 Section Zero of Tin Horns and Calico by Henry Christman. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Tin Horns and Calico, a decisive episode in the Emergence of Democracy, by Henry Christman. Let it be transmitted to posterity that a free people dared to rise and vindicate their rights. Dr. Smith A. Bouton. Acknowledgements As far as possible I have tried to make the anti-rent farmers live and tell their own story in their own words and actions. I wish I could have put into this book all the others who had a part in telling it. The descendants of the anti-rentors still living on the Hudson, in the Catskills, the Helderbergs, and the Teconics, and in the hilltowns of Scoheri and Rensselaer Counties. The stories they told have been recorded here, but not the people themselves. There were the grandchildren of Dr. Smith A. Bouton. I shall never forget his granddaughter reading aloud until near midnight, one August night, from a long autobiographical letter written by Dr. Bouton when he was an old man, and begging excuse for mistakes in orthography and composition, because, as he explained, age had impaired his mental and physical faculties. The letter had lain in his desk untouched since his death years before. When she had finished reading Bouton's own story of his part in the anti-rent struggle, she said, embarrassed at rebellion she had never understood, I wish he had stuck to doctoring. And there were the two grandsons, George and Charles, both proud of the blood of Smith Bouton, living in Alps Rensselaer County, on intimate terms with the scenes familiar to Big Thunder. On a September afternoon, when the first colors of autumn were striking the hills, I drove up a Catskill Valley and turned in at a farm. Pastures and fields ran up the side of the hills, and down in a valley field the grandsons of Edward O'Connor were at work. At the barnyard gate the widow of Edward O'Connor's only son was bringing the cows in for milking. She was a gray wisp of a woman, and her face was lined and tired. She took me into the house, and after she had seated me before a window looking out upon the Catskills, she disappeared into another room. In a few minutes she returned with a tin box in her aged and gnarled hands. In it were yellowed clippings and papers about Edward O'Connor, verses he wrote to Janet Scott, and the powder horn he carried as a Calico Indian. The dullness left her eyes as she searched her memory. For a long time she talked about Edward and anti-rent, about her own father who had worn Calico, and her mother who had sewed Indian costumes and carried food to the Indians when they were hiding after the Moses Earl riot. There was a whole summer and autumn of such people. Walter Liddle down the valley below the Moses Earl farm, who sat by the fire one cold autumn night, and pieced together with bit by bit recollection the songs and ballads of the anti-rentors, songs familiar to many ears when he had been a boy, but no longer heard in the Western Catskills. Descendants of anti-rentors walked with me over the scenes of riot in Columbia County, Rensselaer County, Albany County, Skahari County, and the Catskills. Sons of anti-rentors proudly showed swords, muskets, tin horns, and fragments of Calico costumes carried or worn by grandfather so-and-so in the down-rent war. Women rummaged in their attics and brought forth boxes of letters, carefully preserved for years, in an effort to aid this reconstruction of their ancestors' struggle against oppression. There were descendants of Mayham, Peasley, Slingerland, Devere, Gallop, Bouton, and others. There was the late William Quay, who first roused my interest in the Indians, when a newspaper sent me to get his story as the last of the anti-rentors. Quay was arrested in 1865 when church sent troops on their last expedition to the Helderbergs. I shall never forget his vivid word picture of the hell we raised on the mountain. The stories these people told are interwoven here, with facts dug from newspapers, court records, affidavits, legislative records, letters, books, and so on. I want to thank the following people who have taken time from their busy lives to give me valuable help. John D. Monroe of Cortwright-Delaware County for material on the Delaware phase of the down-rent agitation Arthur B. Gregg of Altamont Albany County for material on Helderberg anti-rentors Mrs. A. C. Mayham of Blenheim for material on Blenheim Hill anti-rentors Dow Beekman of Middelburg for material on Schoherry anti-rentors John E. Boose of Albany for anti-rent newspapers and material on Judge Parker S. C. Bishop of Coxsackie for a five-year file of the Albany Freeholder which had been preserved by its editor Charles Bouton Laura E. Slingerland of Slingerlands Albany County for material including copies of speeches by John Slingerland anti-rent congressman Harry F. Landon of Watertown for copies of letters by Silas Wright dealing with anti-rent Charles Ellis Grant of Margaretville-Delaware County for materials gathered by his mother on Edward O'Connor and the Delaware anti-rentors S. M. Pedrick of Ripon, Wisconsin for material on Alvin E. Bovay Granville Hicks who read the manuscript in its formative stages and gave me many helpful suggestions Phyllis Crawford for editorial aid Zoe Fales-Christman for help with research and editing and for constant encouragement Miss Terry Mangiardi and Miss Nancy Chrysler for typing notes and the manuscript and the following for various material and information Herman Locke Rowe, Mrs. W. C. Little, Mrs. Andrew Little, Mrs. Lotta Merrill, Miss Grace Slingerland, Arthur Bouton, Robert S. Weyer Edna Jacobson of the New York State Library manuscript and history section Clifford K. Shipton of the American Antiquarian Society Mrs. Albert DeMeers, Mrs. Park Mattison, Homer Gallop, William Davis, Willoughby M. Babcock of the Minnesota Historical Society J. P. Coughlin, publisher of the Waseka Minnesota Herald, Alice E. Smith Curator of Manuscripts of the Wisconsin State Historical Society and Clifford Egan of Grafton, New York Henry Christman Introduction There is an ever-recurrent necessity for the retelling of the past in light of the present thought. Events like works of art must await the judgment of posterity as to their importance. Readers have often accepted as most authoritative the interpretation of historians who have had the advantage of observing during their lifetimes the happenings they recorded. Readers of today have come to recognize the fallacy of making such acceptance a general rule. The eyewitness writer is often too close to his material to realize its true significance. Tin Horns and Calico tells a story that has never been told in its entirety before. Nineteenth-century historians gave it little thought and less space in their works. In fact their indifference to it was so great that through lack of feeling for what constitutes true history they made Henry Christman's research labors more difficult than they might otherwise have been. His conclusion of them is therefore the more triumphant. For this narrative is a contribution of importance to American history. It records the dramatic final chapter of the struggle of the people of the United States against undemocratic and feudal practices with regard to the possession of land, practices that had been firmly established for two centuries. The right of a man to own and till his own land had already been recognized in much of Europe before the first settlers arrived in America. In England feudalism had been abandoned for approximately a century. Yet the establishment by the Dutch West India Company of patroonships along the Hudson as a means of encouraging colonization