 Section XXIII of Tin Horns and Calico by Henry Christman. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. CHAPTER XXIII. DEEP IN THE LAND. Anti-rent blood flows down the years and through the land. Mixing with the blood of landlords it has helped build great American fortunes. Sons have sat upon the United States Supreme Court bench and in paneled Wall Street law offices. Some have turned the rich land of the New West to man's use, and played important parts in the politics and culture of the country. In Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, California, anti-rent blood is deep in the land. During their lifetime the anti-rentors did more than arrest the spread of despotic medieval landlordism. They helped, too, to save the frontier from speculators and unscrupulous capitalists. It was John Slingerland, the anti-rent congressman, who introduced the first Federal Homestead Act early in 1848, pointing out the basic interdependence of all the reform movements. An effectual bar to the progress of slavery, he said, will be found in the creation of small homesteads sufficient for the maintenance of single families and requiring not a host of slaves or laborers to cultivate. Slave labor is profitable only when it is extensively employed. Slingerland's homestead bell failed, but the issue kept national politics in turmoil for another fourteen years. The fight to end land speculation and dispose of the public lands to citizens who intended to settle on them was taken up by Horace Greeley, who was elected to the House of Representatives in the fall of 1848, and William H. Seward, who went to the Senate in 1849. The two old friends also spoke frequently from the floor of Congress on the larger aspects of land reform, and kept in mind the possibilities of a new party. In 1850, the Democratic Review of New York observed, it is idle to disguise the fact that anti-rentism is but another of the isms which Mr. Senator Seward and his associates are endeavouring to engraft as an element into the constitution of a new northern and sectional party embracing all isms. The entire anti-rent vote is literally at the command of the free soil interests. How long is a lawless political organization in a few counties to be used by corrupt politicians as a tool and instrument of forwarding the fell design of abolitionism? Greeley's newspaper had gone far toward overcoming the opposition of northern industrialists, who, fearing that free soil would give labour a lever for higher wages, instinctively joined forces with southern Democrats, who realised that small independent homesteads would undermine the institution of slavery. The West Greeley told his readers was the predestined market. The faster the West can be settled and cultivated, the more independent and thrifty its settlers, the greater must be the demand for the products and merchandise of the seaboard states. A new state in the West implies new warehouses in and near lower Broadway, new streets and blocks uptown, new furnaces in Pennsylvania, new factories in New England. A new cabin on the prairies predicts and ensures more work for carmen and stevedores in New York. Eager industrial expansionists found his words a convincing argument for homesteads. The new democratic spirit generated in the anti-rent struggle was bound to be felt far from the manor towns of New York State, as more and more of the discouraged radicals moved to the Midwest, hoping to find the newer social structure less fettered by tradition and conservativism. Albany, Rensselaer, Schoharri, Delaware and Otsego county names began to dot the West, though few of the emigrants found the heavenly destiny of which they had dreamed. These politicians, congressmen, judges and cabinet members had been there before them, like hawks preying on the land, and speculators were demanding six dollars an acre for farms that had cost them next to nothing. Among those who found themselves stepping from one inequity to another were such anti-rent leaders as Alvin Beauvais, Edward O'Connor, William Brisbane and Amos Loper. Not long after Beauvais and Devere made their last speaking tour of the Helderbergs in 1846, Beauvais abandoned teaching for the bar, and married Caroline Elizabeth, the daughter of his old friend and fellow reformer Ransom Smith. In his frequent visits to Greeley's Tribune office, Beauvais had been enthralled by the perfect Western paradise described in letters from Warren Chase, leader of the Fourierist phalanx established in 1844 at Ripon, Wisconsin. On October 5, 1850 Beauvais arrived at Ripon to look for a home after tramping seventy-five miles from Milwaukee where he had left his family. He found Amos Loper, an anti-renter from Blenheim Hill, already settled on a fertile farm three miles north of the Little Settlement, having left the starved soil of Scoherry County in 1847. William Brisbane and his family had been farming for a year at Aalto, twelve miles to the south. Other families from anti-rent counties were clearing new farms in the Fond du Lac region. Beauvais liked the vigorous idealistic frontier spirit of Ripon. He became the settlement's first lawyer, and within a year was laying out Beauvais' addition to the city of Ripon, on property purchased from the phalanx which was being dissolved. Here in this young community he satisfied ambitions that never could have been fulfilled by anti-rent barnstorming or agrarian agitation at Croton Hall and on street corners. He became a social and political force, and later helped found Ripon College to meet the educational needs of the frontier. Meanwhile, anti-rent, free soil and anti-slavery agitation had done much to prepare the way for political realignment under a new party banner. The only spark lacking to light the fire was an issue upon which all the reform factions could unite. This issue was provided by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which would give the two territories the right to establish slavery at the time of organizing local government. The bill was offered in Congress by Stephen A. Douglas on January 23, 1854, and little opposition was expected. Before the end of the month, while the bill was still in the Senate, Alvin Beauvais took the first definite step toward establishing that new political party which he and Devere and Evans had discussed in Williamsburg in 1844, the one which was to bear the name first used by Thomas Jefferson. First he called on his Ripon neighbor Jedediah Bowen, who had been a lifelong Democrat but hated slavery and was ready to forsake the party that had become its apologist. A few evenings later, in early February, Beauvais and Bowen rode out to Amos Loper's place and got his pledge of full support in crystallizing the anti-slavery sentiment in Ripon. Together the three men signed a call for a meeting of all liberty-loving people of whatever party on March 1, 1854. Two days before the meeting, Beauvais wrote urgently to Greeley, advocate calling together in every church and schoolhouse in the free states all the opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, no matter what their party affiliations, urge them to forget previous political names and organizations, and to band together under the name I suggested to you in 1852, Republican. At first day of March in 1854 the little congregational church of Ripon was filled with persons of both sexes from the town and surrounding country. William Brisbane was probably unable to make the twelve-mile trip in the dead of winter, for his name does not appear in the records and he remained a Democrat. As Alvin Beauvais walked into the church his thoughts must have gone back to those turbulent summers ten years before, when cheers echoed through the Helderbergs as he assured the anti-rent farmers that they would yet redeem the condition of labor and a new progressive party would rise to power on a great fundamental truth, man's right to the soil, now he told his Wisconsin neighbors that the time had come. The sentiment of the meeting was polled and it was agreed that if the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed