contemptuous yells of the crowd rolling after them. For the next few weeks Stephen Van Rensselier left the tenants alone, as disturbing political developments had cooled his enthusiasm for an immediate showdown. In the past his family had experienced little difficulty in electing friends who would protect landlord interests in the state legislature. But now, in making their nominations, both parties had their eyes on the Helderbergs. Not only Van Rensselier, but conservatives of both parties had passed many an anxious moment since the inauguration of Governor William H. Seward, the young man from Auburn, with the offhand manner, twinkling eyes and unruly hair. Bread in the ideals of Jefferson, Seward had deserted the Democratic Party early in his career because he felt it had traveled too far from the doctrines of its founder. Now he had come to power in a conservative party by openly advocating that it cut its ties with the aristocracy and become the party of the people. Whig policy in New York State had once been dictated by men like Samuel Stevens, a Van Rensselier lawyer who had opposed Seward's nomination, and Daniel Dewey Barnard, the good patroon's executor, who declared that the tenants should consider it an honor to carry tribute to the patroon. Now it was in the hands of a man who talked to everybody and listened not only to plain spoken liberals but also to theorizing politicians. Seward's public policy required that he restore political power to the people and open to all men of whatever race, negro or white, all paths for the improvement of their condition as well as for their mental and moral culture. He promised schools in the conviction that self-government could be maintained only by an educated and enlightened people. He would welcome the immigrant, share with him political and religious freedom, tolerate his churches, establish schools for his children, and so assimilate his habits, his manners and his opinions. In the marble halls of the defeated Democrats, the derision that greeted this kind of talk was tinged with anxiety. The more conservative Whigs, too, watched with misgivings as the political theorists took the winding path under the horse-chestnuts and pines to the Governor's study. Chief among the visitors was Thurlow Weed, editor of the Albany Evening Journal and rising party-boss, known to his Whig intimates as the dictator. Slumped in a chair with his long legs stretched toward the fire, Weed would talk politics by the hour while the two men puffed heavy cigar smoke in each other's faces. He often brought with him young Horace Greeley, then only twenty-eight, who had come to Albany to edit the Jeffersonian during the campaign of 1838. The Governor liked this slender, light-haired young man with the stoop in the nearsighted eyes. He thought Greeley rather unmindful of the forms and social usages, and yet singularly clear, original, and decided in his political views. These men were very conscious of developments in the Helderbergs. They had the farmers in mind when they selected boisterous old general Erastus Root of Delhi-Delaware County as one of the three senatorial candidates in the Albany District. Root was a former Democrat, champion of the defunct Working-Man's Party, and long a bitter opponent of the landlord aristocracy. However, the Democrats, old hands at political generalship, had nominated Hugh Scott and Charles Bowton for the assembly, hoping that the tenants' enthusiasm for these two members of the Anti-Rent Committee would win votes for the other Democratic candidates and offset the new Whig liberalism. Only by a miracle it would seem could the Whigs break the Democrats' twenty-two-year control of the Senate, the traditional stronghold of conservativism in the state. At the last minute, Thurlow Wheed performed the miracle. He sent word to influential Whigs in New York City, emphasizing the gravity of the situation, and they promptly chartered a steamer for a hurried trip upriver. They arrived in Albany on the Sunday morning before election and sent for Wheed to meet them at the Eagle Tavern, where they were later joined by Governor Seward. The men from New York City opened a trunk and took out a large bandana handkerchief full of bank notes of various denominations, amounting to eight thousand dollars, which they placed at Wheed's disposal, charging him to spare no effort to carry the district. If any more were needed they would draw checks for it. The politician told them it would be impossible to disperse such a large sum in the two days left before election, but he took three thousand dollars, sending half to Columbia, Green, Delaware and Rensselaer counties and reserving the rest for Albany. Governor Seward offered no objection, although he had pledged himself to purify the ballot box, but he was seriously concerned lest they be discovered. A strange ship in port and a party of strangers at the Eagle, might, he pointed out, arouse the curiosity of the democratic Argus. Again Thurlow Wheed proved himself a master strategist. One of his henchmen went for a stroll along the docks with a printer who worked for the Argus and not only pointed out the strange ship, but volunteered to find out what it was doing in Albany. So it was that the next morning, on information thoughtfully supplied by the Whigs, the Argus reported the arrival of a group of flower speculators, who, having private information of bad crops in Europe, were seeking to secure a domestic monopoly. Meanwhile Wheed's men, their pockets weighted with emergency funds, were rounding up all the Whigs' steamboat and sloop-hands on the Hudson to swing around the poles and ascertain where the screws were loose and the machinery needed oiling. The plot succeeded. Wheed outregencyed the Albany Regency and won the three contested seats. Thus said Wheed blandly, a memorable coup d'etat, completely revolutionizing the Senate, was effected on the very edge of election by the thoughtfulness and liberality of a few zealous politicians. As events were to prove, he and his generous friends had bought more than a Whig victory. They had purchased Senate seats for two future anti-rent champions, General Root and Mitchell Sanford. The election was a double defeat for Stephen IV. He could no longer count on the Senate as a defender of vested rights, and the electioneering period had given the tenants time to organize and to entertain notions of legislative redress. He was convinced he could win if the State itself would assist in rent collection, but he had no reason to look to Governor Seward for that kind of support that John Jay had once given to the Livingstons. Seward's lack of sympathy for the landed aristocracy was a matter of record. There was, however, one way of enlisting his aid, to convince him that armed insurrection was threatening the peace of the State. It was on this premise that Van Rensselaer planned more drastic action for Sheriff Archer. Notices were issued by the Sheriff's Office on the morning of Monday, December 2, 1839, ordering seven hundred citizens of Albany to appear at once as a posse to put down the rebellion in the Helderbergs. Meanwhile sensational stories of violence on the hilltop were circulated in an effort to rouse the population. Van Rensselaer tried to justify himself by addressing a two-column letter to the public, which appeared in the press of that day. Of his counter-proposals to the tenant's committee, he wrote, I am well informed that many would have availed themselves of my proposition if they had not been deterred by threats of violence to their person and property. Neither his unconvincing version of events since his father's death, nor the rumours of further tenant uprisings, had much effect on the labourers who were to compose the bulk of the posse. The response was only half-hearted. In a lampoon of the day's events, the Albany microscope solemnly described that morning as follows. Our citizens were startled from their propriety by the call upon them of our indefatigable and efficient constables in all the agitation of a thief race, terror and importance blazing in their sagacious countenances, each carrying a handful of papers of most ominous appearance, being the size and shape to offenders known as warrants subpoenas, etc., etc., at which all goodly disposed people have such an instinctive dread, and when, with the vision of grand juries, indictments, fines, and other commonplace pains and penalties full in their minds, the reader can better judge than we can describe their utter astonishment at receiving a sheriff's mandate to turn out to war, and that too with a hear-of, fail not at your peril. Here was a sight to behold. The Dutch had taken the halibaric, war, pestilence, and famine inevitable. Good God, what was to be done? Some took salts, some turned pale, got the diarrhea, and sent for the doctor, and some went to lawyers to know if there was no getting off, some went to ministers to ask for prayers, and some went to bed. Throughout the day was one of excitement. The Irish invoked St. Patrick, and the Dutch cried to de Blixen in Duyval mid your posse commiatus, while the Yankee reckoned it a bad speck and that he shouldn't engageant. At one time stated the microscope the rumour was that the farmers had bought all the powder in town, at another that the women were all armed with great chopping-knives, all bloody and gashy, forming an impregnable body to all invaders. At another that they had blown up all the bridges, poisoned all the streams, murdered all their children and old folks to have them out of the way, and had sworn to eat nothing but the flesh of their enemies all this winter. By mid-morning that Monday five hundred had responded to the sheriff's summons. According to Frederick Seward, the governor's son, great was the excitement and much the merriment in the crowd that gathered round, either in obedience to Archer's call or from curiosity. The hilarity increased when Archer came out on the sidewalk in front of City Hall and began to call the roll, for it included such prominent people as bank presidents, former Governor William Marcy, John Van Buren, the handsome son of the President, the Petroon's lawyers, and Stephen IV himself. Van Buren was excused from service, but Marcy and Van Buren frowned down the hoops of the crowd and marched away with the army of men, on foot, on horseback, in wagons and carriages. Marcy, a grim-faced man of fifty-three, wearing a big hat that seemed to float on his shaggy hair, marched as far as Adams's Tavern, some six miles away, before a friend picked him up in a carriage and drove him the rest of the way. It was late afternoon when the posse reached Clarksville under the mountain. Although Archer had received word that a large body of men was assembled at Reedsville on the crest, he went forward to meet them with only one hundred mounted men, leaving the rest behind at Clarksville. The picked company had barely begun the steep climb above Clarksville when they found their way blocked by an equal number of mounted farmers, who parted ranks without resistance, and then fell in behind as Archer led his men on up the hill. Less than a mile away another blockade of farmers was encountered. Make way, Archer shouted. The farmers stood motionless while insistent blasts of horns echoed from the rocks above. Archer fell back to consult with his men, and they were girding for action when, to their astonishment, the second blockade divided and let them pass. As soon as the sheriff's company reached Reedsville the farmer's plan suddenly became apparent. They had maneuvered the sheriff into a position where six hundred men blocked his rear, and three times as many now barred the road ahead, all mounted, all armed with pitchforks and clubs. Archer rushed the line with a few of his men, but the farmers pressed them back. A second assault was repulsed with even stronger opposition. After a brief conference with his lieutenants the sheriff ordered a retreat. The farmer's rear guard opened a pathway, the posse galloped through, and the farmers trailed them down the mountain with an avalanche of derision. At Clarksville, instead of ordering his entire army to attack, Archer directed them to return to Albany. He himself hurried on ahead to make his report. His straggling army suffered casualties that day, but only from a