denied that right, and the English rulers who succeeded the Dutch found it to their advantage to continue the system by allowing the patroons as manor lords to maintain their holdings and to grant great manners to deserving English subjects. The unrest that followed these grants developed into open armed revolt in 1766. Despite bitter differences in other matters the manor lords were in complete agreement that the tenant farmers who rebelled against injustice should be suppressed and disciplined. The king's troops were used to accomplish this purpose. Ten years later the great landholders were divided over the revolution against England. Many of the renters of small farms on the widespread manors hoped that the winning of the war by the continental forces would result in abolishment of feudal manner practices. Others, less optimistic, dreamed that the manners held by the Tory landlords would be broken up into small farms which they might own. Both were bitterly disappointed. The manor lords who supported the revolution were so powerful that when it ended they were able not only to continue themselves in the position of agrarian domination, but to acquire many of the confiscated acres of the landholders who had favored the English king. As the young republic came into being none of its structural legislation affected the manor system, it remained not only a continual injustice, a monument to special privilege within the new democracy founded on the principle of equal rights for all, but a lasting menace to democratic practices. If it could exist along the Hudson there was danger that it might be used as a precedent to justify a similar system along the banks of the Genesee in the Ohio. It might eventually affect land ownership practices throughout the nation. In one of the most comprehensive and efficient research studies of recent years Henry Christman tells us in this book how this threat was destroyed, not by great and influential champions, but by earnest citizens of less than average means whose chief weapon was a burning belief in the rightness of their cause. Having sought some of the sources from which Mr. Christman obtained his materials myself, when preparing to write a historical study of the Hudson River, I can testify to the thoroughness, the persistence, the imaginative quality of his research. He has proved himself a detective of remarkable powers, both deductive and intuitive, in running down elusive evidence. Even more impressive, I believe, is his marshalling of his facts into a stirring narrative. Let it be admitted at the outset that he was wise, first of all, in selecting as his subject one of the most picturesque and dramatic of America's untold tales. Material, no matter how compelling, may be ruined in its presentation, as any intelligent lay reader of history can testify. Henry Christman has not only enlightened us on an important historical subject, he has written of it with honesty and with the ability to recreate the past in vivid sure and rhythmic sentences. I prophesy with much more certainty than I usually feel when I attempt to look into the future, that this narrative will be the standard authoritative history of its subject for many years to come. It deserves to be read not only by those whose a special interest is the story of our country, but by all people who find interest in the study of dramatic human conflicts. I hope that it may be the basis for other works, novels, plays, motion pictures, for all of which it provides exciting materials. I believe it should be told again and again, because it tells most effectively the story of the triumph of the democratic spirit over the unjustified pretensions of aristocracy, pretensions from which to this day our country is far from free. The words of the heroic leader of the Calico Indians, Dr. Bowton, ring as true today as they did when he said them. If a civilization such as ours, which professes respect for the individual man, is to endure, it obviously cannot become the monopoly of an elite. It must become so far as possible the common enterprise of all. The purpose of our society is not for the few of maximum strength and ambition to lead lives of Byzantine glory, but for all men to make the most of their common humanity. We are pledged to a general diffusion of culture, of independence and self-respect, and the means to a good life. Tinhorns and Calico is a history lesson and a thrilling tale which I recommend to all Americans. Carl Carmer. End of Section 0, Recording by Maria Casper. Section 1 of Tinhorns and Calico by Henry Christman. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 1. A Landed Aristocracy Nowhere in the America of the late 1830s were the promises of the Declaration of Independence less fulfilled than in Albany, the capital of New York. Here was the seat of power of a landed aristocracy, the center of an island of semi-feudalism, in a land that had little more than half a century before declared its common faith in democracy and free enterprise. Under the Patroon system, flourishing as vigorously as it had in the days of the early seventeenth century, a few families, intricately intermarried, controlled the destinies of three hundred thousand people, and ruled in almost kingly splendor over nearly two million acres of land. In Albany, class lines were sharp. Democracy was so little known that a veteran of the Revolution might be refused a seat on the Albany Troy stage because he was shabbily dressed. Newspapers found it sufficiently important to report that cigar smoking had lost its charm for the elite since almost every shop boy and dirty little urchin had taken it up. Society was geared to a round of pleasure matched only in Washington, and local politicians mapped the nation's political future over drinks at Eagle Tavern. Workers left stranded at the completion of the railroad in the Erie Canal, demoralized by the Panic of 1837, herded together in the poverty-ridden section on the city's edge known as the pasture. They had begun to talk of organizing against low wages, unemployment, and unstable purchasing power. Most of all, they were beginning to cry out for land—land through which to escape the vagaries of profits and wages. But almost no land within a radius of one hundred and fifty miles of Albany could belong to the people. The Hudson Valley Gentry had owned it for generations, their ownership guaranteed by a charter which was a direct denial of the people's constitutional rights. The situation in these unsettled times was beginning to draw questions. How long must this continue? Had it established a principle for the future in a nation rapidly expanding into the territories of the West? Some of the Hudson Valley Gentry bore British names—Livingston, Morris, Jay. Others, descendants of Dutch settlers, were named Van Rensselier, Hardenburg, Verplank, Van Cortland, and Schuyler. No other family was so proud or so influential as the Van Rensselier family, pioneers in American feudalism, who for more than two hundred years had been the owners of the largest estate in the region. Rensselierwick embraced all of Albany and Rensselier counties and part of Columbia, and by 1838 was maintaining between sixty and a hundred thousand tenant farmers. Their overlord was Stephen Van Rensselier III, who had become the sixth lord of the Manor at the age of five, and was now an urbane old gentleman in his seventies, a former soldier and a former congressman, who rejoiced in the sobriquette of the Good Patron and was adored by his six sons, three daughters, and numerous grandchildren. The Patron system, which Stephen and his contemporaries inherited, had been engrafted on America by Killian