a second meeting would be called to cut old affiliations and bring forth the new party. On March 20th, seventeen days after the Senate had approved the bill, eager citizens of Ripon responded to a new call signed by Beauvais, Loper, and about fifty others, and met in a little white school-house in Ripon for a general uprising of the North. We went into the little meeting, whigs, free-soilers, and Democrats, Beauvais reported. We came out Republicans. Later in this frontier settlement, men who had once shaped local resistance to local oppression now shaped national political destiny. Whigs and free-soilers dissolved their local party organizations, and a committee of five was selected to organize the Republican Party. Among them were the two former anti-renters, Beauvais and Loper, one a Whig, the other a free-soiler, and Jedediah Bowen, the Democrat. The House of Representatives passed the bill on May 26th, 1854, and it went immediately to President Franklin Pierce for signature. The next morning about thirty members of the House met in Washington, discussed the situation, and decided in favor of the new Republican Party. As it rocketed to power, many persons claimed the distinction of fathering the new party, and the little Rippon meeting was dismissed as accidental. Beauvais protested against attempts to discredit the Rippon founders. This was no blind unconscious movement of which the human family makes so many. We did not build better than we knew, as some have supposed. We built precisely as we knew. The actors in this remote little eddy of politics thought at the time that they were making a bit of history by that solitary tallow candle in the little white school house on the prairie. In New York City Horace Greeley failed to respond as wholeheartedly as Beauvais had hoped, and much nagging was needed before he finally committed the Tribune to the Republican Party in June 1854. Even then he was not sure and expressed his misgivings in a letter to Beauvais. I faintly hope the time has come which Daniel Webster predicted when he said, I think there will be a north. But I am a beaten, broken down, used up politician, and have the soreness of defeat in my bones. However I am ready to follow any lead that promises to hasten the day of northern emancipation. Your plan is all right if the people are right for it. I fear they too generally wish that they had a good plantation and negroes in Alabama or even Kansas. However we will try to do what we can. But remember that editors can only follow where the people's heart is already prepared to go with them. They can direct and animate a healthy indignation, but not create a soul beneath the ribs of death. But the people's conscience had already been stirred, and in most places where Republicanism took hold man's right to the soil was proclaimed. As enthusiasm for the new party surged across the nation, New York State's obstinate anti-rentors, who had refused to surrender to political intrigers, saw clearly where their interests lay. The Democrats had so flouted democracy that the Jeffersons and the Jacksons, who gave it life and living faith, should lie uneasy in their graves. It was a hard decision for many farmers who had grown up in the traditions of the Democratic Party, but eventually in a resolution adopted at a state convention in Albany in 1866 the tenant farmers turned their backs upon the past. Friends of liberty and progress, the great Republican Party of the Nation, we have no hope or expectation of relief from the Democratic Party, we expect their hostility to the last, and therefore leave that party to its fate and we turn to you, you who have so steadily and persistently stood up for the cause of universal emancipation and for right. In the months preceding the presidential campaign of 1860 the Democrats failed in their last chance to rob the new party of its working class appeal. Andrew Johnson, an agrarian Democrat, did his best to hold back the Republican title wave by introducing a compromise homestead bill. Thomas Devere put out a hand-bill on January 1st, 1860, pointing to the danger ahead if the bill failed. Unlike most reformers of the day he refused to countenance the new party. It is because the Democratic Party of the present day have turned their backs upon the great principle of democracy that they find themselves in their present position, for this is the true source of the preponderance of the Republican power in the northern states. But the retribution may still be averted by doing justice even now at the eleventh hour. This can be done by the Democratic Party in the Senate taking up the measure and passing it through by a vote that will show they are in earnest. The passage of this law would be at once just and a final compromise of the existing difficulties. With the unchained enthusiasm of the northern states for free homes the vessel of state would rapidly swing round to her old moorings. Still hoping that the Democratic Party would justify its name, Devere included in the hand-bill a letter in his most resounding style which he had written to Senator James Shields of Illinois eight years before when an earlier homestead bill was pending. It read in part, "'Do as you please, do all of you as you please. I will not go down on my knees to you. I will not kiss the dust of your feet and implore you to save at once this Republic from ruin and your names from eternal reproach. But I will tell you when the wail of suffering and the howl of strife shall hereafter arise in the land, for strife too will start up before this drama is ended. There will be names uttered with a hissing curse, the names of those men who could have averted the destruction, but would not.'" In a letter to Andrew Johnson, Devere insisted that the Democrats would be punished for opposing free homesteads. Most of the land reformers were old-line Jeffersonian Democrats. But the Republican Party, he said, had by deception drawn away nineteenth-twentieths of our men. There was still time to enlist the Party in the free land movement. The free soilers and their successors, the Republicans, Devere declared, were and are impostors. If the Democrats were indeed Democrats they could turn the tide against them. John Comerford made a similar appraisal of the situation in a letter to Johnson. I know that the Republicans attribute their success to other issues than the advocacy of the distribution of land among the people, but I am satisfied that they are mistaken. Thomas Devere's prophecy soon came true, as the nation poised on the brink of civil war. James Buchanan vetoed Johnson's homestead act, on the ground that it would go far to demoralize the people and introduce among us those pernicious social theories which have proved so disastrous in other countries. When Horace Greeley personally appealed to Devere to help elect Abraham Lincoln, the compromise candidate for the presidency, Devere printed an abusive hand-bell castigating Greeley for having used Lincoln to push aside William Seward, a far abler man, whom you have so long personally and bitterly opposed. Devere clung to his opposition even after Lincoln made Seward his secretary of state and gave him unusual leeway. The former governor continued to feel himself a man of destiny, and was to distinguish himself by many brilliant acts of statesmanship, including the purchase of Alaska from Russia, but Devere could never forgive Lincoln. Alvin Beauvais, on the other hand, thought Lincoln the wisest possible choice. He wrote to Greeley on June 17, 1860. It seems to be the style now to discuss the sayings and doings of Horace Greeley. An obscure and humble individual away off in Wisconsin wishes to say this in relation to the prevailing subject, you did a splendid thing at Chicago, and if it was through your sole efforts that William H. Seward was defeated so much more glory and honor to you. It saved the Republican Party, and it saved the country from four years more of the worst rule that any civilized country ever saw. Next to Simon Cameron, I think Lincoln's nomination was the