protracted assault on the bar and commissary at Clark's tavern. The rumor was that former Governor Marcy tore his breeches and had to spend the night at the tavern to have a patch put in. John Van Buren, the handsome young widower, was said to have stayed overnight, but most of the posse went home at some time before morning. Of this phase the microscope reported, the homeward march of the victorious, covered with glory, spoils, and grease, was a sight to behold. The line of march extended nearly sixteen miles. The squads that first commenced the advance backwards arrived at about two in the morning, and they made the streets echo with their notes of triumph. The remainder, among whom were several who had been desperately wounded in the melee and left for dead, but who had strangely recovered, came straggling in at their leisure until sunset. A few who had given out on the road and had been observed lying in the corners of the fences in a happy state of wounded unconsciousness came limping in late in the evening. This is an unparalleled case, and will immortalize the revolt of the Helder Barrick and the march and deeds of the Grand Army to all posterity. Although it was nearly midnight when he reached Albany, Sheriff Archer went at once to Governor Seward and asked for the state militia. He made his desultory efforts of the past four months sound like major battles, and though he had not brought the whole posse into action that afternoon, he told the Governor that his entire force had been inadequate to overcome the resistance. Seward's skepticism was undisguised. He had already had reports of the day's expedition, and the debauch of the main contingent at Clarksville. He had Sheriff Archer file a sworn, explicit report of all attempts to serve papers on the recalcitrant tenants. After reading the documents, which included a carefully edited account of the posse's march, the Governor was convinced that there had been some violence, but there was no evidence that the county had fully used its powers to effect a settlement. The law required him to give military aid to any county that needed it to enforce law and order, but he would not appeal to the last argument of kings until the legal resort of republics had been exhausted. Seward was in a difficult position, but the pressure was too strong to ignore. After a lengthy conference with his advisors, he ordered Archer to get warrants for the arrest of farmers who had resisted him or his deputies in the exercise of their duty. The Sheriff was then to summon the Albany County militia to ensure order while he made the arrests. If there should be any resistance this time, the Governor's instructions read, he was to seize the person resisting and repel force by force, being careful to avoid the destruction of life. Seward made it clear that the troops were to be used only in arresting persons who were charged with having resisted in the past, not for the purpose of collecting rents. This distinction satisfied the Governor and his aides, but not the tenants of the West Manor. A military invasion was a military invasion. Besides, their Fourth of July vow still held, and the arrest of a single anti-renter might seriously damage the movement. Hastily the farmers assembled at Reedsville, equipped with every kind of makeshift weapon. At the top of the mountain road they rolled into position two hoary old field pieces that had done service in the Revolution. Accompanied by the militia as an armed guard, Archer marched again on Monday, December 9th, in a blustery winter storm. Again Albany bristled with rumors. One report had it that two thousand farmers were at Reedsville prepared to resist or die. Another said Archer's army was hemmed in without shelter drenched by swirling rain. At two a.m. a messenger arrived at the Governor's mansion with a special dispatch from Major William Bloodgood, commander of the military. The farmers had neither fired nor offered any resistance, but by occupying all the available accommodations for the night, they had kept the troops from gaining a foothold on the mountaintop, thus winning the first engagement. The Major regretted to report that his men had been forced to fall back to Clarksville, and he besought the Governor to rush him an immediate supply of tents, provisions, and blankets. No resistance need be apprehended, his message added, unless in the case of endeavouring to bring off prisoners or property, in which case there is no doubt our small force will be effectually overpowered. Archer appended a special appeal. I find a body of men estimated at from one thousand to twelve hundred collected together with the avowed purpose of obstructing me in the execution of my duty, and I am entirely satisfied that the power of my county is not sufficient to enable me to execute the process. I therefore make application to your Excellency for such military service as the occasion demands. This time Governor Seward had no choice. The tenants themselves had forced his hand. Since only the state militia had the power to seize and occupy needed buildings, he ordered three uniformed companies to join Major Bloodgood at Clarksville. Some of the contingent left Albany at once, and five hundred more were ordered from Montgomery County. In New York City a steamboat waited under orders to embark troops at a moment's notice, and Philip Hone recorded in his diary, Young men with muskets, unconscious yet of murderous lead, parade the streets panting for the fray, and anxious to flesh their maiden swords in Dutchman's blood, and many a one whose nose looks red this bright frosty morning may find it turned blue when he comes to poke it into the hostile camp of the belligerent Rensselaer-wickers, but in truth and soberness this is serious business. New York State was at war against the tenant farmers. Seward closeted himself in his office, where such close advisers as Thurlow Weed came and went throughout the night. At dawn the Governor emerged, tired and grave. Candles still burned on his desk, and the floor was littered with paper. To the waiting newspaper men he handed copies of a personal appeal to be scattered broadside among the tenants. I appeal to all who have taken part in these unlawful proceedings to reflect upon their nature and consequences, and to remember that resistance to the officers of justice is a high misdemeanor, that when such resistance becomes concerted and organized it is insurrection, and that if deaths ensue the penalties of treason and murder are incurred, that the only lawful means to obtain relief from an injustice or redress of any grievances of which they complain are by application to the courts of justice and the legislature, and that they shall receive every facility which the Executive Department can afford in bringing their complaints before the legislature. I enjoin upon them therefore to desist from their opposition, and to conduct and demean themselves as orderly, peaceable, and well-disposed citizens, justly estimating the individual rights that they enjoy, and knowing that the only security for the preservation of their rights consists in the complete ascendancy of the laws. Quick to grasp the import of the Governor's Pledge, the leaders of the Tenant Army let the troops push on to Rensselaerville without opposition, while they called in Azor Tabor and Henry G. Wheaton, both able lawyers and members of Seward's Party. Wheaton had just been elected to the legislature and was in a position to support them there, and Tabor was an influential wig from a leasehold stock in Knox. On Thursday morning, December 12th, a messenger took Governor Seward the Tenant's answer, set forth by Tabor and Wheaton. We entertain no doubt, the intermediaries wrote, that the utmost reliance may be placed upon their assurances, and that the pacific offers of your proclamation have been cordially embraced by those to whom it was chiefly directed. Virtually quoting from the Governor's appeal, they pledged that the Tenant's would end hostilities, withdraw their army, and demean themselves as peaceable citizens, in the hope of securing justice by legal methods. As the troops prepared to leave Rensselaerville, Sheriff Archer sent further word to the Governor, that he could not find any of the persons against whom he had warrants. They had all disappeared when their comrades evacuated Rensselaerville. Their mission uncompleted, Archer's men began the homeward journey on Saturday. All day they plotted slowly across the cold, snow-cloaked Helderbergs, and down the steep mountainside to Clarksville, where they encamped for the night. The next day they were off again at daybreak, wrapped in blankets and pushing their weary way through drifting snow for twelve miles. The bells were ringing for church when at last they reached the outskirts of Albany, where Governor Seward met them in a sleigh to thank them for their good conduct and patriotism. Without the loss of a drop of blood, Seward had taken the Helderbergs. He had saved the farmers from the brutalities of military occupation and the certainty of crushing defeat, yet had given no ground to the landed aristocracy. Thurlow Weed was sure the Governor had taken a right and wise course, and the farmers themselves were confident that eventually the people of the state would vindicate their stand. The Democrats had hoped that the Governor would blunder into political suicide by alienating the farmer's support. Instead he had increased his stature as their friend. Moreover the march on the Helderbergs had catapulted the tenant's struggle into national attention and himself along with it. James Gordon Bennett, who made the New York Herald the most wicked and witty of papers, was inclined to feel that the landlord's sympathizers had made fools of themselves. It was all right for the banks to suspend payment in 1837, he remarked editorially, it was always all right for bankers, financiers, and merchants to suspend debts, because they could always get the laws made to order. But for the ignorant, big-breached Dutchmen of the Hills to suspend paying their rents is a big crime to the noble Van Rensseliers. None but the educated, the refined, the financial, the brokers, the great commercial interests of society have a right to suspend their just debts. Bennett ridiculed the governor's appeal to the farmers as the small potato proclamation and the tenant uprisings as the small potato war. He poked fun at former Governor Marcy and John Van Buren for having joined a sheriff's posse and then allowed themselves to be routed without a single shot. Finally he published a malicious, versified satire on the posse's expedition, which did not spare the feelings of either Marcy or Van Buren. Steven Van Rensseliers and his friends, both Democrat and Whig, were worried and angry that the Governor should have offered to use his high office on behalf of the farmers, and they lost no time in preparing for a legislative rejection. The doors of the Manor House were thrown open to politicians and lobbyists in an unparalleled round of Christmas festivity, as Steven IV and his agents busied themselves anxiously with fence-building. In the Argus, voice of the Albany Regency, editor Edwin Crosswell accused Seward of acting with imbecility on the one hand and political demagoguism on the other. He said that it was perfectly notorious that the sheriff had not brought the main body of his posse within four miles of the tenant army in the invasion of December 2nd, and it was therefore a matter of conjecture whether it could not have fulfilled its object. Even if the sending of troops the following week had been warranted it had been needlessly expensive. The Governor recommends, nay, appeals to apply for redress to the legislature. We trust we shall not be accused of incendiarism if we inquire what the legislature can do. William H. Seward attempted to supply the answer, in his 1840 message to the legislature in January. After congratulating the farmers for their cheerful and patriotic submission to the law, he then demanded immediate modification of the feudal leases. Even though the tenants had accepted them, as the Van Rensselier lawyers pointed out, the state had an obligation to promote the general welfare and the legislature had power over this as well as all other forms of legal redress. Stephen IV asked indignantly by