Van Rensselier in 1629, long after it had been discarded in Holland. An influential pearl and diamond merchant in the Dutch capital, Killian joined with other crafty businessmen to obtain a charter for the Dutch West India Company, ostensibly to colonize the New World. However their true purpose was to wage privateer war against Spanish ships carrying gold and silver from Peru and Mexico, and to re-establish Dutch command of the sea without violating their country's treaty of friendship with Spain. Armed fleets set sail with orders and authority to conquer provinces and peoples and administer justice. Enormous riches returned to the company, and the prize of maritime supremacy kept the government complacent, until other interests, alarmed at the British challenge of Dutch claims in the New World, began to ask what had become of that projected colonization. Shrewdly the directors explained that settlement of such a wild and uncivilized country called for more settlers than they could supply. Important inducements would have to be offered before the undertaking could succeed. It was relatively easy, therefore, for the directors to get authority to offer a grant of land, with absolute power as patroon, to any member of the company who would plant a colony of fifty persons in America within four years. The patroon would have baronial authority with full property rights and complete civil and military control over the people, who would be bound by contract to fealty and military service as vassals. Each tract was to be legally purchased from the Indians and limited to a river frontage of sixteen miles, or if the land lay on both sides of a river, eight miles on each bank. But enterprising Killian made his own laws. He had his agents give a basket of trinkets to the Indian chiefs for a title to land stretching twenty-four miles along the Hudson River, with Fort Orange, a fur trading settlement as the approximate geographical centre. Of six patroon ships granted, his was the only one to survive the first six years. For although he never crossed the ocean to his dominions, he was as fortunate in choosing his deputies as he had been in selecting his location. Tenants, imported to secure his title, were under absolute control of his agents. They were compelled to buy all their supplies from the patroon's commissary, at usurious prices, grind their grain at the patroon's mill, and pay over to him part of all crops and increase in livestock. Hobbled by such restraints, agricultural settlers were few, but the traffic in beaver skins flourished. The Van Rensselaer Empire stood at the gateway to the fur trade of the inland wilderness, and although the grant of patroon ships specifically reserved this trade to the company, Kylian had a fort built on Barron Island at the southern end of his domain, and decreed that no ships should pass except those in his personal service. When the company protested that trade rights belonged equally to all members, Kylian declared he would enforce his edict by weapon right, and from the watchmaster of Barron Island all ships got orders to strike thy colors for the Lord Kylian and the staple right of Rensselaerwick. Peter Stuyvesant, the hot-tempered peg-legged director general in New Amsterdam, took passage up river to have it out with Van Rensselaer's agent at Fort Orange. When the boat docked, he stumped up the hill to the agent's house and ordered the soldiers to tear down the patroon's flag. That done he laid out a town adjacent to Fort Orange, named it Beaverwick, and proclaimed it company property, under the jurisdiction of three magistrates whom he himself appointed. Beyond that the patroon's influence with the home government proved too strong even for the hot-headed governor. As the land was cleared and farms became productive, the tribute paid by Kylian's slowly growing nucleus of settlers added measurably to his fortune. I would not like to have my people get too wise and figure out their master's profit, especially in matters in which they themselves are somewhat interested, he wrote in 1629 to William Kieft, director of New Netherland. After the British seized New Netherland in 1664, the changes were largely superficial. Fort Orange and Beaverwick were combined, under the name of Albany, from the Scottish title of the Duke of York, afterward James II of England. Kylian's grandson, then in actual residence, was confirmed in his possession of Rentsolierwick by provisional orders. In 1685 the governor granted a patent transforming the patroon ship into an English manor and the patroon into the lord of the manor. His civil rights were restricted a bit, but there was no change in the relations between landlord and tenant. The English almost outdid their predecessors in saddling the valley with big estates. For in addition to the nine actual manors they handed out millions of acres in patents to lesser members of the Hudson River aristocracy. It was regarded as good policy to place large tracts in the hands of gentlemen of weight and consideration, who would naturally farm out their lands to tenants, a method which would create subordination, and as the last of the colonial governors expressed it, counterpoise in some measure the general levelling spirit that so prevails in some of his majesty's governments. Even the revolution did not weaken the feudal hold of the big landowners, it merely stripped them of baronial honors and privileges. The rent-distressed tenants of New York State gave themselves and their supplies to the struggle. They fought at Saratoga and Oreskini and Valley Forge for the right to be independent landholders. Side by side with men seeking freedom for capital enterprise to exploit the wealth of the New World, farmers and wage earners fought for the principles of individual political and economic freedom. With a common rallying cry two wars were fought, one within the other, and one was lost. The farmers and the wage earners found themselves betrayed in victory, when the new government became a bulwark for the rich and the middle class against the despised proletariat and the rising tide of democracy. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and the Livingstons worked unceasingly to keep New York the most conservative commonwealth in the New Union. In 1777 the people of the state guaranteed that nothing in the state constitution should be construed to affect any of the grants made by the authority of the king or his predecessors. Two years later, however, under Governor George Clinton, the estates of Tories who had been loyal to the crown during the revolution were confiscated. In 1780 these and the lands acquired from foreclosures, tax sales, and Indian purchases, were promised as bounty for revolutionary services, but the land office was not created until four years later. By that time the choices tracks had all been taken by prominent Federalists to satisfy their war claims and great blocks had been sold to speculators and corporations for a pittance. Wherever impoverished veterans turned they found the speculators had been their first. The tenant system spread, in flagrant disregard of the broader economic interests of the state. Highly skilled settlers fleeing old-world oppression and class distinctions avoided New York, rejecting its terms of perpetual tribute for the use of the soil and water-power. Still the great landowners would offer only leases. Thus it was that when Stephen Van Rensselaer III came of age, on November 1st, 1785, Rensselaer Wick was as extensive as it had been at the death of Killian in 1645, and had grown vastly in wealth and influence. Hudson River Society felt that young Stephen had every quality necessary