strongest, and including Cameron's I believe it was the best that could be made. That was my opinion for a year prior to the convention. I expressed it to you last winter at Madison, I held it down to the day of nomination, and I hold it still. I thank you and I thank God that Governor Seward was not nominated, and yet I would have elected him and would gladly today if I had the power. But now, when we have arrived at the point where success is possible for us, to throw away our chances for the love or admiration of any man, what madness of treason could equal it. Devere would not have supported any Republican candidate, because he was convinced that the new party, reaching down to the masses with the Vote Yourself a Farm slogan of the reformers, was actually the party of conservatism. Industrial slavery was already supplanting agricultural slavery. Devere was sure that, despite its working-class roots, this new party was no triumph of the people, but a triumph for northern business enterprise. They had grasped at land agitation merely to aid free enterprise and increase dividends. Horace Greeley did not answer Devere's hand-bill until after Lincoln had been elected. New York, November 26, 1860, Mr. T. A. Devere. The only favour I shall ever ask of you, and I never asked one before, is this, that you procure and read Benedict Arnold's letter to his betrayed countrymen after he escaped from West Point to the British camp, and then take a steady look at your own face in the mirror. I loathe you too much for your treason to the rights of man to speak of you, but for what you have said or may say about me I care nothing. I remain glad that you have ceased personally to infest me. Horace Greeley. Thomas Devere's reply was equally incisive. Greeley, are you the rights of man? Are the political knaves associated with you the patriots of the last century? It is long since I knew your vices, but I never thought you were such an able and malignant scoundrel. Devere carried his mistrust of republicanism to its logical conclusion of opposition to the Civil War. When the slaves were freed he wrote bitterly that negro emancipation had been carried triumphantly through ponds of blood and overfields of dead bodies and broken hearts, that the negro is free, free to starve. If the Civil War had been a basic reform, a recognition of an evil, the negro would have been given a patch of land upon which to sustain himself. Instead he was free to join the vast gang of wage slaves, indirect slavery, nominally the least odious, practically the worst of its forms. Devere saw the whole conflict as only another step toward the enslavement of America by monopolists and stock gamblers. Ironically, it was through the Republican Party that Thomas Devere's twenty-year agitation for free farms was rewarded. Lincoln's signature to the Homestead Act in 1862, just twenty years after Devere's pact with the anti-rentors, started a wave of westward migration that saw two million five hundred thousand acres settled within two years and fifty million acres within twenty years. Many of the people who had done the most for free farms were already dead before their dream was realized. Lawrence Van Dusen, the George Washington of anti-rent, died in 1852. After the free soil debacle of 1848, George Henry Evans went back to his farm in Granville to work the land, publish intermittent editions of Young America, and agitate for free homesteads. That pure-hearted man, wrote Thomas Devere, had been literally starved back to his mortgaged spot in New Jersey, where instead of cultivating the stony public mind, George went to cultivate melons. Some of the first money he made was used to pay the mortgage Horace Greeley held on the farm. Heart, soul, and voice of the land reform movement, George Evans died in February 1856, from an illness brought on by exposure to cold and wet. In 1874 a group of reverent land reformers, Thomas Devere, Louis Masquerier, and John Comerford, went to pay homage to the man who had done so much for the cause. They found his grave on the Evans farm by a little worn path leading to a tall marble slab headstone amidst a wild growth of herbage, while the moaning breeze waved the branches of the overhanging trees like a banner, as if still inviting the landless and the pauperized masses to strike for perpetual and not a mere transient share in the soil. John Slingerland, who had dared the wrath of the Whigs with a homestead measure in 1848, died a few months before Lincoln signed the bill of which his had been the forerunner. In the last few years of his life he had emerged from political eclipse to serve as a Republican assemblyman. Slingerland's political godfather, Ira Harris, was elected to the United States Senate on his return from his trip to Europe with Stephen Van Rensselaer. His candidacy was successful largely because Thurlow Weed used him to defeat Horace Greeley, who no longer regarded Weed as such a pure and able man. While in Washington, according to one commentator, Harris was distinguished chiefly for his persistency in pressing candidates for office. I never think of going to sleep, Abraham Lincoln once said dryly, without first looking under my bed to see if Judge Harris is not there wanting something for somebody. Ira Harris wanted to forget his anti-rent past. In family-approved biographical articles and memorials published after his death in 1875 the anti-rent pages are blank. One of the youngest of the anti-rent heroes, Edward O'Connor, died of a fever on May 4, 1863, in Forestville, Michigan, hailed as a martyr and champion of the Free Soil Party. He left one son. His wife Janet had died ten years before, her health destroyed by the anxieties of those dreadful months when he awaited the gallows. After her death he had turned to the wilds of Michigan, leaving the child behind with relatives in the Platte Kill Valley. The boy grew to manhood and married a daughter of Henry Bouton, one of Delaware County's first anti-renters and a member of the Bouton-Bouton family. Moses Earl, an old man even in the heyday of anti-rentism, continued to live on Dingle Hill after his release from prison. He had acquired such a habit of building walls at Danamora that he was unable to stop afterward. His steers and stoneboat became as familiar to his neighbors in the hills as afternoon cloud shadows and storm-sheets. During the winter evenings he sat alone before the big fire, except for his dog Bruce and his cats, for he outlived Sarah by many years. In 1863, there where Osmond Steele had died eighteen years earlier, Moses Earl passed away with an old red flannel nightcap on his head. He was buried beside his father in the field they had cleared near Trimper's Kill. Later his bones were moved, with those of the other earls, to a common grave in Andes, marked by a stone that bears only the name of his father and the record of his father's service in the Revolution. All that remains of Moses Earl is the briar-grown, tumbled foundations of his house and most of the stone walls that still ribbed Dingle Hill. From Brisbane, drawn into the anti-rent agitation by a strong sense of justice, lived a long useful life. After leaving Dingle Hill in 1849, he farmed for ten years in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, a neighbor of Alvin Beauvais and Amos Loper, and then in 1859 moved westward to Wilton, Wasaca County, Minnesota, where he purchased two hundred and fifty acres of prairie and timber. Having a herd of forty-two cattle over the westward trail was a struggle with April mud, and so slow was the progress that the Brisbane sometimes camped two nights within sight of the same farm. The first year in frontier Wilton, Brisbane said, tried men's stomachs as well as their souls, but he prospered, grew in influence, and served two terms in the Minnesota legislature as an independent Democrat. On July 25, 1890, at the age of seventy-nine, he died in the house he and his wife had built on arriving in Wilton. Eleven of his twelve children were still alive at the time of his death, and he left eighty head of cattle, thirteen