what right the Governor questioned the justice of his claims or the wisdom of his vigorous enforcement. James Fenimore Cooper, also a landlord, recalled with nostalgia how readily John Jay had put the evil down when the Livingston tenants in Columbia County rose against their landlord. These Republican farmers, Cooper wrote contemptuously, had become so aristocratic that they did not want to be thought of as pulterers. He considered the relation between landlord and tenant entirely natural and salutary, and charged that Seward had taken his stand with the levelers solely because Stephen and William Van Rensselier were only two, while the disaffected tenants were probably two thousand. Despite protests from conservatives in both parties, Seward would not be swerved from his course. While the Senate was wrangling over the bill of five thousand three hundred sixteen dollars and two cents for the Helderberg War, Seward prodded the reluctant legislatures. True, he said, in organizing armed resistance the farmers had chosen the wrong remedy for the evils of leasehold, yet it could not be denied that their complaints were well grounded. Their petitions for relief from tenure's oppressive, anti-Republican and degrading are already before the legislature. I respectfully commend them to the favorable consideration of the Senate. The legislature was finally forced to set up a select committee to investigate the tenures. Late in March the chairman reported that they too found the tenure's contrary to good public policy, the quarter-sale reservation, if rigidly enforced, would almost entirely prohibit transfer of title. The committee secured affidavits proving that the good patron had induced poor and illiterate people to enter upon and cultivate the lands by promises which have not been fulfilled and by misrepresentations as to the nature of the leases. Exploring possible remedies the committee found that a New York Supreme Court decision permitted the state to exercise the right of eminent domain to force the landlord to sell at a just price, provided the legislature deemed the benefit to the public of sufficient importance. A less drastic measure, giving partial relief, would be the elimination of the landlord's special remedies for distress. The committee recommended, however, that the state first try mediation. Accordingly a bill was passed calling for the appointment of two commissioners to negotiate a settlement. Governor Seward promptly appointed as commissioners Gary V. Sackett and Hugh Maxwell, who had been president of the Whig Convention of 1838. The appointments provoked a storm of protest from the Democrats, who linked the move to the coming elections. The United States was in the grip of the wildest presidential campaign this country has ever known, in which a wealthy old Indian fighter named William Henry Harrison, hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, was being hailed as a poverty-stricken farmer, the log-cabin and hard-sider candidate. The picture was palpably false, but the Whigs only replied, no matter the prairies are on fire. The Democrats, struggling to re-elect Martin Van Buren, in spite of the slogans and parades and carnival spirit of the Whig campaign, insisted that Seward's whole plan was designed to create new officers to perambulate the manner and do service for the hard-sider cause and at the public expense. They were grieved to see more and more farmers cutting their Democratic ties to climb into wagons, hoist a coon high on a pole, and chant, Van, Van, as a used-up man. Moreover, Seward's friend Horace Greeley had returned to New York City to edit a Whig campaign paper, the log-cabin, and a new verse had been added to the most popular of the campaign songs. Who shall we have for Governor, Governor, Governor, who tell me who? Let's have Bill Seward for he's a team, for Tippi Canoe and Tyler too, for Tippi Canoe and Tyler too. Whether the two commissioners joined in the noisy summer campaign or not, they accomplished nothing for the farmers of West Manor that year, beyond a few preliminary conferences with tenants and representatives of Van Renssel here. Meanwhile, the prairie fires swept Harrison and Tyler into the White House, and William H. Seward was returned to the Governor's Mansion, although by a much smaller majority. Early in January, 1841, Maxwell and Sackett attempted to bring the landlord and the tenants together around a conference table. Stephen IV refused to participate, but he sent his attorney with his proposals. He was willing to retreat slightly from his 1839 position, but the only terms he offered were still contingent on full payment of back rent, and applied only to the four rebellious hill-townships. The valley farmers could have their terms by applying individually at the Manor House. Van Renssel here also refused to give up the quarter sale, which the best lawyers in the state considered unconstitutional. Neither would he agree to the tenants' offer of a principal sum which would return interest equal to the rent, although Seward held it to be fair. Van Renssel here argued that the farms had risen in value because of years of cultivation, and that he should receive a comparable increase. On the whole the tenants were still disposed to compromise, but the patroon balked at every counter-proposal. James Fenimore Cooper stated the case for him. This property is not only invested to his entire satisfaction, as regards conveniences, security, and returns, but also in a way that is connected with some of the best sentiments of his nature. Of Governor Seward Cooper wrote, He has lived in vain who has not learned that they who make the loudest profession of love of liberty have little knowledge of the quality, beyond submission to the demands of numbers. Our executive has carried his fatherly care even beyond this. He has actually suggested the terms of a bargain by which he thinks the difficulty can be settled, which, in addition to the gross assumption of having any voice in the matter that in no manner belongs to him, has the palpable demerit of recommending a pecuniary compromise that is flagrantly wrong as a mere pecuniary compromise. In March, while negotiations were still theoretically in progress, Stephen IV took further measures against the tenants of Byrne and Rensselaerville. Amos Adams, archer's successor as sheriff of Albany County, was once more sent to the Helderbergs, this time to auction off livestock to satisfy the rent claims. If he had hoped to find the farmer's vigilance relaxed because they had promised to end hostilities, he was due for a surprise. Not only did the tin horns sound the warning, as usual, but he was confronted with a disconcerting new development. A party of men gathered round disguised as Indians in loose pantaloons and tunics of brilliant calico, decked with fur, feathers, and tin ornaments. To prevent recognition some had painted their faces black or red, and others wore masks of calico or painted sheepskin. These grotesque creatures did not lift a finger against Sheriff Adams himself, yet they prevented him from holding the sales by the practical expedient of driving off the landlord's friends who had come as bidders. The fact that Stephen Van Rensselaer had resumed legal action against the tenants proved to Maxwell and Sackett that the patroon did not intend to come to terms. In April, therefore, they told the legislature that negotiation had failed, and they could do nothing more until a better spirit of compromise was shown. Their report left no doubt of their personal opinion. They declared the tenures in every way unfortunate in their operation upon the tenants individually and upon the general condition of the country, and incongruous with the general laws, customs, and habits of the people. The tenants had economic as well as political complaints. In the last ten or fifteen years their exhausted soil had been unable to grow winter wheat, and they often had to buy it in the Albany market to pay the rent. Frequently the agents of the landlord refused wheat that had been purchased on grounds that the tenants considered frivolous or unjust. Spring wheat, the only kind they could grow on their soil, was rejected. In many instances they were frustrated in their honest efforts to pay, and in the end were compelled to pay the cash equivalent of the very highest market price. In addition, Van Rensselaer adopted the view that the day's service with team should consist in bringing a load of wood to the manor house or else paying two dollars in discharge of that service. This interpretation obliged the tenant in many cases to work for several days instead of the one specified in the contract. However just the tenants' claims, whatever the effect of the commissioner's report, no action was taken, and the legislature adjourned for the summer without further recommendations. About the same time a new deputy sheriff began to infest the Helderbergs, a rough, hard-drinking bully named Bill Snyder. This account of his first appearance on the mountain is quoted from a letter written by a Helderberg farmer. On about the twenty-eighth day of May, early in the morning, two teams were seen passing along the highway a few miles west of the village of Rensselaerville, and with each team two men were seen and two only, while to all appearances the boxes of the carriage were filled with some strange and singular production cautiously covered and concealed from sight. The whole appeared to be some straggling party of some travelling caravan. Thus they passed along until they arrived at a certain house where they halted and unloaded their singular freight. When behold it consisted of the high sheriff of the county of Albany, the notorious Bill Snyder, and eight or ten more armed with rifles, muskets, and small arms, who, after leaving their place of concealment, loaded their guns, and thus armed and equipped proceeded to search the house as they pretended for one of the inmates thereof, who bears the character with his neighbours of an honest, upright and well-disposed citizen. It happened, however, he was not at home. They demanded of his lady to show them every nook and corner of the house as they were not to be trifled with, and Snyder, while searching the cellar, bluntly and in language of the man, told a bystander that if he did not clear out he would let his punch out. Then they returned, more than publicly, to Fort Clark, Clark's tavern, where they spent part of the day drinking gin by the glass and Snyder by the gallon, the sheriff as in duty bound footing the bills, bestowing some of the choicest epithets upon the Helderburgers, and showing their dexterity in the use of firearms by shooting at a mark, to the great terror of the damn rascals who for the best reason in the world they did not have with them as a trophy of their skill. This course of conduct, especially in an officer of high rank, appears to me to be an outright and open violation of the laws of our country, and repugnant to all rules of civilized society. Be the people of the Helderburgs ever so notorious in the eyes of flaunting nebobs, the first act yet remains to be recorded that can possibly compare in a single particular with the one above described. Good precedents are desirable in all society, and are what we have a right to expect from a public officer, but we cannot see that while the sheriff is traveling through the country with a gang of armed bullies, threatening the inhabitants with the loss of a punch, that their conduct will be very likely to allay the excitement on the Helderburg. Provoked by a series of such incidents, the farmers finally brought out their Indian disguises to teach the bully a lesson. On September 20th Snyder appeared on the mountains with rits. Not far from Byrne, a constable who was friendly to the anti-rentors, arrested him for some misdeed in Scoherry County, placed him in a wagon with his hands tied and started for Scoherry. Near Rensseldureville, a band of Indians sprang from the brush and surrounded the wagon. The constable cut the ropes that bound his prisoner. Fight for yourself, he ordered. Snyder battled as desperately as a cornered woodchuck. Until maneuvering gradually toward a ledge, he suddenly tumbled into a deep ravine. A few shots spattered close to his heels as he gathered himself up and dashed into