to a leader of a landed aristocracy. He had been educated by his grandfather Philip Livingston, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. His wife was the lovely Margaret Schuyler, with whom he had eloped at the age of eighteen. In beauty and elegance she was second to no young woman in the region, except her sister Elizabeth, who had married Alexander Hamilton. Not since the Hamilton Schuyler wedding had Albany known a beef-and-licker dinner such as was spread for Stephen's coming to power, the flower of society was there, but the social sensation was overshadowed by the young Petroon's revelation of his business plans, plans which betrayed the skillful guiding mind of Hamilton. The great manor had always returned income enough to support its lords in luxury, but the farms were few. Only scattered settlers had gone beyond the fertile valley lands to clear the heights of the Helderbergs, where thousands of untouched acres still awaited the axe and the plow. East of the Hudson thousands more stretched across the rolling hills. Stephen now announced a liberal program to people the rest of his seven hundred thousand acres. He would give the patriots of the revolution homesteads without cost. Only after the farms became productive would he ask any compensation. Surveyors were sent over the hills. Farms of one hundred and twenty acres each were blocked out. Exaggerated reports were issued about the fertility of the soil, the celebrity of the climate. Men began to come. And to each the Petroon said, Go and find you a situation. You may occupy it for seven years free. Then come in at the office and I will give you a durable lease with a moderate wheat rent. Before long nearly three thousand farms were taken and villages sprang up around church spires. Seven years went by and the tenants came in for their durable leases. By this time protected by the new federal constitution which he had helped to frame, Alexander Hamilton had perfected for his brother-in-law a lease that would bind the new tenants permanently to the estate. In effect its terms did not differ radically from those offered by the first Petroon to his original settlers. By calling the contract an incomplete sale Stephen Van Rensselier adroitly sidestepped the issue of feudalism which had been outlawed in New York State in 1782 by the abolition of entail and primogeniture. He sold the property to the farmer and his heirs and assigns for ever on the following conditions. As purchase price for the title to and the use of the soil the tenant was to pay ten to fourteen bushels of winter wheat annually and four fat fowls and he was to give one day's service each year with team and wagon. He was to pay all taxes and was to use the land for agricultural purposes only. The Petroon specifically reserved to himself all wood, mineral and water rights and the right of reentry to exploit these resources. The tenant could not sell the property but only his contract of incomplete sale with its terms unaltered. A quarter sale clause restricted him still further. If he wished to sell the landlord had the option of collecting one fourth of the sale price or recovering full title to the property at three quarters of the market price. Thus the landlord kept for himself all the advantages of land ownership while saddling the tenant with all the obligations such as taxes and road building. This contract was an expression of Hamilton's theory of government. He proposed to save the nation from democracy by putting the rich and well-born in a position to check the unsteadiness and imprudence of the common people. America should be a nation of landed gentry, rich merchants and professional men, with a strong coercive government to serve business and capital by guarding against the ambitions of laborer and farmer. He would preserve the old class distinctions by preserving the institutions which made them possible. For his brother-in-law the Petroon he accomplished this objective. Too late the settlers realized that the terms of the durable lease should have been agreed upon in writing when they took possession of the land. One farmer described his experience. I was poor. I found a lot that suited me and went to work. Cleared me a spot for a log cabin and a barn. At the end of seven years a large portion of the forest had disappeared. Myself, wife and little ones had just commenced to enjoy the fruits of our labor. I called at the office for my lease. It was handed to me. I told them I could not read it and requested that it should be read to me, which was complied with. I frankly told them that the lease did not agree with our verbal contract. It's the only lease given by Mr. van Rensselier, the agent said. What does quarter sale mean, the settler asked? You Dutchmen will never want to sell, and if you should the Petroon would never exact it. Mr. van Rensselier does not want the Yankees to get among you, for if they do they will make trouble. It is put in there to keep them out. The agent further assured him that the day's service would never be exacted, except in the case of building a mill in that neighbourhood, then the Petroon would call on the tenant and his neighbours for a few days teaming. If the day's service is only to be performed in the case of building a mill in my neighbourhood, why not insert it so, the settler suggested? That is not in accordance with our agreement, and I shall not take it. You must take it or leave the premises. Thus the settler's story concludes bitterly, I was compelled to take the lease. The first seven years were cruelly hard for most of the men who took up homesteads in Rensselier Wick. A few found good soil, but more did not. Some travelled as much as ten miles to labour for half a bushel of corn a day, carried it home on their backs, and then took their axes out into the forest to clear the land with nothing but cornbread to eat. In this way they were able to get together a few tools with which to begin farming. Yet Stephen van Rensselier expected them to accept his terms without question. Others received a worse fleecing as a reward for superior enterprise and equipment. The following passage is quoted from a speech before the state legislature. I have in mind an instance where a man erected a mill costing some three or four thousand dollars, built two dams, dug a canal a quarter of a mile in length in order to lead the water to a spot where nature designed the erection of the mill, and for this privilege he was obliged to pay seventy dollars a year to Mr. van Rensselier, while Mr. van Rensselier didn't pay a cent of tax. In my native town I know of an instance where a man erected a fulling and carding mill at much expense, and who, when the terms of his lease expired, was threatened the moment he put water to his wheel to have a writ put on him, and finally they drove him off entirely, and he went to Schohari where he now resides. Any offer to buy the land outright was scorned, for no investment could be so secure for the landlord as this perpetual interest in the produce of his land. Only a few tenants had the courage and hardyhood to refuse the leases and turn to the wilderness to begin their toil anew. The rest remained in a serfdom which was for all practical purposes complete. For non-payment of rent Stephen van Rensselier and his kind could issue their own warrants for the seizure and sale of crops and livestock to satisfy their claims, their own testimony being all the proof required. They could fix their own price, they could call upon the sheriff to collect for them, and the tenants had no appeal to the courts. The farmers worked, one sympathiser with the tenants said, so the landlord could swill