horses, large barns, two granaries, and two houses. In reporting on his death, the Wasaca Herald observed, owing to natural sympathies for the poor and unfortunate, he took an active and prominent part in the anti-rent troubles. In politics and religion he was, without acknowledging it, a liberal in thought and sentiment. He was a rough diamond, somewhat warped and ill-shaped by surrounding circumstances and early habits, but still a diamond of no mean value. His ambition was great, his mind never ceased to work upon the problems of life, and he loved to study and discuss the principles of government. No American ever had a greater love for our American institutions than he. While some of his ideas were crude, owing to a want of early education, he was nevertheless honest in entertaining them and fearless in giving them expression. He was a good neighbor, and though a man of strong passions he could easily forgive. The editor could have added that Brisbane never relaxed his fight against the enemies of equal rights. Those men, as Brisbane said, whose only God is wealth, whose greatest study is how they can cheat and rob their fellow men of the fruits of their labor. Brisbane's former neighbor, Alvin Earl Beauvais, was elected twice to the Wisconsin legislature as a Republican. After serving in the Civil War as a major and as provost marshal of Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, he returned to Ripon, where he remained for many years a political force. After 1880 he spent most of his time developing new communities along the North Dakota frontier, and returned to Ripon only at rare intervals. There are a few who still remember him, a tall spare figure with stooping shoulders, long legs and flowing beard, walking with long steps and vigorous stride. At the end of the century Beauvais returned to New York, a stately dignified old gentleman, and lived for several years in a quiet corner of Brooklyn. New York had changed, and his old fellow radicals were dead, George Evans, Thomas Devere, Horace Greeley, but he had many rich memories. In 1901, in search of health, Beauvais crossed the continent to California, and on January 29, 1903 he died in Santa Monica at the age of 85. Thomas N. Devere never laid down the crusader's sword until death took it from him. After leaving the anti-rent movement in 1846, he built up a small fortune by developing the East River Waterfront, and accumulating 400 building lots in Williamsburg, and spent much of it in dowing radical papers. In 1876 he proposed that the Irish reformers in America depute thither to Ireland a few eloquent men like Wendell Phillips to educate the people in knowledge of their rights, and prepare them for acting the part of men resolved to be free when the chosen hour shall come. He wrote volunteering to be one of the mental skirmishers himself. I am only approaching the old line of seventy years. In the intermediate space of two or three years I expect to have a good deal of civil talk with the men whose crime blighted my childhood with poverty, and sent me to explore other regions for the means of life, which they have feloniously taken away. When I look back at what I have acted and endured through the long years, and through the crime of those right honourable felons, I am doubly embraced to enter the field against them for a last encounter. I am not alarmed about the progress of years. I am yet eligible for the ranks of war. He has no personal ambition, commented Patrick Ford, editor of the Irish world, save that of doing good. His proposition to relinquish ease and home comfort, and go forth to strike, we consider magnanimous and plucky. The plan to send agitators to Ireland failed, but Ford asked Devere to join the staff of his paper. Once more the wiry little man wrote tirelessly on his old theme of land reform, advocating the allotment of forty acres of land to each person as a bulwark against industrial wage enslavement. His most effective work was an editorial campaign that same year against the judicial murders, as he called them, in the Mali Maguire riots in the Pennsylvania coal fields. The New York Times' comment that the mine agitators looked fit subjects for the gallows and were dangerous and brutal-looking evoked Devere's full indignation. He accused the coal thieves and their friends, the newspapers and politicians of both parties, of wanting big dividends for themselves and helpless, hopeless slavery for the workers. The coal miner working in constrained and unnatural position begrimed with dirt was in all respects a blacker and less protected slave than the negro ever was, he insisted. Devere gave the miners much the same advice he had given the Rensselirwick tenants in 1842. You are equal citizens. Be armed. Prepare resolutely for the next election. Prepare beforehand and proclaim a general strike on the weak ending election day. Hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst. The inhuman and unjust men now riding over you will make desperate efforts to keep their seats. They will stop at neither fraud nor force. If serious trouble threatens them, they can by one dash of their pens destroy the Constitution by simply proclaiming martial law. If that be done, and the moment it is done, accept the gage of battle, march into the arsenals, capture the gunrooms of the militia, especially capture the ruffian newspaper offices, and make their types tell truth for once in their lives, take possession and let not a lie flash over the telegraph. Your enemies are thieves, and thieves, when justice overtakes them, are mostly found to be cowards. All this citizens is not a declaration of war, it is simply a preparation for war, and that has ever been one of the grand essentials toward preserving the peace. On May 27, 1887, still battling for the common man against privilege and monopoly, Devere died in Brooklyn at the age of 82. What of big thunder, in some ways the most remarkable of all the heroes of the down-rent struggle, the country doctor who risked his life and fortunes for an abstract principle, and had the courage and the audacity to go to the great Daniel Webster himself for a legal opinion on anti-rentism. In 1880 at the age of seventy, Dr. Smith A. Bowton retired from the practice of medicine, determined, he said, not to mix any more in the term oils and busy scenes of life, but to settle down to domestic tranquility so acceptable in old age. It was only a short stroll down the meadow to Pike's Pond, back of his home in Alps, and he walked there often, looking up at the wooded shoulder of Pike's Hill and remembering the days long ago, when he had put on the flaming robes of big thunder, to rally his neighbors to strike for the green graves of their sires. Reflecting on those turbulent days, Dr. Bowton was satisfied that he had reasserted the Bowton proclivity for resisting tyranny. He observed that great good has risen from our struggle. The feudal landlords were stripped of their privilege, and now a man could sit under his own vine and fig tree of his own planting with no one to make him afraid of being disturbed or driven from the land. No longer did the landlords hold exclusive right to industrial enterprise. Hydraulic plants were rising along many of the larger streams that poured out of the Manor counties, and the doctor was gratified to see them doing immense business. When they took the old doctor's body down the road to his last home in Sand Lake Cemetery, they raised a stone at his head. Dr. S. A. Bowton, born September 1st, 1810, died November 14, 1888, aged seventy-eight. No epitaph told his story, but a reminder of the long warfare was close by. In the next plot, an already well-settled monument marked the grave of Willard Griggs, the turncoat anti-renter who had died trying to evict William Whitbeck. It was Walter Church, the farmers of Alpsad, who had paid the stone cutter to chisel his tribute, erected by a friend to the memory of Willard Griggs, who was shot in fearless discharge of his duty as deputy sheriff in executing process, and died August 2nd, 1869, aged fifty-eight. The stone over Dr. Bowton's grave marks the date of his death, but his memory still lives in the hill-country. About two years ago Dr. Bowton's grandson was driving on a back road above Alps, following the trails his grandfather had taken in his buggy and on horseback. He stopped a bent and weathered man to ask directions, and the old farmer's eyes, peering sharply from under grizzled brows, followed the questioner's angular frame, his blue eyes and white hair. What's your name?" Bowton answered the younger man. Your Doc Bowton's grandson! The old man's face was bright and warm with recognition. Dr. Smith A. Bowton had from life the fruit he asked. I have found the old maxim true, he wrote shortly before his death, that the man who attempts to overthrow an existing wrong or revolutionize a principle of government that is tyrannical must not expect to reap any reward, only in conscience and the satisfaction of knowing that his individual efforts bring a benefit to thousands. In this I am fully rewarded. End of Section 23, Recording by Maria Casper. Section 24 of Tin Horns and Calico by Henry Christman. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Appendix, Songs and Ballads. Few men with a cause have left behind so great a body of song and ballad as the anti-rentors. They sang their way through the struggle with spirit and humor. From scores of verses handed down in broadsides, newspapers and manuscripts and by word of mouth, the following have been selected, some only for their topical interest and others for their vigorous democratic appeal and faith in eventual victory by ballad rather than by arms. Many were written and sung for special occasions—independence day celebrations, political meetings, and organizing rallies. The end of Bill Snyder, the best known of the anti-rent songs, was written by S. H. Foster for a celebration on July 4, 1844, at Reedsville, first battleground of the anti-rentors. Foster wrote also We Will Be Free for an Independence Day meeting at New Salem the following year. One of the most finished song-sters, a resident of Middletown Delaware County, signed himself only Forest Minstrel. Dozens of songs appeared in the columns of the Albany Freeholder, Anti-Renter, Voice of the People, Young America, and the Working Man's Advocate. And probably the volume of anti-rent verse is due in part to the editors who invited original contributions. Some of the ballads have been lost except for snatches handed down from generation to generation. Many farmers in the anti-rent counties, especially Delaware, which seems to have been the most prolific in songs, still sing Remembered Quattrains. The songs below retain the misspellings and the occasionally eccentric punctuation of the original publications. Versified Account of the Sheriff's Raid on the Helderburg Anti-Rentors on December 2, 1839. When Reedsville Hill Afray began, at Clark's Ale House it ended, the Dutch out or the soldiers ran so merrily they bended. The sheriff from the city came, where young Prince John came he, the young, the old, the blind, the lame, they bore him good company. They reached the Helderburg Hill, said the sheriff, I see one farm, where I must seize for good or ill, therefore we'll sing a song. When they came to Reedsville Hill, as daylight did appear, they spied an aged Dutchman, and he did them draw near. Come hither, aged Dutchman, the sheriff, he did cry, and tell where are your stout men with all their great army. But verse, you must gum-del to me if friends or vows you be, I hear you be to Sheriff's mine, gum up from Albany. And if you be to Sheriff, as I do think you be, I'm sorry you had bring so view, mid you bad company. There's joist den dousen Dutchman, stand vast upon the hill. They'll make cold junks of all your men, they want their bellies fill. Then up spoke Marcy sadly, for the Dutchman I'm a match, I've tore my breeches badly, they must give me a patch. Then up spoke Prince John after, the Dutch girls to me high, he spoke mid's shouts of laughter, to sleep with them this night. Oh, March men cried the sheriff, and mind not all this rain, if the Dutch do not surrender, we'll all march back again. The Dutchman dared them all to shoot, and threatened them to kill. They ran and stopped but at the foot of Helder Barak Hill. And there Prince John did take a drink, and Marcy he drank, too, and said, Good troth I truly think will ne'er reach Westerloo. To small potatoes we will send, for troops these Dutch to fight, and then I will my breeches mend and sleep away the night. Now let us all for Prince John pray, and Marcy long live he, although they had the worst that day with the Dutch company. From the New York Herald. A great revolution, composed by a stranger travelling among the Helderbergs, who, being struck with their generosity and politeness, espoused at once their cause. A great revolution has happened of late, and the pride fallen landlord laments his sad fate. The cry has gone out through the nine counties o'er, our landlord is falling to rise never more. They are striking examples of Haziel of old, who of future misrule by the prophets when told, with vehemence exclaimed, Is thy servant a dog? But our latter-day tyrants might have better said hog. This leads my reflection to days past and gone, when rank and high birth in close wedlock were joined, when aristocrat sons lived in riotous way, and the poor tenants' earnings for their revels did pay. When honest old Holland sent forth her Dutch band, he offered them gratis large farms of wild land. Seven years past and then, as they least did suspect, they must pay him great rent, or them he would eject. Rather than be driven from farmhouse and home to his oppressive exactions they reluctantly come. Hence many poor tenants have now to bewail, or their quarter-sale leases and the devil entailed. If the land is air-sold it must be at low price, and the landlord can pocket one-fourth in a trice. Thus while our constitution proclaims equal rights, it is basely perverted by aristocrat might. They're the spirits of freedom all honest and bold, and you can't buy and sell them like Arnold's of old. They all have the spirit of seventy-six. They have got the old landlord in a very bad fix. Like Bostonian Indians destroying the tea by hook or by crook they've resolved to be free. Go on, my brave brothers, I bid you Godspeed. It is time our republic from slavery was freed. Shall a free-born republic be ruled by a nave? Shall a tyrant prevail and the people be slaves? Brave men, you will seek no occasion for war, and the foul deeds of rapine you'll ever abhor. But if in defence of your rights you shall arm, let toils ne'er discourage nor dangers alarm. Or Helderberg's mountains I've travelled to see if the tenants really were as represented to me. But I have found them humane, hospitable, kind, and a stranger with them an asylum may find. I've rode undisturbed o'er their hills and their dales, and have ne'er been molested by fair ones or males. Know what is your business, saluted my ear, or where are you going or why come you here? I must say and frank justice to the anti-rent band, the view we have taken of you in our land was as villains and outlaws familiar with crime, and more brutal than savages of olden time. They are misrepresented, I see in the cause, they are all zealous lovers of order in laws, but at gross opposition they indignantly spurn, and will fight for the soil their forefathers have earned. So farewell, my brave fellows, I now have no time to spend with you longer in song or in rhyme, for if my name and abode you should have any calls, you have it, F. Austin, Warren County, Glens Falls. From the Albany Freeholder. The Landlord's Lament. Air, O dear, what can the matter be? The Helderberg boys are playing the dickens, the night of confusion around me now thickens, unless the rent business with some of us quickens will all have to live without rents. O dear, dear, what can the matter be? Dear, dear, what can the matter be? What shall I do with my tenants? How shall I get all my rents? I used to get rich through the poor