the safety of the woods. When reports reached Albany that Bill Snyder had been captured by the so-called natives, Sheriff Amos Adams rushed an armed posse to his rescue. The next morning they found Snyder's battered hat, his torn coat, shredded rits, and the marks of a violent struggle. It was feared that the deputy had been murdered. But late that afternoon he plotted wearily into Albany after spending a night and a day making his way through the woods. Sir Charles Lyle, the famous scientist, geologizing on the Helderbergs that day, found the farmers in a ferment. Sir Charles took time from his study of fossils embedded in the rocks of the Helderbergs to criticize Governor Seward for courting popularity, and to praise the conservative legislature, who, to their credit, refused the tenants' relief. Out of the farmer's elation over this route came a ballad sung to the melody of Old Dan Tucker, which was to become their war song. The moon was shining silver-bright, the sheriff came in dead of night, high on a hill sat an Indian true, and on his horn this blast he blew. Keep out of the way, big Bill Snyder, tar your coat and feather your hide, sir. Bill ran and ran till he reached the wood, and there with horror still he stood, for he saw an Indian tall and grim, and he heard a horn not a rod from him. Keep out of the way, big Bill Snyder, tar your coat and feather your hide, sir. Bill thought he heard the sound of a gun, and he cried in fright, oh my race is run, better that I had never been born than come within sound of that big horn. Keep out of the way, big Bill Snyder, tar your coat and feather your hide, sir. The next day the body of Bill was found, his writs lay scattered all over the ground, and by his side a jug of rum told how Bill to his end had come. Keep out of the way, big Bill Snyder, tar your coat and feather your hide, sir. It was an uphill contest for Stephen IV, but the tenants were not always victorious. In the sporadic raids that continued throughout the summer and fall of 1841 some of them fell into the hands of the law. They had to pay exorbitant fines, but at that the tenants considered the price small as against wholesale seizures and evictions. A farmer was fined two hundred dollars and sentenced to thirty days in jail for resisting a sheriff's sale by noise and violence. One of the Boutons, Palmer Bouton, was jailed for an equal period and fined one hundred and fifty dollars for rallying a night attack on a Dutchman who insisted on paying his rent. He had gone along unprotected by disguise when a band of Indians took the Dutchman to a tavern and forced him to sit in a chair in the centre of the room for five hours until he consented to jump up three times and cry down with the rent. CHAPTER IV. THEY COULD NOT STAND IDLE. An off-year election in November 1841 destroyed Seward's control over the legislature and unseated many upstate representatives on whom the anti-rentors were pinning their hopes. In 1842 the new legislature named a special grievance committee to hear the tenants' petitions, but before it could accomplish anything Stephen van Rensselier engineered the transfer of the whole subject to the conservative judiciary committee. While ostensibly the switch was made to get a ruling on what relief was possible, in reality it was to bring the issue before a committee whose report the landlords could dictate. Seward was helpless, and the Friends of Conservatism promptly reported that the state was without any power to grant relief. The committee fully appreciated the burdens and inconveniences of the tenures and were aware that they were inconsistent with the true American system of owning one's own land. Happily, however, time will cure the evil. Such estates under the all-prevailing influence of our institutions will, in a few years, be gradually worn away, and these lands will finally be held in fee. The hard-headed farmers took this optimistic statement to mean that if they were good tenants and paid their rent, some day a van Rensselier might be converted to American ways and agree to sell. Anti-rentism staggered under the blow. Let a purse pampered aristocrat or some company knock at the door and they are at once admitted, one embittered tenant complained. We want you, they say, to grant us a privilege to run a railroad from Albany to Boston. Oh, yes, yes, this is constitutional. The hole in the Constitution is large enough to throw a bowl through. The Democrats, professed political heirs of Jefferson and Jackson, seemed to have absorbed Alexander Hamilton's philosophy that government was sound only when it bulwarked business and wealth. But in order to fend off the political threat of a strong farm movement, they loudly simulated regret that the 1842 report, written by their own committee, made legislative relief impossible. Given this temporary advantage, Stephen van Rensselier renewed his pressure for rent collection and shrewdly indicated his willingness to compromise with individuals. Many tenants were so disorganized at this point that they were ready to acknowledge defeat and capitulate on the best terms possible that the whole movement did not break up beginning and ending with the rebellion in the Helderbergs was due to the presence of a few strong, hard-willed men who were determined to see justice done whatever the cost. The anti-rent contingents had never been made up exclusively of the ignorant Big Breach Dutchman pictured by the Metropolitan Press. They were plain, hardworking people, some were illiterate, but among them were men of education and outstanding character. Also, more and more able and respected professional men, living in the manor towns, were being drawn into the ranks, even though they were not leaseholders. Doctors, particularly, were becoming a real menace to landlord security. Their medical practice carried them all over the back country roads, on horseback or in a Leather and Spring gig, winter and summer. Men of their education and high idealism, knowing at first hand the problems of the hill-people, could not let the struggle die for lack of leadership. One of the doctors who thus kept the power of resistance alive was Frederick Crownes, a country practitioner in his middle thirties, who lived under the mountain in Gilderburg Township, and had patience all over the Helderbergs. As it became increasingly obvious that time alone would not cure the evils of the feudal tenures, Dr. Crownes' calls became less and less exclusively professional. Seated astride a chair, his hands gripping the back, he would talk earnestly about democratic principles and convince the farmers of their social obligation to unite against the inequities of the leases. On the other side of the Hudson, in Alps, a little village in Rensselaer County, lived another doctor, who was destined to become even more important than Crownes to the anti-rent movement, his name was Smith A. Bouton. Warm-hearted, romantic, and generous by nature, Dr. Bouton had his headquarters at his home, where he pulled a tooth for a quarter, set an arm for fifty cents, and received urgent calls that took him back into the hills to deliver an infant for three dollars, or joust with death for a pittance. Alps was situated in a valley between Bailey Mountain and Pike's Hill. It was a picturesque spot, with broad pastures running up to high walls of pine, hemlock, birch, and maple, but the mountain beauty only sharpened by contrast the suffering the young doctor saw among his neighbors. The village offered little community life and not much social intercourse beyond the walls of Griggs Tavern, yet wherever Dr. Bouton went he preached resistance to William P. Van Rensselaer, for he felt that the amiable disposition of the younger brother did not make the East Manor leases any less binding nor any more acceptable to men of spirit. Smith Bouton was not the first insurgent in his family. Back of him was a long line of French Hugennots calling themselves variously Bouton and Bouton, who had battled as reformers down through the years and finally fled the religious oppression of seventeenth-century Burgundy. His father and two uncles were among the Yankee troublemakers who fought in the Revolution. One uncle starved to death on a British prison ship in New York Harbour. Having no money at the end of the war, his father Azor and William the other uncle settled on Leasehold Farms in Rensselaer County, where Smith was born on September 1st, 1810. Shortly afterward Azor moved to the West Manor where the boy grew up. From childhood he was faced with contradictions in the American idyll. Until he was sent away to school in Washington County at sixteen he had helped his father harvest the rent from their lean acres. Each year he saw Azor Bouton drive off toward Albany with his load of wheat to ransom his right to live on the land and cultivate it. At Middlebury College in Vermont, where he entered medical school at eighteen, he made his first effort to write what he felt to be a wrong. The college was under denominational control and students were required to attend the prescribed church. But Smith reasoned that the college had no more right than the government to impose religious tenets. He led forty-eight students in a march on the college authorities and argued the case so convincingly that religious compulsion was abandoned. After receiving his degree in eighteen thirty-one the young doctor practiced under the aegis of an older physician in Saratoga Springs until he was sent to New York City by a group of doctors to study cholera which was raging at the time. On his return he opened an office in the frontier village of Glen's Falls in Warren County. But two years later, restless and reluctant to settle down, he moved to Delhi in the Western Catskills. Here again he came face to face with the oppressive fruits of landlordism which he had known as a boy, for most of Delaware County was held under semi-fuel leases. In the fall of eighteen thirty-seven he joined the Patriots' War in Canada, led by Louis Papineau, Speaker of the Lower House of the Canadian Parliament, and William Lyon McKenzie, a Canadian journalist. The Governor-General of Canada was surrounded by a corrupt ruling clique, and reform was impossible because the Upper House, appointed by the Governor, had power to negate the acts of the Lower House elected by the people. The Patriots, as the reformers called themselves, held a convention in Toronto, set up a provisional republic, and called upon the people to cast off the yoke of England. Zellis to help, Dr. Bouton went secretly to Canada. His company engaged the royal forces from Montreal, but after quite a smart skirmish Papineau's peasant soldiers fled, leaving the American volunteers alone in the field and outnumbered. They fought valiantly but were forced to retreat to Navy Island in the Niagara River, where they were shelled into final surrender after a month's resistance. Dr. Bouton came home, shorn of money, clothes, and health, with his hair prematurely white. But this tall slender young man had resiliency as well as character. Within another year he had met and married Mary Bailey, sixteen-year-old daughter of Amasa Bailey, the leading farmer and businessman of Alps, and started a flourishing practice there in the hills. By this time Dr. Bouton's boyhood companions on the Helderbergs were in open revolt. Charles Buton was an anti-rent leader in the West Manor, and other Butons and Boutons were serving jail sentences for anti-rent disturbances. His neighbours, in Alps, in all the East Manor, bound by the same leases and subject to the same oppressions, seemed to feel that the agitation on the other side of the river was none of their concern. His own sense of justice outraged by stories he heard, Dr. Bouton crossed the Hudson to talk with his old friends. Their testimony convinced him and he came back determined to rouse his people to action. I could not stand idle, he wrote of his decision, and see thousands deprived of their natural and, as I conceived, social and legal rights. While Mary, the doctor's pretty wife, went about her housework and took care of their baby son, he was calling meetings in all the East Manor towns. This was men's business, in which she had neither interest nor part, though she was gratified to see her husband becoming so prominent in the county. He