his wine, lull on his cushions, fill his life with society, food and culture, and ride his Berush and fine saddle-horses along the beautiful river valley and up to the backdrop of mountain. It was small wonder then that the tenants' resentment grew. Glowing descriptions had led them to expect rich soil, like that of the valley farms taken up long before the Revolution. Some settlers found small loamy valleys east of the Hudson, but the majority were pushed up into the Petersburg Mountains, where the soil was hard and sterile, or even further into the wild rocky picturesque table-land of teconic mountains along the eastern border of the state. West of the Hudson they found themselves established in the Helderbergs, the rock wall rising abruptly from the Hudson Valley which once served as the great girdling shoreline for an ancient sea. Along the ridge the receding glacier had left a deposit of boulders and rubble over which the years had sifted a thin topsoil. Here the farmers spent their energy resting a living from the grudging land and talked with patient humour of the stones that pushed up perennially as the only dependable crop. Some even fancied that the Helderbergs were the last place made by God and the dumping ground for all the rock left over from creation. A missionary making a tour of the Mohawk and Black River valleys in 1802 wrote, The American can never flourish on leased lands. They have too much enterprise to work for others or remain tenants, and where they are under the necessity of living on such lands I find they are greatly depressed in mind and are losing their animation. While Van Rensselier's incomplete sale was yielding millions, he was energetic in guarding his interests on the political front. Like others of his class he was a Federalist, and in the legislature at Albany and the House of Representatives in Washington he struggled to resist the tide of Jeffersonian democracy. In 1805 he helped to enact state legislation permitting the imposition of rents as a condition in a contract of sale, a practice he had put into effect in Rensselierwick nearly twenty years earlier. During the State Constitutional Convention of 1821 he revealed his fear of unrestricted suffrage in his vigorous but unsuccessful fight against the relaxation of property qualifications for voting in state senatorial elections. As another of the conservative leaders put it, I wish those who have an interest in the soil to retain the exclusive possession of a branch of the legislature, the men of no property together with the crowds of dependents connected with great manufacturing and commercial establishments and the motley and undefinable population of crowded ports may perhaps at some future date under skillful management predominate, and yet we should be perfectly safe if no laws could pass without the free consent of the owners of the soil. Chancellor James Kent jurist and conservative whip in New York State politics. Three years later when the Patron was a member of Congress his fear of losing his empire tricked him into casting the vote that made John Quincy Adams president. Adams, Andrew Jackson and William Crawford were locked in a three-way stalemate which had to be broken by the vote of the House of Representatives. Van Rensselier had promised Martin Van Buren, the young New York senator with whom he occupied a house in Washington, that he would vote for Crawford, who was neither a dangerous Jeffersonian Democrat like Jackson nor a Yankee like Adams. At the last minute Henry Clay and Daniel Webster called Van Rensselier into the Speaker's office to see if he could not be scared out of his position. They told him that a continued deadlock might result in complete disorganization of the government and anarchy was sure to threaten his manner. Their proverbial eloquence impressed the Patron. He returned to his seat on the floor and, as always before making an important decision, bowed his head on the edge of his desk and prayed. When he opened his eyes an Adams ballot lay on the floor before him. It was divine guidance enough and the Patron gathered up the ballot. His vote swung the State of New York and Adams was elected president. Stephen Van Rensselier was too realistic not to know that the semi-feudal power of the Hudson Valley aristocracy was an anachronism and that a single act of provocation might crystallize democratic opposition. Knowing the history of his title, he was constantly harried by doubts of its legality. He betrayed this weakness on one occasion after he had announced that he was going to dispense with the services of a prominent Albany lawyer to whom he had been paying a thousand dollars a year. Very well said the lawyer, then I shall be at liberty to accept a retainer from your tenants and I will then show you that they are no longer your tenants but owners of the soil. The payments to the lawyer were continued, it is said, to the end of the lawyer's life. Another incident revealed the Patron's dread of a court test. One of his sub-agents brought a man named Potter Maxon before a justice at Grafton on charges of poaching timber from the manor. When Maxon demanded proof that Van Rensselier owned the timber, the case was transferred to the Rensselier County Court. The Patron sped Robert Dunbar to Grafton to settle the case out of court, but Maxon, backed by neighbors who were anxious for the test, would not be pacified. Greatly agitated, Dunbar took out his anger on the sub-agent, whom he found in the backyard of his home. Who, in hell and damnation, authorized you to carry that suit to a county court, he demanded. Nobody answered the astonished sub-agent, but there are so many in the practice of trespassing on the Patron that I thought it necessary to make an example of one. I had no doubt of the goodness of Mr. Van Rensselier's title. Who made you the judge of the Patron's title, Dunbar stormed? What do you know about titles? You are a damned ungrateful wretch. Mr. Van Rensselier has sustained you for forty years and all you ever had come through his means, and now by this one act you have ruined him. But Ruin did not follow. The case was decided in favour of Van Rensselier, a decision made suspect by the Patron's paying all the legal fees, despite Maxon's protests. Van Rensselier continued to avoid forcing the issue whenever he could, thereby earning the name of Good Patron. In hard times he let the Rents accumulate. Even when the Depression of 1837 pinched him so critically that he complained to Van Buren, then President of the United States, the Good Patron could not be persuaded to press the tenants for back rent. As 1838 was drawing to a close, farmers in a dozen New York counties hitched up their teams and set out for the landlord's office. Rent day was on a Tuesday, the first of January, and many had to travel more than a day over frozen roads to get there in time. A few brought loads of produce to leave at the landlord's warehouses, but most of the farmers had their receipts for wheat and the four fat hens, which had been previously delivered to the Patron's mills, the local stores, or specified shipping points nearer to home. Stephen Van Rensselier's agents received the tenants at the office connected with the Manor House on the northern edge of Albany. Every farmer in Rensselierwick was supposed to be represented there on rent day whether he could make payment or not. The fertile valley farms which had been under cultivation for several generations, and had more favourable leases than the rest, were seldom in arrears, but the best that the upland farmers could do was make current payments in the good years if they reported at all. All day long, that cold New