toiling tenants. I spent all their earnings in pleasures, satanic, but now I confess I am in a great panic, because I can get no more rent. O dear, dear, what can the matter be? Dear, dear, what can the matter be? What shall I do with my tenants? Oh, how shall I get all my rents? My tenants once to my office were flocking, some without coat or a shoe or a stocking, but now I declare it is really quite shocking to know I shall get no more rent. O dear, dear, what can the matter be? Dear, dear, what can the matter be? What shall I do with my tenants? How shall I get all my rents? I must give up this business I vow it's no use to me, it's been a continual source of abuse to me. The friends of equal rights give no peace to me, until they get clear of the rent. O dear, dear, what can the matter be? Dear, what can the matter be? What shall I do with my tenants? How shall I get all my rents? Air Old Dan Tucker That same old tune, oh, keep out of the way, Big Bill Snyder will tie your coat and feather your hide, sir. Says Bill, this music's not so sweet, as I have heard. I think my feet had better be used, and he started to run, but the tin horn still kept sounding on. Oh, keep out of the way, Big Bill Snyder will tie your coat and feather your hide, sir. Legs do your duty now, says Bill, there's a thousand Indians on the hill. When they catch Tories they tar their coats and feather their hides, and I hear the notes of, keep out of the way, Big Bill Snyder will tie your coat and feather your hide, sir. He ran and he ran till he reached the wood, and there with horror still he stood, for he saw a savage tall and grim, and he heard a horn not a rod from him. Oh, keep out of the way, Big Bill Snyder will tie your coat and feather your hide, sir. And he thought that he heard the sound of a gun, and he cried in fright, oh, my race is run, better had it been had I never been born than to come within sound of that tin horn. Keep out of the way, Big Bill Snyder will tie your coat and feather your hide, sir. And the news flew round and gained belief that Bill was murdered by an Indian chief, and no one mourned that Bill was slain, but the horn sounded on again and again. Keep out of the way, Big Bill Snyder will tie your coat and feather your hide, sir. Next day the body of Bill was found, his writs were scattered on the ground, and by his side a jug of rum told how he had to his end come. Oh, keep out of the way, Big Bill Snyder will tie your coat and feather your hide, sir. S. H. Foster, from a hand-bell. The Brave Indian. From rocky mountains we are come to free our lands from slavery, never again to see our home till we execute our bravery. A brave Indian there despise nor count him as a stranger, remember he your country stays in the day and hour of danger. Your pleasant homes you shall enjoy, we boldly have avowed it. Your peace the tyrants would destroy, but we will not allow it. Our tawny arm is stretched out still to shield you and protect you. Our dearest blood will freely spill, we never will neglect you. A brave Indian there despise nor count him as a stranger, remember he your country stays in the day and hour of danger. Fatiguing marches will endure that you may dwell in quiet. Your lands from rent we will secure, at least we mean to try it. At night in peace you need lie down upon your beds to rest you, but we must wander through the town to see that none molest you. A brave Indian there despise nor count him as a stranger, remember he your country stays in the day and hour of danger. Don't drive poor Indian from your door nor with disdain reject him, but give him of your plenteous store how cruel to neglect him. A brave Indian there despise nor count him as a stranger, remember he your country stays in the day and hour of danger. From original manuscript found among the papers of the editor of the Albany Freeholder, the Spring Campaign or the Tory exploits, Delaware County Spring 1845. The Delaware Invincibles and Wonder of the Day and Sheriff Greene that reliant man whose fame can ne'er decay. Greene felt his race was nearly run and so resolved was he to do some deed to send his name down to posterity. A posse first he ordered out to march to Andy's town. Lord how commander was it seems a Tory of renown. The wondrous feet they there performed stands bright on history's page. They captured a prisoner but sixteen years of age. The bloodhounds started out next day fresh laurels for to gain. They stole four dollars worth of hay and made their boasts in vain. Their hands were in what could they do, they must not idle be. So the sheriff and his ruffians next set out for Roxbury. Four natives they made out to take, oh joyful news indeed, they now could keep a posse upon pretence of need. Bovina next a visit got from this degraded clan. Was ere such valor known before, a hundred took one man. To Roxbury again they went resolved to have some fun. They pulled the women out of bed because they fired a gun. That night the horns began to toot and Sheriff Green looked pale. He ordered out a pitchfork guard to watch the Delhi jail. Some straw was placed beneath the jail and should the natives come were orders from Sheriff Green to fire the jail and run. Lord how was lost amid the din, that Tory so renowned, hid in a flower barrel at last was the old rascal found. And bub steel too that hero brave, where could the bloodhound be? Safe in an oven peeping out the dreadful scene to see. Rast Edgerton was trembling, he could not hold a gun. Old Hathaway went into fits, he thought his race was run. Judge Wheeler crawled beneath the bed. Pete Wright hid in a churn. He said the native will be here, the village they will burn. The women ran from house to house to bid their friends farewell. The horrors of that fearful night no mortal tongue can tell. The great and gallant pitchfork guard stood looking quite austere. They could not fight, they could not run, so struck were they with fear. The night passed on, the morning dawned, the natives did not come. The Sheriff and his pitchfork guard once more beheld the sun. When the four prisoners were tried, old Hathaway was there. The devil with a cloven foot could not be more severe. The judge, while passing sentence on, the prisoners shed tears, because he couldn't sentence them to sing-sing twenty years. About those tears much has been said, by both up-rent and down, but it is well known a crocodile might claim them as his own. Cannons were fired off for joy by fiends in human form. They took delight in others' woes, but their reward will come. And should the evils here described forever be endured? No, by the ballot box will show such evils can be cured. Supplied by Charles Ellis Grant of Margaretville, Delaware County, from anti-rent material gathered by his mother. We will be free, as sung by the uterpean band at Antiland Monopoly Celebration at New Salem, Albany County, July 4, 1845. Air the Boatman's Dance. Hail, Patriots, hail the sacred day! Our fathers broke the tyrant's sway, Let earth resound with notes of glee, It is our nation's jubilee, Then shout, brothers, shout! Oh, shout, brothers, shout! Loud sound the horn upon the morn Of Independence Day. Who's ah? Who's ah? We will be free From feudal rents and tyranny. Who's ah? Who's ah? We will be free From feudal rents and tyranny. Our feudal lords in coach's ride Puffed up with vanity and pride, Their boasted wealth they do forget Was purchased by the tenant's sweat. They ne'er remember that the bread Upon their tables daily spread, And the rich vians which they eat Are products of the farmer's wheat. Their wives and daughters richly dressed, For naught but golden charms caressed, Oft treat one far more fair with scorn Because for sooth she's cottage-born. But shout, brothers, shout! Oh, shout, brothers, shout! Loud sound the horn upon the morn Of Independence Day. Who's ah? Who's ah? We will be free From feudal rents and tyranny. Who's ah? Who's ah? We will be free From feudal rents and tyranny. Proud haughty barons ye may spy The tempest gathering in the sky. The storm ye once thought would not last Ye may