spoke at as many meetings as he could, developing an eloquence he never knew he had. Though in conversation he was soft-spoken and reserved, on the platform his blue eyes flashed and his speech became magnetic and persuasive. His scorching attacks on the despotism of patrunery were heard at huskings and raisings, and at the horse-swapping conventions that brought farmers from miles around to Martin's Tavern at Hogue's corners. Bouton knew very well that the only hope was to weld the tenants of all Rentsolier Wick into a solid organization, pledged never to pay rents again. With this in mind he crossed the river frequently to consult West Manor leaders and speak at their meetings. In his own county he met often with Burton A. Thomas of West Sand Lake, and still another doctor, Rufus S. Waite of Grafton, who helped him lay plans for the permanent organization. In order to devote full energies to the cause Burton Thomas forsook the Democratic Party, in which he was a power, Dr. Waite risked his position as one of the most influential men in Grafton, the rocky, lake-pot township straddling the divide between the Hudson and the Housick River. Having come up the east slope from Petersburg in 1819, when he was twenty-two and settled in Grafton as the town's first physician, Waite could have lived prosperously as a satellite of the Van Rentsoliers, yet he chose to stand with his neighbors. With the most intelligent men in Rentsolier Wick committed to anti-rentism and the groundwork thus laid for effective resistance, all that was needed was the fire and vision of a real organizer. In June of 1842 the right man came to the Helderbergs, drawn by his interest in the struggle. He was Thomas Ainge Devere, an Irishman with a revolutionary history long enough to fit him for the work that fate wanted of him. Like the eloquent doctor of Alps, Devere had been acquainted with poverty and landlord oppression from his earliest days. He was born in Donegal, Ireland in 1805, at a period when British misrule was at its worst. Conditions all around him might have made him a criminal. Instead they molded a philosopher and a reformer. When he was thirty-one he formulated his social theories in a small pamphlet he called Our Natural Rights, in which he vividly traced the growth of his ideas. I saw, he wrote, that the earth, if vigorously tilled, would yield plenty of the comforts of life. I saw that there was an abundance of willing nerve and sinew. Willing labour and fertile soil should produce plenty to eat, drink, and wear. That this plenty did not exist was sufficient proof that there was something wrong in the relation between that labour and that soil. He pointed out that the people were being crushed between an economy of land monopoly on the one hand and a growing industrial economy on the other. The theft of man's natural birthright of land had driven the masses to London, Liverpool, Glasgow, to huddle like sheep in bedless rooms and force their children to work endless hours until they collapsed from exhaustion. In Devere's agrarian utopia there could be no such exploitation, no power of coercion and no poverty, for man would have land of his own to fall back on, and enough of the fruits of his industry to live, so that he could at last defy the employer oppressor's ultimatum of work for me at my price or starve. Soon after publishing the pamphlet, Devere left Donegal for London, where he wrote for Liberal Papers. In successive posts he attacked Irish landlordism and vigorously supported the Canadian Patriots' war, but each time ran into political opposition. When a group of working class agitators in Newcastle upon time asked him to join them, Devere was glad to leave London, that great social when where he had seen millions thrown into deep and filthy mud to scramble for a mouthful of the polluted life supply that London offers. The Newcastle group were chartists, proponents of the National or People's Charter, which advocated universal manhood suffrage, abolition of property qualifications for voting, the secret ballot, equal electoral districts, a new parliament every year, and payment for members of the House of Commons. As editor of the Northern Liberator and Secretary of the Northern Political Union, the wiry Irishmen worked with the inner circle of reformers that included such men as John Collins and Fergus O'Connor. His energy was limitless, and his talents for writing, speaking, and organizing, were constantly employed. Though Newcastle soon bristled with soldiers, and the mayor banned seditious meetings, Devere rose at a large public gathering of working men and reformers, and made a stirring appeal to the middle classes to side with the workers against the aristocracy in order to avoid bloodshed. Future ages would recognize their responsibility, he said, if they failed to accomplish the needed reforms by peaceful measures. After the rally, when the more impetuous reformers marched through the streets carrying banners, bent on challenging the military, Devere was in front begging the marchers to turn back. It is not riot we want, he shouted, but revolution. His pleas went unheeded, the forces clashed, and about twenty of the leaders were seized. The next day Thomas Devere was indicted, arrested for sedition, and taken before Lord Denman. You are committing not only a crime but a folly, said the magistrate, in assuming that the mass could govern instead of being governed. Devere asked if he might reply. Certainly, said Denman, freedom of speech is the glory of England, the privilege of Englishmen. In proof of which, snapped Devere, I and my fellow prisoners stand here in the dock. It is a glorious sunset streaming through that gothic window. Did your lordship ever hear of a great country lying away in the direction of the setting sun? Did you hear that its people did assume to govern themselves? Actually to do the very thing your lordship informs us cannot be done? And surely your lordship will not pronounce Englishmen less capable of governing themselves than Americans. Are your lordships countrymen less intelligent, less trustworthy than those denizens of the mountains and the forests? Taken aback, the magistrate ordered Devere to a cell, where he joined his fellow chartists in singing, the Marseillais and American Star, Anything but God Save the Queen. In mid-December of 1839, Chartist delegates from all over Northern England met with their leaders, temporarily released, and fixed January 12, 1840, for a simultaneous uprising to seize the government. In Newcastle meetings were continuous for the next two weeks, as final plans were perfected and firearms and explosives collected. In Devere's own chambers busy fingers made the graduated fuses for grenades to be thrown from the ranks, from roofs and from windows. Old cannon were reconditioned for service. Men from the towns of Winleton and Swalwall were to furnish the shells. On the night of January 11th men came one by one, walking quickly up the dark stairway to the secret meeting place. The men of Winleton came, but without the shells, for they could find no furnace for casting. Of seven hundred men secretly pledged, only seventy appeared. Then came the news that preparations in Sheffield, Bradford, and other towns had been equally inadequate. Leaders had been arrested, and the government had full knowledge of the scope of the plan. Devere, still under indictment, walked across the Tine Bridge as if for a customary evening stroll. From the hills beyond the town he cast a last look backward. When government men reached the docks, the independence was under full sale, and Devere and his wife were on their way to America. The winter voyage was long and cheerless. Storms rattled down the yards and rigging, but at last land clouds rose ahead, and the low white sandy coast of Long Island showed above the waves. A Yankee pilot climbed aboard to ease the ship to its moorings, and Thomas Devere, with the six pence in his pocket, stepped into the New World. The United States he found was not the paradise of plenty he had seen through the romantic haze of distance, for the country was still struggling out of the depression that had troubled Martin Van Buren's presidency. The Devere's took quarters in Williamsburg, Kings County, where for some weeks they endured trial which words cannot describe. Night after night Thomas returned to a dinner of Indian meal and molasses after a vain search for employment, any employment I would have worked at, pick, spade, or anything, he said. At last, in the middle of April, he got a foothold. He was offered the editorship of the Williamsburg Democrat, which was being launched to oppose the Whig Star. He thought he was joining the party of Jeffersonian democracy when he accepted the post, and he plunged into the campaign to re-elect Van Buren with his usual vigor and asperity. Within three weeks of his arrival in America he was an accepted Democratic spokesman, ably exchanging volleys with Horace Greeley's campaign paper, the Log Cabin. He scorned Greeley's exhibition of stuffed owls, coon skins, toy cider barrels in miniature log cabins as a spurious vote-getting device, and for his own paper he wrote solid Jeffersonian doctrine, confident that the Democrats were the embodiment of pure virtue. Even Governor Seward drew Devere's criticism because he was running for re-election against a Democrat. There was irony in that. For William H. Seward was the one American politician who should have aroused his admiration, the only one who pleaded the cause of the farmers against the landed aristocracy. Devere did not know of the existence of Petrunary in America, although some of the most spirited passages in our natural rights were those warning the New World against the rampant tyranny, the slavery, and the wretchedness engendered by land monopoly. When elections were over and Van Buren had lost, the Democrats proposed to send Devere to Washington to continue his editorial work in their behalf. At first he was elated, seeing a chance to make a comfortable fortune and wield great influence, but he had begun to suspect that the Democrats were not all that their name implied, and that the old abuses were not confined to England, away with all ambition that has not for its object the welfare of the human race, he wrote firmly. Instead of going to Washington, he turned the Williamsburg Democrat into a truly democratic paper and began to agitate for railroads built and owned by the people, laws restricting wealth, freedom of the public lands to actual settlers, and limitations on land holdings. When the Democrats protested that these reforms were not democratic because they had not been sanctioned by the party, Devere said the party should adopt the more change its name. As an answer the political advertising was promptly taken away from the Democrat, and Thomas Devere was read out of the party councils. At this juncture, disillusioned and disheartened, Devere happened upon a copy of the Helderberg Advocate, edited and published in Scoherry Township by William H. Gallop. The paper was the successor of The Huge Paw, an 1840 campaign weekly, so-called in honor of the Log Cabin Hero's legendary horny hands of toil. By request of West Manor farmers and their neighbors on Colonel Jacob Livingston's tract in Scoherry County, Gallop had continued publication after Election Day, turning the paper into an anti-rent organ that was doing much to combat the discouragement resulting from Governor Seward's inability to force through the legislation in their favour. As soon as Devere read William Gallop's anathemas against the monster system of Petrunary, he felt at home once more, eagerly he joined the anti-rent fight, and from New York City began to send articles denouncing the vestiges of feudalism, encouraging resistance, citing European parallels, and above all calling for freedom of the public lands to settlers. In the summer of 1842 as a result, he received an invitation to address a great Independence Day rally of tenant farmers at Rensselaerville in the Helderbergs. Toward the end of June, Devere arrived in Albany by steamer, as buoyant as a boy. He was returning to his old unfinished war, anxious to join his fellow soldiers on the battlefield. It took seven hours to make the 25-mile trip to Rensselaerville by stage, but he did not find it tedious. At