Year's Day, 1839, tenants stood in the yard outside the office, waiting for their names to be called, in an endless monotone that could hardly be heard over the whinnying and stamping of tired horses. The thick, clotted wall with its single window resembling a porthole looked more like an old prison-house than a place of business. As the farmers handed in their rates through the window and got their rent receipts and their orders regarding the day's labour with their team, they felt more like prisoners receiving their rations than the respectable citizens they were. One lad of seventeen, substituting for his father that day, wrote afterward, I have been in several different courts where criminals have been arraigned before the Bar of Justice, and that too for crimes of highest offence, where they had more liberty and more privilege allowed them than the honest and hardworking yeomanry had in that office. No farmer was permitted to enter the warm office to examine the books for himself, but each was obliged to take the agent's word that the entries were correct. As they walked away from the window, however, more than one tenant must have felt relieved that another rent day had come and gone without any reference to the unpaid back rents. Although none of them could have been aware of it, events were to make this rent day highly significant. In the first place, at the other end of town, a new governor was taking office. Political attention, long focused on the marble palace of the Democrats, had shifted to a yellow brick mansion at Westerlo and Broad Streets where New York's first Whig governor, William H. Seward, had just taken up residence. Even now the young governor was preparing his message to the legislature, which would make it clear that he had no use for the social philosophy that tolerated a landed aristocracy, and that he regarded American democracy as a force to remake the world. In the second place, it was the last time any of the farmers would pay rent to the good Patroon. Death came to Stephen Van Rensselier at the Manor House on January 26, 1839, when he was seventy-three years old. The last Van Rensselier who could legally use the title of Patroon or Lord of the Manor was gone. With him ended an era, for his passing was to effect not only his own tenants, but eventually the tenants of every estate in New York. Stephen Van Rensselier belonged to a dying social order, but he was able to live out his life in exponent of the aristocratic tradition that men of wealth were preordained and exclusively competent to be leaders in government, public service, and cultural development. His admirers had ample reason for calling him the good Patroon. Nevertheless he should be judged not only by his acts, but by his motives. Under a modest and benevolent exterior he had been the uncompromising guardian of his vested rights. He had contributed to the relief of the poor. People overlooked the poverty of his own tenants. He had let nearly half a million dollars in rent go uncollected for years. Signs of unrest had died down among his tenants. He helped build churches on his manor and contributed to their support. The church became a vigorous defender of his privilege even after his death. He gave money and time to foster agricultural science. The application of new methods increased the productivity of his farms. He campaigned vigorously for the Erie Canal as a public improvement. The project enhanced the value of his manor at the gateway of river and canal. He gave money and personal effort to the advancement of education and culture, including the establishment of Rensselier Polytechnic Institute at Troy in 1824. People disregarded the ignorance generated by the demoralizing leasehold system. The good Patroon could well afford philanthropy. His rule over Rensselierwick had paid him an estimated forty-one million dollars. With Hamilton's aid he had extended his holdings to include extensive tracts in northern New York and considerable real estate in New York City. He was counted by many as the richest man in America. News of the great man's death travelled swiftly from the big house, and statesmen, editors, and clergymen vied in their eulogies. The good Patroon had none of the morbid appetite for wealth which grows ravenous by what it feeds on. Daniel Dewey Barnard, one of the executors of his will, said that his heart reached forward well into the heart of the Republican system. Thurlaw Weed, Whig leader and editor of the Albany Evening Journal, recalled the bounties and blessings Stephen had scattered and the happiness and gratitude his lifelong goodness created. President Van Buren said that he had grown to love the good Patroon as a father. In New York City Philip Hone jotted a note in his diary, few men were more extensively beloved, one of the Lord's noblemen, his ability to do good, which from his great wealth was more enlarged than that of most men, was never sparingly exerted for the good of his fellow citizens. The tenants of Rensselaerwick waited. His last will and testament would show the extent of the good Patroon's humanity. After all these years the back rents were to be collected so that debts amounting to four hundred thousand dollars might be settled and the estate handed over to his heirs unencumbered. The good Patroon charged the trustees to show all reasonable indulgence toward the poor and unfortunate tenants, but at the same time put a premium on immediate collection by requiring his heirs to pay his debts if the tenants fell short. Rensselaerwick was to be divided between Stephen IV, fifty-one years old, only surviving offspring of Stephen III's first marriage, and William Patterson Van Rensselaer, the oldest son of his second wife Cornelia. Stephen's share was the land west of the Hudson, Albany County, including the manor house built by his grandfather on the northern edge of the city, and also, as befitted the head of the family, the warehouses and offices nearby. William was to receive the east manor, consisting of Rensselaer County and part of Columbia. Among the other seven children the Patroon divided the tracts in Saratoga and Hamilton counties, land and houses in Albany and New York City, and stocks of various kinds. From the tenant's point of view neither of the two principal heirs was particularly qualified by either temperament or training to manage the estate, for they had been brought up as ornaments to society. They had received the education of gentlemen, Stephen at Princeton and William at Yale, and had brought back fancy ideas from their travels in Europe. None of the Patroon's sons had ever had a chance to learn humility, and they had no natural sympathy for farmers and working people. Even Cortland, who had become a Presbyterian minister, ignored distressing conditions in Rensselaerwick to spend two years as a missionary among the slaves in Virginia. His message would probably have been the same, however, at home or among strangers, submission to God's will, contentment with one's lot, and scrupulous discharge of duties toward one's superiors. Obviously the sons had none of their father's doubt of their rights, nor did either have his personal charm, though William was the warmer and more modest of the two. Stephen had always been arrogant and demanding. Now, after living entirely off his father's bounty with his wife and seven children, he promptly assumed the heirs of a powerful Lord of the Manor, and his first official act was to order Daniel D. Barnard to have the rents collected in Albany County. Only a few farmers responded to the first call, and these came chiefly from the fertile valley farms where few were in arrears. As Stephen noted