discern has not yet passed. We sons of patriots sires now swear Your loads we will no longer bear. A thousand hearts now beat as one To finish what we have begun. The time is past when we'll consent To pay for land a yearly rent. To you whose title is at best one Which you dare not now contest. Then shout, brothers, shout! Oh, shout, brothers, shout! Loud sound the horn upon the morn Of Independence Day. Who's ah? Who's ah? We will be free From feudal rents and tyranny. Who's ah? Who's ah? We will be free From feudal rents and tyranny. No longer are the fields and roads Our teams shall drag your heavy loads. We'll bring your tables to adorn Not one fat hen nor peppercorn. Of lands or which the waters run We can consent to spare you none. For in those streams we fear a drought If you should take the bottoms out. Then happy days return once more No sheriff knocking at the door. With food enough upon our shelves We'll spend the quarter sales ourselves. Then shout, brothers, shout! Oh, shout, brothers, shout! Loud sound the horn upon the morn Of Independence Day. Who's ah? Who's ah? We will be free From feudal rents and tyranny. Who's ah? Who's ah? We will be free From feudal rents and tyranny. SH Foster. From a hand-bell, originally published in the Albany Freeholder. The up-rent major. In Delaware County an office-seeker was caught taking down a liberty pole raised by the anti-rentors. The pioneers of freedom, the hardy sons of toil, resolved to claim their birthright the freedom of the soil, no more to cringe and flatter, and bow with hat in hand, the tyrants who oppress them and claim to own their land. So they solemnly united and raised their standard high, with banner fair unfolded to meet the public eye. Heaven gave the fair foundation and heaven gave the tree. The sons of freedom raised it, pledge of their liberty. It plainly showed the landlords their day of power was o'er. Henceforth they would be free men and pay them rent no more. The landlords saw and trembled the token well they knew. They feared the hands that raised it and prudently withdrew. But secretly determined a fitting tool to find, who could be bought with lucre to act what they designed. They thought a man of honour would spurn their gilded bait, but they knew a quantum major whom their notice would elate. They knew that flattery fed him, that office was his aim. He'd be proud of chain and collar, if it bore a landlord's name. So they hinted what they wanted. But oh, how big he grew! For twenty silver pieces I'll betray these men to you. Well, they bought him, dubbed him agent, or at least he hoped they would, if he proved a faithful donkey, and served them all he could. Then like his predecessor, old Judas, on he went. We judge this by his conduct, to betray the innocent. So he pricked up his long harkers, and at once began the job. Perhaps the silver pieces were sinking in his fob. He wore a mask of friendship, he borrowed Jacob's art. Art thou in health, my brother, while he stabbed him in the heart. He assumed a tone of kindness, said he wished their minds to know, t'was his object to befriend them and his good feelings show. They were old friends and neighbours, nor would he do them harm, but he wanted to advise them how each might hold his farm. Then he told them his old story, long as the moral law, about the constitution, to fill their minds with awe, since the only way of safety, the wisest and most fit, since the landlords were the masters, was for them to submit, that it really was their duty, and he thought their interests too, all peacefully to settle, and let the landlords have their due. He'd one more thing to mention. That pole, you've acted wrong, the madam is offended, she will be back ere long. It has stood too long already, it must be taken down. She feels herself insulted, you'll be ruined by her frown. It surely must be levelled, it must no longer stand. The madam won't allow it, she'll drive you off her land. The law is hard against you, as you must plainly see. The landlords' claims are sacred, and honoured they must be. Now we are here together, let's take it down today. If you don't like to do it, I can and will straightway. But not a man that raised it would desecrate the tree, they loved the sacred symbol of their country's liberty. He saw their manly firmness, and with his bribe-stained hand, broke down their tree of freedom in its own native land. How did the forest natives their fury then restrain? Had justice claimed the forfeit, the blood that rock had stained, or had one trace of honour, one spark of patriot zeal, one kindly throb of feeling, allied to public wheel, found shelter in his bosom, or warmed his fulsome frame, with this eternal stigma he would not have stained his name. Now we leave the quantum major, his hopes all come to naught. While he the brush was beating, another bird was caught. But long the tree shall flourish, and the banner proudly wave, till every up-rent tory shall fill a coward's grave, and long as splendid rivers shall roll their waves sublime, our cause shall be respected in every distant climb. Forest Minstrel, from young America. The Helderburg War. Oh, hark, in the mountains I hear a great roar, those Helderburg farmers are at it once more, with their war-whoops and Indians most wickedly bent, on shaving Van Rensselier out of his rent, and the way they make war is to feather and tar, every unfortunate law-seeking gent, who by landlord or sheriff among them is sent. And then, when with soldiers you seek them, alas! For those chiefly concerned it still came to pass, they might as soon with a thread think of catching a whale, or a swallow by throwing some salt on its tail. Even thus when the sheriff, so warlike at need, sees a pack of them coming, and thinks they are hisen, commands his stout posse to charge them with speed, and prepares in his triumph to march them to prison, they melt into air, or creep into holes, like nothing I'll swear but sprites or moles. So the only thing the poor sheriff can do is to make them leave when they hover in view, for he knows in his soul when they vanished away, that the finding a pin in a bundle of hay were as nothing compared with the labor so hobbling, of finding those Helderburg farmers or elves, it would seem as though each were a mole or hobgoblin, though their landlord would swear they're the devils themselves. But tremble, tremble, ye farmers stout, for our troops may assemble to ferre e out. Even the troops of New York with invincible hearts, who when they went picking last time in your parts, succeeded in killing three pigs and a cow, though they failed as to putting an end to the row, like the Duke of York and his merry men they marched up the hill and marched down again, and will wager of pennies a hundred to ten, that should they revisit your region so gory, they'd eat you alive when they find you, that's when, and return with an equal division of glory. Oh, our soldiers are boys that fear no noise. Unless they are mounted on horses, but then they are very like to fall off them again. Should their steeds show their metal, and therefore they fear, every sound that may fall on the sensitive ear, we speak not of privates or sergeants or such, nay the captains themselves are below us a touch. But of generals and staff who would make a dog laugh, upon horses hired out for two dollars a day, as leaving their shops they prepare for the fray. One keeps his saddle, without any thanks, by anchoring his spurs in the poor horse's flanks. One tugs at the curb till his charge shows blood, and deposits his rider at ease in the mud. A colonel so carries his legs that a child might perceive at a glance he's a tailor run wild, while a general, who much in the service takes pride, has belted his rapier on his right side. On the whole they look like a parcel of flats, knocked for their sins into three cocked hats. But still at a distance, when people don't see how badly themselves and their horses agree, and what dismal long faces among them abound, for fear they might measure their length on the ground. With their falchions so bold