Clarksville, down and under the hill, as the hilltop farmers called the village, the riders got out and walked up the steep winding trail where two and a half years earlier Sheriff Archer's army had climbed to meet the farmers. On top of the mountain, waiting for the coach to labour up the trail at a snail's pace, Devere gazed in awe at the expanse of farms below, with the Adirondacks, the Berkshires, and the Green Mountains in the distance. Farther up in the Helderbergs at Reedsville, while the horses drank at the watering trough, Devere looked over the ground where Archer had been repulsed, and felt that it was almost hallowed. When the stage deposited him at Rensselaerville, he met his new friends for the first time. The days that followed were full of anti-rent talk as he visited from farm to farm and appeared at local meetings. The farmers liked Devere's warm heart, his simple habits and his courage, but more they welcomed a man who understood that their position was insulting not merely to themselves but to the majesty of the American people, and their struggle was a natural extension of the revolution. His attitude gave their cause a dignity which they sometimes found it hard to maintain in the face of the Van Rensselaer arrogance, and yet at heart he was one of them, speaking of our country and our descendants. One of the first to recognise Devere's value to the cause was Dr. Smith A. Bouton, who came over from Alps to meet him. The two men warmed to each other immediately. Both had participated in revolutions that had failed, and were resolved not to let the anti-rent rebellion collapse for similar lack of organisation and plan. Bouton, the soft-spoken, even-tempered humanitarian, realised for the first time in talking with the burning Irish radical that anti-rentism was more than a local issue. Devere convinced him that it was part of a broad reform movement in America, and that in order to enlist the support of urban workers the farmers would have to agitate also for freedom of the vast public domain to settlers. By the morning of July 4th local anti-renters had built a platform for the speakers, and Rensselaerville was swarming with farmers who had come by wagon, by buggy, and horseback from all over Albany, Rensselaer, and Skohari counties. This kind of rally was Thomas Devere's forte, and one can imagine the delight with which the farmers greeted his spirited answer to the argument that leases were contracts between man and man, and therefore immune to legislation. A legal technicality, he pronounced it, and quoted Jefferson in his own support. The immortal author of the Declaration of Independence has left us his opinion that the present generation is entitled only to the use of fruit of the earth and that they are bound to leave it free for the use of the generation that is to succeed them. Those who please to invert the laws of nature and adopt the doctrine of the thick-headed Dutch company are, of course, at full liberty to do so, but from my part I cling to the law which is stamped upon creation, and I have more respect for the least sentence that ever fell from the pen of Thomas Jefferson than for all the dirty, greasy, tobacco-died parchments that ever chronicled the wisdom of the big-breached sages of old Amsterdam. If you will permit unprincipled and ambitious men to monopolize the soil, they will become masters of the country in the certain order of cause and effect. Holding in their hands the storehouse of food, they will make man's physical necessities subdue his love of freedom. They will flood the halls of legislation sent there by their despondent tenants. Then rapacity and wrong will assume all the due forms of law and order. Then our unhappy descendants will be coerced, enslaved, famished to death. Then resistance to the oppression will be stigmatized as a crime against lawful authority. Then our country will career down the steeps of wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last. Moved though his listeners must have been by the sincerity of the quick-tempered, bushy-browed Irishman, the farmers could not go all the way with him. The majority, politically conservative, had been roused to radical action only by the pressure of their own bondage. Some were reluctant to dispute the landlord's title. They were willing to pay rent, but they wanted to pay it in cash rather than in wheat. Although sympathetic to Devere's program, the anti-rinters in general were not ready for the national crusade he saw as the logical outgrowth of their cause. Despite reservations, however, the farmers signed a pact with Thomas Eng. Devere that day, little more than two years after his abandonment of the Chartist Revolution, they to help me free the public lands to actual settlers only, I to aid them in their local war, right, attend their conventions, and made the conditions that I should pay my own expenses. It was not the wholehearted pledge of unity he wanted, and obviously he was promising more than they, but if he had to make some concessions to the conservatives in this instance, he and Dr. Bouton recovered lost ground when they helped draw up the statement of grievances and proposed redress. The radical imprint was plain upon it and it minced no words. The statement reiterated that the tenants were under an unequal ratio of taxation, they paying all and the landlord none. It was illegal as well as immoral for the lessor to have the power to collect rents while the lesse had no power to contest that right. The system had an improper bearing on elections, because fear of oppression led the tenants to concur in their landlord's political views. Not only were the titles to the largest states illegal, but the leases that bound the tenants were unconstitutional, since they contradicted the fundamental tenets of republican government. The tenants asked for a constitutional amendment to end the leasehold system, pledged themselves to pay no rent until relief was secured, and committed themselves to a ten-year war if necessary. This plain-spoken declaration brought new life to the anti-rent movement. With Dr. Smith A. Bouton as their accepted leader, more and more farmers joined, and the circulation of the Helderberg advocate increased rapidly throughout the Manor Counties. As Devere's influence grew, his barbed pen and realistic call for united farmer labour action against inhuman oppressors aroused the concern of political strategists, especially among the Democrats who still retained the farm vote. When Devere climbed the Helderberg escarpment again in October 1842 to urge the farmers to use the ballot against any man who refused to promise support, the Democrats found him too dangerous to be countenanced any longer. Under threat of losing political patronage, William Gallup was ordered to stop publishing articles from Devere's pen. Gallup was defiant at first, but was finally obliged to surrender when a Scoheri grand jury of twelve patriotic citizens called for the suppression of the Helderberg advocate first edition. Chapter 5 Justice for Sale Another election day came, and the Democrats moved back to Albany. The new governor was William C. Boke, a genial farmer from Fultonham, Scoheri County, who had made a host of friends as canal commissioner, riding his white horse up and down the eerie. His popularity was enough to elect him, despite a split in his own party. The rift had occurred over state financial policies, the faction known as the Barnburners favoring a pay-as-you-go policy, and the hunkers, a continuation of the policy of pledging the state's credit and resources to the extension and completion of the canal system. There is no very convincing explanation of the origin of the name hunker, though some said they were after a hunk of spoils. The Barnburners were probably so called because of the old Dutchman who burned his barn to get rid of the rats, in as much as they were willing to scrap internal improvements in order to cut down the payroll. Paradoxically, the hunkers were known as the conservative faction, though they advocated a liberal spending policy, and the Barnburners were radicals because they argued for radical reductions, in short a conservative spending policy. As was only natural for a former canal commissioner, William C. Boke leaned towards the hunkers, but his political mentor was Martin Van Buren, whose son, John, was a rabid Barnburner. Politically, as well as personally, Boke was moderate and amiable, the ideal compromise candidate to unite the hunkers and the radicals. He had the added advantage of being a farmer sprung from farmers who had lived close to the evils of the leasehold system in the Upper Schohery Valley. During the conferences that filled the month between the elections and the end of the term, William H. Seward found his successor simple, kind, honest, and sagacious, a man of homespun rural manners, lacking neither dignity nor grace. But then Seward was always companionable, and Boke could relax with him as though he were not a political opponent. On state occasions the new governor became stiff and reserved, without any of the elegance that most people expected of the executive of a wealthy state. When he moved to the capital on January 1st, 1843, his friends made him bring his best span of white horses, so that he would not, as he phrased it, degrade the high office. He was willing to bring the horses, but when he found that the coachman was supposed to wait while the governor attended church, he promptly sent the team back to the vly. Thereafter he walked. Then Mrs. Boke dismissed the chief cook and insisted on doing the cooking as she had always done at the farm. I feel better now, Boke said, I can discharge my duties better, and when my term of office expires and I return to private life, I shall feel that when I was governor I did not set an example for extravagance in any respect that might be the means of ruining anyone. In the first year of Boke's governorship the tenant farmers were busy holding meetings, distributing copies of their statement of grievances, and organizing for their first test of his sympathies and influence. True to the pact with Devere, Dr. Bouton and some of the others were stressing the identity of the free soil and anti-rent movements wherever they went, but the Irishman was left stranded in the city without any means of carrying out his part of the bargain. He was not a man to be suppressed for any length of time, however. Early in the spring of 1843 he was back among the farmers, handing out a broadside he had printed in his Williamsburg shop. I have been shot out from the privilege of communicating with you for a period of many months, and I take this means of informing you that I have within that time made repeated attempts to obtain a hearing through the columns of the Advocate but without effect. Your paper is, in fact, and reality under the censorship of your enemies. On one side Mr. Gallup is threatened with fine imprisonment if he publishes anything which may give offense to ears polite, and on the other hand Mr. Gallup has been, as I understand, threatened with the loss of legal patronage. I do not pretend to judge what portion of this influence was directed against my humble productions. It is enough for me to know that they were first altered to suit the taste of the censors and afterward shot out altogether. You will, I presume, perceive that a paper so controlled can be of very little service to your cause. Of your will and ability to disenthrall yourselves, I entertain no doubt. Your recent organization proves that the spirit of seventy-six still lives among your mountain fields. You have, I am persuaded, little of either difficulty or danger to encounter. There is a very slender barrier between you and the full realization of your wishes. More slender than your lords and their legal advisors are thoroughly aware of. But still you will have to act with both judgment and energy, or else, slender as is that barrier, you will never be able to surmount it. As a preliminary and, I think, an indispensable step toward commencing operations, you ought to have a weekly paper established in Albany devoted wholly and fearlessly to your cause. Under the management of a competent editor who would write and publish whatever in his judgment would advance the truth, regardless of what the