impatiently, the greater part neglected to do so. Throughout the county there was bitter talk from tenants who had once called the good patroon generous. They thought he should not have allowed unpaid rents to accumulate so long unless he meant to waive payment altogether. Resentment was most acute in the Helderbergs, particularly among the thirteen hundred inhabitants of the Summit Townships, of Byrne, Westerlo, Rensselaerville, and Knox. These tenants were mostly Dutch and Scotch-Irish, sons of the post-revolutionary settlers who had preferred the wilderness on any condition rather than work for wages. In their contest for a foothold they had acquired a tenacious character that matched their rock-scrambled soil and its hard pan outcroppings. From childhood to old age they labored away in the daylight and more. Women joined their men in the harvest fields and then went back to the house to pack butter-furkins, weave home-spun for clothes, and bake bread in the big brick ovens. The women tramped miles in the back and forth shuttle of the weaving-room, while the men marched up and down the moist brown fields with sewing-bags over their shoulders. The only change in the endless cycle of work was seasonal variation. There was always work, even in the winter, when maple, birch, and beech logs brought warmth into the house and the threshing flail beat rhythms on the barn floors. Here and there a neighbour had prospered, not solely because he was energetic, but because he had had the luck to find good soil when he cleared the forest. Such a tenant might in time achieve a large frame-house, an orchard of grafted trees, fifty or more hives of bees, carriages and slays, and a reputation as a man of tasting character. Of one of them a visitor wrote, the interior of his house was replete with plenty, purity, and freshness. Lamb's wall and choice feathers fit up his dormitories. Sit down at his breakfast-table and you will hesitate to get up. Men in such comfortable circumstances could easily pay the rent at any time, but many withheld it as a matter of principle because they abhorred the vassalage their contracts imposed. Moreover, the years of struggle there in the hills had welded an uncommon community of feeling among the tenants. Realizing this, the old Patroon had known better than to drive his coach and fore to the Helderburgs without an armed guard of outriders. The new master, Stephen IV, had much to learn. It was a mistake to insist on forcing payment in the spring. Resentment over the trickery that had bound them to the manor always flared up afresh at this time of year, when the plowing not only broke a man's back but turned up a new crop of stones. Spring planting had started when Stephen served notice on his tenants that back rents must be paid at once or action would be taken to recover the farms. The edict shook the hill towns. Every man on the Helderburgs knew that should the young Patroon persist, many would be turned homeless from the land they and their fathers had tamed. Many of the tenants were aware that arrearages were not the basic issue. Men like Lawrence Van Dusen of West Mountain, a prosperous grey-haired man of sixty, and his friends Hugh Scott of neighbouring Westerlow and Charles Bouton of Wren Salireville, all three followers of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and influential among the farmers in the Democratic Party. These men pointed out that settling for back rents would only confirm their status as perpetual tenants, not change it. Morally they had a better right to the land than its legal owners had. Not only had they paid all the taxes, but they had paid the purchase price many times over in the form of tribute to the Van Rentsaliers. When our people settled these farms, Van Dusen reasoned, farms in neighbouring free counties were sold for less than a year's rent in Wren Salirewick. At taverns, over stone walls, in excited conversations before and after church, in talk from wagon seat to wagon seat, the anti-rent sentiment gained momentum. One by one the tenants determined on defiance. Once having decided they were sober, resolute and ready to face the consequences. Oats planted in early May made a soft green carpet. Corn and potatoes were poking their stems through the warm soil, and buckwheat fields had been plowed for late June sowing, when Van Rentsaliers agents returned to the Manor House with empty pockets and alarming reports of unanimous refusal to pay rent. Stephen IV sent them back into the hills with a message for the West Manor farmers. They were to select a committee to meet with him at his office. On May 22nd, 1839, Van Dusen, Scott, Bowton and twenty-seven others drove through the lodge gate and down the tree-lined avenue to the Manor House. It was true that they did not arrive in splendid carriages with an attendance of servants in rich livery, and they were clothed in homespun made by their wives and daughters, but it was exhilarating to feel that this time they came not as rent-day serfs, but as self-declared free men. Dow Lansing, the patron's agent, greeted them stiffly as he admitted them to the office. The patron will see you presently, he said. He did not offer them seats, but they took what they found. As there were only two or three chairs in the room, some occupied the window-sills, some the stove, others the floor. Stephen Van Rensselier IV entered, stalked through the room without a sign of recognition, and disappeared into an inner office where several subordinates were in session. Later he returned in the same haughty style, walked to the end of the room and seated himself on the steps, casting an indifferent glance at the tenants as one of them reported, as much to say, serfs, you are beneath my notice. This was the signal for Lansing to inform the farmers that the patron wished all suggestions reduced to writing. The men had come prepared for frank man-to-man discussion, and were ready to compromise the question of back rents if the patron would recognize their right to buy full title to their land. Now they were back on the old footing as humble subjects. Disappointed the delegates recessed to Dunbar's tavern to prepare their statement of grievances. The sterility and roughness of the soil made payment in winter wheat impossible, they declared. For the ten to fourteen bushels a year they would prefer to substitute money rent, computed at the rate of seventy-five cents to a dollar a bushel, according to the quality of the land. The patron should surrender the quarter sales and water rights, and concede the tenants' right to exploit mines, minerals, timber, and other natural resources. The tenants should have the option to buy free title to his farm at any future time, for two to two-and-a-half dollars an acre. That amount invested at six percent interest would give the landlord an income equal to the annual rent. To save the farms immediately threatened the delegation proposed that the patron write off the arrearages of any tenant unable to borrow the money to pay. These propositions were left with Dow Lansing and the farmers returned home to report to their neighbors. One week later Stephen IV sent his reply, which stated that he saw no reason why he should fritter away his estate in the manner they proposed. He would do gross injustice to himself and his family and to society at large if he should yield to their exactions. He was willing to sell, at five dollars an acre, double their price, but only in the four hill townships of Byrne, Westerlow, Rentsolereville, and Knox. The rich valley farms were not for sale at any price. He was willing to change wheat rent to money rent, but at a dollar and forty and one-half