and their coats laced with gold and their feathers so fine they cut a great shine. Though not quite Napoleon's, as sure as a gun, might steal the soft heart from the breast of a nun, which all must admit if their tastes be but true, who gaze on a picture so warlike to view. But there's one sort of soldiering done in New York which the dander might raise in a stoic or turk, and make strangers suppose, if they gazed on our woes, that with all our boasting we Yankee doodles were the sublimest of this world's noodles. We speak of our train-band gatherings raw, which fools of us make according to law, and mulked us in fines which are spent in dinners to fatten a pack of lazy sinners, who study the stupid drills to make, and bad as may be for their stomach's sake. For the more are shamed into paying the fine, the better that awkward squad can dine. You dough-heads whom still we must take into grace and vote up in Albany if you are true, and worth half the rhino you get by your place, relieve us from this, or go hang yourselves, do. From the Working Man's Advocate. At two dollars per day. Albany City is a very rough place, filled up with those landsharks of Killian's race. The city's too small to hold all the breed, they rove round the country like every bad weed. In Columbia County and State of New York lived some of those prowlers much worse than the turks. For legally robbing they have made themselves known, their acts of oppression the land Doth be mown. In Columbia County, town of Hillsdale, where people assembled or wronged to prevail, to talk of their grievances and hit on some plan, how they could get rid of this lord of the land. The natives assembled in motley array, with pistols in belt as people do say. A pistol went off, and we do lament it shot a pale face without an intent. The news then to Hudson with speed it did come, the judge to the sheriff with speed he did run. He says to the sheriff you must go with me, we'll take up those rebels wherever they be. The judge and the sheriff away they did steer, at the place of conflict they quick did appear. They arrested one bouton, and he they did say, had been the ringleader of this very fray. The people of Hudson, in arms they did rise, for fear of the men who put on the disguise, placed a guard at the jail in the midst of the fray, for fear the red men would take bouton away. The people of Hudson, in counsel they went, to call on the governor it was their intent, for arms from the arsenal and men from that place, to shield them from cost and from lasting disgrace. The late legislature was in a great stew to save Mr. Governor and carry him through, but I fear he will stumble and fall on the plane, if he ever puts up to be governor again. Oh now says his lordship you must pay these men, who went out accruing in the last campaign. They went to old Hudson and there they did say, they gambled and drank at two dollars per day. C.S. from the Albany Freeholder. The Prisoners in Jail Lines composed in the Columbia County Jail, July 9th, 1845 There is bouton and beldon and many beside, they are quite clever fellows or else there be lied. For what they're in jail I scarcely do know, but it's base at the best, well let it go so, in these hard times. The sheriffs will out with their array of men, the county will find them what money they spend, they will seize upon prisoners and into the cell, if there's anything worse it must be in hell, in these hard times. And there they will keep them confined in the jail, without any liberty for to get bail. They will do as they please in spite of your friends, and God only knows where this matter will end, in these hard times. But the sheriff and others who go in the huddle, I'm fearful are getting themselves into trouble, for unless they keep themselves somewhere near straight, they will be twitched at the eye at a hell of a rate, in these hard times. But we're prisoners in jail, our cases are hard, they look all around to keep on their guard, their feet fast in irons chained down to the floor, they are pretty sheriffs what can they do more, in these hard times. And as for the jailer he's a man of renown, he spends all his time in ironing them down, he says for their keeping they don't get half pay, though he gives them but two poor meals a day, in these hard times. The judges and jurors are a very fine crew, they take the poor prisoners and drive them right through, the sheriffs will falter all hell they don't fear, they will bring them in guilty if they prove themselves clear in these hard times. They will send them to jail and therefore to lie on bread and cold water or else they must die, or else down to sing-sing and therefore to dwell for twenty-five dollars they would send us to hell in these hard times. The district attorney is a handsome young man, he spends all his time in laying some plan, and as for the sheriff he's a man I despise, he will go to the governor with his mouth full of lies, in these hard times. He seizes upon property and that he will sell, and drink, by the way, he can do very well, he will do anything that will profit himself, for Uncle Sam has to pay him as well as the rest, in these hard times. And as for the council they seem to be clever, they tell them fine stories, make all things fair weather, but it's for money they go as you're all well aware, and without it they don't care a don how we fare, in these hard times. But there is the doctor I like to forgot, still he is the meanest of all the whole lot, he says he will cure them, for half they possess, and when they are dead he will sue for the rest, in these hard times. Although he says the old jail's very filthy, and the jailer must clean it or else he will see, the prisoners are fast declining, and the jailer is to blame, if he don't do his duty he'll report him very soon, in these hard times. But I think now it's time to finish my song, I can prove all I've said if you think I've done wrong, for there are prisoners in jail without any bail, and I think they don't like this lying in jail, in these hard times. Mortimer C. Belden, little thunder, from the Albany Freeholder, come all true anti-rentors, come all true anti-rentors, who live by honest toil, come sing a song right gaily, about the right of soil, when proud and haughty tyrants would live on others' gain, the shout against oppression was running o'er land and main, ye form and noble phalanx of men upright and bold, and to your rights undoubting ye firmly now must hold. Come to the contest gather, and vote now once again, and soon the strife is over, the victory soon is won, come cast your trusty ballots for friends of anti-rent, and when your work is ended your time will be well spent. From the Albany Freeholder lay down the musket. Lay down the murderous musket, put by the glittering steel, we ask the rights of free men, and to free men we appeal. A weapon far more potent, the ballot box shall yield. It is the only weapon a yeoman's hand should wield. We ask no princely favours, we ask for this alone, the rightful boon of free men, a spot to call our own. Would you bid us leave these valleys, and on the prairies west erect our humble hamlets, to be with freedom blessed? When up our mountain streamlets, and o'er these hills we rove, we trace our father's footsteps amid the scenes we love. Toz here their graves are scattered, how were they want to toil, and by these sacred memories we are wedded to this soil. And you, the princely owners of this rich and wide domain, what boots it longer proudly to regard us with disdain? We envy not your riches, though increased an hundredfold, but why our landed titles preferred to shining gold? No gift, however humble we are asking at your hand, we ask the rightful purchase of the free hold of our land. We ask the glorious privilege, be every honest will, of gaining independence and wooing fortune's smile. We ask no princely favours, we ask for this alone, the rightful boon of free men, a spot to call our own. From the Albany Free Holder. End of Section 24, Recording by Maria Casper. End of Tin Horns and Calico by Henry Christman.