patron and his mercenaries might think about it, and willing to meet them any day they choose and test the liberty of the press before a jury of American citizens, with due encouragement on your part I would undertake to conduct such a paper, provided you could not secure the service of a more fitting and competent hand. The fact that I am thoroughly acquainted with the printing business would guarantee economy and our establishment, and the additional fact that I conducted a press in England for several years, which drove into the very teeth of the government and its crown lawyers, gives pretty strong assurance that the patron lawyers will not make much profit by attempting to persecute me. At all events I am willing to adventure the risk. I submit these matters for your consideration. I feel much satisfied that I am again permitted to communicate with you even in this makeshift way. Believe me to be your brother in the holiest cause that ever pen or sword of mortal ever lost or gained. The farmers read the hand-bell and took Devere's advice up to a point. They abandoned the sinking advocate and launched the guardian of the soil, but Thomas Devere was not called in as its editor. His friends on the Helderbergs persuaded him that to accept the post would be to invite suppression of the paper by the enemy. Devere gave in gracefully, insisting that he had no desire to leave Williamsburg beyond the wish to become more extensively useful. He was willing to bide his time in the conviction that the future would bring closer collaboration from the cautious farmers. Meanwhile, from his headquarters at 99 Reed Street, New York City, he began to build up an organization to agitate for free farms. By the end of the year, the farmers felt confident that their appeal could no longer be ignored. Down with the rent banners were flinging their challenge from the Berkshires to Schoharie County. On January 1st, 1844, Dr. Smith A. Bouton rode down from Alps and crossed the Hudson to the capital, carrying with him the fruits of many months' work, petitions to the legislature, signed by thousands of anti- renters. It was an impressive set of documents, but unfortunately the landlords were prepared. Bouton reported afterward, It was a desperate struggle we had the whole aristocracy of the state to contend with immense wealth and powerful political influences. In both branches of the legislature, the cry of the majority was, Your ancestors made a fair covenant, and now you, their descendants, want to break from it and obtain your lands for nothing. This I had to contend with by explaining to the members the deception practiced on the tenants when they received their leases. The lobbies were filled with landlord lawyers contradicting me. On January 19th, Dr. Bouton won a critical victory, when the assembly, by a majority of twenty-two votes, sent the petitions to a select committee made up of members from Rensselaerwick, some elected by the farmers, and consequently sensitive to tenant opinion. Samuel Stevens, the van Rensselaer lawyer, begged that the petitions be referred directly to the Judiciary Committee, of which he and two other landlord lawyers were members, though with revealing lack of logic he refused to serve with the select committee on the ground that he might be supposed to have a bias on the question. Dr. Bouton was asked to supply legal opinions supporting his contention that the legislature had the power to interfere with the tenures. He secured an opinion from Ira Harris, a young Albany lawyer with a progressive reputation, and then went to Boston to talk with Daniel Webster. That elderly statesman, with the mouth like a Mastiff, a brow like a mountain, and eyes like burning anthracite, had not forgotten the way he had persuaded old Stephen III to elect President Adams, and he also had dealings with the lords of Livingston Manor when he rested the Hudson River steam navigation from them and returned it to the people. If I had time, Webster roared, I would tear that manor into shoestrings. He sent the doctor to New York to see his friend Ambroselle Jordan, who had a brilliant courtroom presence and a skill in cross-examination that had won him the sobriquet of Aquafortis, literally strong water, the name by which alchemists denoted nitric acid. When Bouton returned to Albany with encouragement from the great Webster and supporting opinions from Harris and Jordan, Stephen IV was so alarmed that he tried vainly to get the petitions away from the select committee. Bouton parried the best blows of the aristocracy. Although he had been told contemptuously that horse-dealers might as well look for legislation as anti-rentors, the committee returned a sweeping indictment of the leasehold system. Like the report of the previous select committee in 1840, this one stressed the mental and moral effects of such anti-Republican restrictions upon free men. It pointed out also that although the leasehold counties were especially adapted to manufacturing, having abundant water power and unsurpassed facilities for disposing of manufactured articles, yet the leases prohibited the tenants from using the water power, even should it remain unoccupied for a hundred years, the committee proposed a three-point program of relief, taxation of the landlords, a court test of the Patroon's title, and in the event that title was established, state exercise of the right of eminent domain to force the sale of the land at a price to be fixed by appraisers appointed by the legislature, struck by surprise the house cited the decision of the 1842 Judiciary Committee that the state constitution barred any such changes. Stephen IV, supported by his friends, sent his agents swarming to the capital. Samuel Stevens worked feverishly. Suddenly the report was scuffled without ever reaching the floor for a discussion. For the second time the Judiciary Committee took charge. After conferring frequently with Stephen Van Rensselaer it made its own report, which the anti-rentors suspected had been written by one of the Patroon's lawyers. Samuel Stevens gave support to this suspicion when he explained in an angry reply to accusers that his name was placed on the report without his consent. An anti-renter retorted dryly, I do not wish to charge our legislature with being susceptible to bribery by the hard earnings of the tenants passing through their landlord's hands, and I protest against any of the members putting such a coat on unless they anticipate an exact fit. The Judiciary Committee, like its 1842 prototype, took refuge in the state constitution, waving aside all warnings of civil war. It referred the farmers to Van Rensselaer, who had assured the committee that his tenants could have all the relief to which they were entitled directly from him. The committee deplored the fact that the tenants had been told their lot was hard when it was well known that the state could not relieve them, but its members did not feel that the tenants should be depressed, as actually they were suffering no injustice. The degradation and the hardship were imaginary. If we admit there is a wrong done not to many but even to one, and that the remedy for that wrong was within our constitutional power, we are bound to find and apply a remedy. The legal minds of the committee could find constitutional objections, real or fancied, to all but one of the select committee's proposals. That one issue, taxation of the reservations held by the landlord, which if passed would tend to drive the landlord to seek better investments, could not be disposed of so easily, because the legislature's power of taxation was unassailable. On this point the constitutional experts resorted to a strategy of delay. They asked the Comptroller to report to the next legislature on the desirability of such taxation, hoping that the respite would give the landlord time to force a peace on his own terms with the unfavorable report as his principal lever. Section 6 of Tin Horns and Calico by Henry Christman. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 6. Storms and Tempests. Realizing that the Comptroller's verdict would not alter the judiciary committee's report, Dr. Bouton acknowledged defeat on the legislative front, with something like relief. The tenants had made every effort to achieve relief in the democratic way, and as Devere had repeatedly warned them only one course was left. They indicated their acceptance of this alternative by drafting a new declaration of independence, which they distributed throughout the manners in the form of a hand-bell. We publicly, solemnly, unifiably declare ourselves free and independent from and not under the control of patronery. If it was to be war, let it be war. Burton A. Thomas, corresponding Secretary of the East Manor Anti-Rent Association, sent word to Devere in February 1844 that anti-rentism was still moving, despite the Judiciary Committee report, which he felt sure had made a handsome sum out of the Van Rensselaer's for its authors. The latest development was that William Van Rensselaer was suing extensively for back rents. But the letter went on to say, We calculate to defend the suits to the utmost, and if he gets judgments, the next thing is to collect them, that's all. They served notice upon George Clipperly Esquire, treasurer of the Anti-Rent Association, to remove the dam of his factory out of the creek within thirty days, and now they are up. Now let them come. The man that undertakes the job will get a wet jacket, for we are determined to buck the bull off the bridge and no mistake. In conclusion, the letter expressed the hope that Devere would soon rejoin them, now that the farmers up and down the manor were preparing for the inevitable conflict. One tenant was quoted as having said that they had heard of Lexington and Bunker Hill. When Devere received the message, he was deeply involved in the movement for broad land reform and political action, and was not quite ready to call upon the farmers for their share of assistance. After almost a year of waiting for a summons, a few more weeks would not matter. Devere was convinced that American soil was prepared for a crop of radicalism. Violent conflict between the old order and the new was in the air. The world was raked by unrest. In France, François Fourier had mapped out an ideal socialist community, and died without seeing a single one of his phalanxes established. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels analysed the social forces disrupting Europe and produced the Communist Manifesto. British leadership, hard-pressed for democratic reform, pointed confidently to the spreading anti-rent riots in New York State as proof of man's incapacity for self- government and the total failure of Republican institutions in America. But the Chartist movement was not dead, and Britain found no rest from a people long oppressed. In America, men and women in northern factories toiled longer hours than the slaves they pitied. Agitation for laws to limit working hours was increasing, but it met stubborn resistance. Efforts to organize unions were stiffly opposed. State legislatures were asked to outlaw organizations formed to raise wages. Schools in New York State were using Bishop Alonso Potter's political economy so that pupils would understand that it was infidel for labor to organize. Meanwhile American intellectuals took up Fourierism, introduced in the New World by Albert Brisbane, and established a number of socialist communities, of which Brook Farm was the most notable. Henry Thoreau, an individualist, decided he would rather keep Bachelors Hall in hell than Board in Heaven. He found Horace Greeley as healthy a New Hampshire boy as one would wish, but completely converted to Fourierism. The columns of Greeley's New Paper, the New York Tribune, were open to most of the social reformers. Former Governor William H. Seward, stopping in for a visit, reported for posterity that he had listened to efforts of a speculative philosopher to convert civilization to an anticipation of the simplicity and frugality of the Fourier system. The attitude of vested interests toward such social theorists ranged all the way from ridicule to panic, and the bogey word of the day was agrarianism, which to the landlords meant confiscation of their property and redistribution among the riff-raff. Gloomily James Gordon Bennett of the conservative New York Herald looked forward to storms and tempests and tornadoes and earthquakes in the economic world. It was in this furnace of social unrest that Devere and his associates were able to forge the foundations of land reform. At an early stage in his organization Devere associated himself with such men as George Henry Evans, John Wint, and Alvin Earl Beauvais, men of action as well as of ideals. Evans had been in retirement since 1835, farming forty acres in Granville, New Jersey. Until 1841 he had continued to publish, whenever time and money permitted, a little paper called The Radical, but for the most part he had spent the nine years reading, working, and thinking. Born in Hertfordshire, England, on March 25th, 1805, Evans was brought to Central New York State as a boy. While serving as an apprentice printer in Ithaca, he discovered the writings of Thomas Paine and became, according to his friends, a firm and consistent infidel. By 1829 he had become prominent in the Working Man's Party of New York City, along with Thomas Skidmore, another printer, and William Leggett, and was editor of the labor paper The Working Man's Advocate. Up to this time, like most of the radicals in the party, he had regarded equal educational opportunity as the basic need of the poor. Skidmore was an exception, for he believed that the primary social injustice from which all others sprang was unequal distribution of the land. Thanks to his association with Skidmore, Evans revised his views sufficiently to try to convert Andrew Jackson to land reform. But before he had a chance to make the principal felt as a force in politics, the Working Man's Party disintegrated from factionalism. Evans's brother Frederick, who had worked alongside him for years, turned to heaven and the spirit of departed friends for guidance and became elder Evans of the Shakers. Somewhat embittered by his experience, George bought the farm in New Jersey and retired to revise his social philosophy still further. Drawing from his new experience as a farmer, he developed a scheme for land reform which, like Devere's, proposed that the public land be open to settlers free of charge. Free farms would draw off surplus labour, he argued, thus easing competition in the industrial labour market. His ideas caused no little discussion among the progressives. While disparaging the basic proposition, Brooke Farms Harbinger admitted that Evans was a modest, untiring, and sincere friend of humanity, whom even such perfectionists as themselves had to respect for his perseverance, honesty, and zeal, he seems to be true, to be well disposed, and to be uncompromising, which is enough. This was the man who in February 1844 began to think seriously of returning to New York for more active participation in the struggles of the downtrodden. His friends had been writing him of the growing discontent of labour and the resurgence of reform agitation, and the approach of spring was crowding him for a decision. By late February the sun had drawn most of the winter out of the earth, and it was a matter of days before the soil would be warm enough for planting. Once the seeds were in the ground he would have to stay until the crops were harvested. Evans loved the quiet of his farm and hated the grime of cities, yet one morning, as the robins sang, he arose, put on his white shirt and collar, combed his chin whiskers, and started for New York. As soon as he got there he went to John Wint, an old friend and fellow agitator, an anti-monopolist, and first president of the Printers Union. During Evans's absence from New York, Wint had helped instigate the flower riots of 1837. He was one of the eight who signed the placard calling a mass meeting in City Hall Park on February 13th to protest the hoarding of flower by speculators. Several thousand hungry men, women, and children assembled in the snow and cheered wildly every one who addressed them. While one or two took the opportunity to make political speeches, Wint kept to the subject of monopoly and excess profit. Eli Hart has fifty-three thousand barrels of flower in his store, he shouted in conclusion. Let us go and offer him eight dollars a barrel, and if he does not take it—he never finished his speech. With a roar of approval the crowd surged down Broadway through the slush and stormed the doors of Hart's warehouse. For several hours barrels were thrown from the lofts to crash on the street below, while women scooped up the flower in their hands and with aprons bulging scattered through the side streets and alleys. Men like Evans and Wint did not need to be talked into joining Devere, they sought him out. They had both read and liked the Irishman's writings, especially the pamphlet on our natural rites. And so the very afternoon of Evans's arrival they took the ferry across the East River to find Devere's print shop in Williamsburg. The three men talked for hours, touching upon almost every phase of reform. Years later they were to look back on this day and recall their vision of a grand Republican party of progress, opposed only by the little Tory party of holdbacks. Devere's mature opinion was that the program they determined on eventually led to the Great Civil War. Certainly they charted a new course of reform. They agreed that the machine had come to stay and that the onward march of science could not and should not be halted, but the power who called forth these mechanical forces did not call them forth for our destruction. The prostration of human labour before the machine could be averted only if man's inalienable right to the land could be established by law, they said. Freedom of the public lands to actual settlers, therefore, would be the first step. That step Devere maintained was within their reach. By means of letters reporting growing unity and determination among the anti-rent farmers and his 1842 contract of mutual aid he was able to convince George Evans and John Wint that the broad plan of national reform carried on in conjunction with the anti-rent struggle against land monopoly could achieve political success. With the aim of saving the public domain for small farmers and incidentally emancipating the exploited wage earners of the industrial centres of the East, the three men then and there founded the National Reform Association. As Evans and Wint left him to walk down Grand Street and board the ferry for New York City, Thomas Devere had not been so wildly happy since his arrival in America. A red sun hung low beyond the horizon and the unmistakable blue haze of spring filtered through the city. It was the season when man's hands hungered for the feel of the soil. It was the season to return to man his birthright. In March, convinced that the day of deliverance was at hand, George Henry Evans revived the working man's advocate as the official organ of the land reformers. Weekly gatherings filled Croton Hall at Division Street and the Bowery. Thomas Devere stumped the streets, speaking from a wagon-platform. Not since the turbulent days of chartism and the magnificent oratory of Fergus O'Connor had Devere's life been so full, the downright worth and simplicity of the reform, he said, stirred an immediate response in the public mind, and new names began to appear among those in the inner circle of reformers. One of the new recruits was Alvin Earl Beauvais, a 26-year-old teacher. Born a wig of Patriot stock, he had seen enough of land monopoly during his boyhood in northern New York to convince him that land speculation was a cancer on society. His own life had been hard, but by manual labor and teaching he had managed to work his way through college and come to New York City. From talking radicalism with Horace Greeley and agrarianism with Ransom Smith, whose daughter Caroline he was courting, Beauvais was drawn into the reform movement, where he became an officer of the association. Before long he was one of its most persuasive speakers, for his rural background gave him a practical basis that Evans and Devere lacked. Most national reformers looked to the eventual equal redistribution of all land. In strict justice Evans wrote in his paper, the landless ought to be put in immediate possession of their share of the appropriated soil, and to receive compensation from the monopolists for the loss of education, property, and other deprivations they may have suffered from want of their birthright. Since such a frontal attack on vested rights could not be accomplished without confusion in human slaughter, the reformers were satisfied for the time to press the issue of freedom of the public domain. They also advocated shorter working hours and equal rights for women, and they took a vigorous stand against chattel slavery, arguing that federal farm grants would end the extension of slavery and ultimately destroy the evil. Public support of their vote yourself afarm agitation surprised even the most optimistic. William H. Channing agreed that the location of the poor on the lands of the far west might be the remedy for the increasing pauperism of the East, restoring self-respect and honorable principle inseparable from citizenship. Park Godwin, son-in-law of William Cullen Bryant, stated that in his opinion the immense domain which was now fast going into the hands of the capitalists, should be held by the government in trust for all who are willing to cultivate it. William Lyon Mackenzie, who was telling his friends he never would have organized the Patriots' War had he known how the revolutionary ideals had been betrayed in the United States, called private monopoly one of the worst evils, and declared against all land sales and land jobbing. Even Albert Brisbane of the Fourierists decided to accept the basic principle of the National Reform Association. Garrett Smith, himself a landlord, called free farms the mightiest of all anti-slavery measures, and opposed even the moderate price recommended by Andrew Jackson. It is also my belief, one I have cherished for years, he said, that the individual owners of large tracts of farming land should divide them into lots of say forty or fifty acres, and then give away the lots to such of their poor brethren as wish to reside on them. In the initial political bid of the National Reformers, however, they discounted the support of theorists and leaned heavily upon the farmers of the Hudson Valley. Thomas Devere was at last ready to remind the tenants of their pact, and he was not long in receiving pledges of their support. On May 27, 1844, John J. Gallup wrote from Eastburn, You will find a hearty cooperation from this region, there is a fixed determination to resist patronery in all its forms. Burton Thomas of the East Manor urged Devere to put his plan before a general assembly of anti-rentors. I think it will be no trouble to get up a meeting at any time, unless in harvest time. I hope you will do it, and I hardly need say come and see me, for I know you will do it without. From Delaware County, Dr. Jonathan C. Alben wrote, The principles advocated by the National Reformers are in perfect accordance with my own view, and their sentiments relative to the distribution of the public domain, harmonize with the system of anti-rent, inseparably connected, one cannot move without bringing with it the other. Dr. Alben, familiar with only the conservative press, read the working man's advocate with amazement and pleasure, discovering that it has for its object the amelioration of the deplorable conditions of the poorer classes of society, mitigating their sufferings and releasing them from the hooked fangs of tyrants. In return George Evans opened the pages of the advocate to the anti-rentors, championing their right to use all the power God and Nature had given them to defend their firesides and maintain their homesteads, a right as unquestionable as the right of our forefathers to attempt to throw off the British yoke, which they did in part, as one ox will sometimes do, leaving the burden dangling on the neck of his mate. After a brief recruiting visit to the east and west manners, Devere came back so elated that he established a new paper. It was called the National Reformer, but it made common cause of the struggles of the reformers and of the anti-rentors to put down forever feudalism, tyranny, and lordly oppression.