cents a bushel, from poor land and good alike. The back rents, the most pressing issue, were a matter solely between the individual debtor tenant and the trustees of his father's estate—a matter with which you have nothing to do, he added. It was to be expressly understood, moreover, that all arrears must be paid before he would make any changes in rents, quarter-sales, or any other provisions of the contracts. The tenants received the patroons' reply realistically. They knew he was standing on his legal rights, regardless of how they had been secured, and his rejection of any workable compromise left them little choice. In June the daisies and the butter-cups and the devil's paintbrush bloomed in the fields of hay. Toward the middle of the month the farmers mustered oxen, horses, scrapers, shovels, hose, picks, crowbars, and jugs of hard cider, and gathered with the Pathmaster to repair the springwashed roads. But this year the annual event lacked its usual social flavor, and there were few tall yarns to keep the laborers chuckling. Instead they talked gravely of the crisis they were facing, and words of hard defiance were hurled down the mountain to his lordship, Stephen IV. Despite the good patroons' avoidance of any issue which might unite the tenants and his efforts to bar Yankee troublemakers, there had always been enough hard heads to keep the farmers' resentment of their serfdom simmering. Now confronted with the possibility of having their life's work wiped out entirely, and for the sole purpose of supporting the luxury of the Manor House, even the most timid tenants rallied to the leadership of the committee. Lawrence Van Dusen and Hugh Scott called the first mass meeting, on July 4, 1839, at Byrne, the highest point in the Helderbergs. There among the rock-studded hills and ravines, with the broad summits of Grippy Hill and Irish Hill in the background, Van Dusen addressed the crowd in a ringing voice while Hugh Scott took notes for the record. In the new Declaration of Independence which the committee had prepared to send to Stephen Van Rensselier IV, they heard his proposals compared to the Intolerable Stamp Act, and themselves to the Patriots of 1765, driven to a choice between two grim alternatives. Since the pretended proprietor of their soil refused to revise the leases or sell at reasonable prices, the tenants were obliged to protect their rights and property by resisting, even to the last extremity. To this they pledged their fortunes and their sacred honour. The document read in part as follows, We have counted the cost of such a contest, and we find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery. Honour, justice and humanity forbid that we should any longer tamely surrender that freedom which we have so freely inherited from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive or expect from us. We will take up the ball of the revolution where our fathers stopped it, and roll it to the final consummation of freedom and independence of the masses. The next day, with these words still ringing in their ears, the tenants went back to their fields to await Van Rensselier's reply. It was not the first time that Hudson Valley tenants had rebelled against the leasehold system. There had been a flare-up nearly forty years before among the Livingston tenants in Columbia County, but it had been promptly and completely squelched by John Jay, then Governor of the State. The farmers knew the risk they were taking. They knew what it meant to lose, too. Some of the older men still remembered Daniel Shays, who had settled near Rensselierville after his unsuccessful rebellion of 1787 against the stranglehold of creditors on the farmers of Massachusetts. Nevertheless, these farmer sons of patriots had no more doubt of their right to resist tyranny than those bold men who raided Boston Harbor and scattered the bay with tea. While they waited, they went about their tasks as usual. Sides, rakes, forks, and hay-rigging had been made ready on rainy days, and the farmers, working until their knees shook, turned great swaths of hay in the meadows. As the sun dried the wind-rows, the women and children followed with rakes. Seven weeks passed without incident. Most of the hay was mowed and stacked, oats were shocked or in the barn, corn stood above a man's shoulder, and buckwheat was about to burst like a flurry of snow. Then Stephen van Rensselier sent his agents up into the Helderbergs to test the temper of the farmers. Hard summer work had not dulled it in the least, and the agents hurried back to Albany to warn him that they were no longer safe among so excited a people. Undaunted, Stephen IV had the sheriff of Albany County draw up rits of ejectment against the leaders in the four rebellious hill towns in the hope that the rest would be frightened into volunteering the rent. A farmer named Isaac Hungerford received the first writ on August 28, 1839, when under sheriff Amos Adams drove up to the farmhouse, Hungerford greeted him pleasantly without suspicion, but his manner changed when he looked at the paper. You'd better get home and be in some other business, he said brusquely. I warn you, as a friend, to go no further. You can't go through this country with patron papers and get home a live man. When Adams retorted that it would take more than one man to stop him, Hungerford drew a long knife from his belt. I'm warning you, there are hundreds like me, we'd as soon die as not if we have to. Alarmed by Hungerford's cool menace, Adams laid whip to his mare, and his wagon rattled over the rocky road for several miles before he paused again. He continued to serve papers in isolated regions the rest of the day, encountering no worse threat than sullen frowns, angry silence, or vigorous oaths. About sunset he reached the shelter of a tavern in Rensselaerville and put up his mare for the night. He did not hear the little group of horsemen that rowed up in the darkness. Their stop was brief, and when their work was done they scattered in different directions over the hills. In the morning when Adams slid open the stable door he found a shambles. His wagon was a splintered wreck, his harness a neat pile of leather waste, his nag's tail was a stump, and her mane was clipped to a stubble. One can imagine him borrowing saddle and bridle for his mortified mount in order to get the shorn beast home, his discomfited progress past the tenant farms, the farmers pausing in their grain harvest to watch in grim silence. When Amos Adams's account confirmed the previous reports of great excitement prevailing in the hill towns, Van Rensselaer insisted upon immediate and vigorous action. Sheriff Michael Archer was about to go into the hills himself when he received a letter from Hugh Scott, the secretary of the tenant's standing committee on rent, enclosing a copy of resolutions passed at a meeting in Westerlow on September 7th. Resolved that the committee be—and they are hereby—requested to inform Sheriff Archer, in a friendly and courteous manner, that it would be advisable for him to remain at home unless he come in the character of a private citizen. Lest the sheriff be misled by the quiet tone of the official notice, one of the farmers followed it two days later with a stronger warning. Dear sir, I understand you are calculating soon to make your electors a visit in your official capacity, in favour of the tenant's monarch, and as the tenants were so friendly as to elect you to the office of sheriff, gratitude would say they ought to inform you of the perilous tour you are about commencing. Therefore let it be understood that the tenants have three times prayed to their landlord, like children to a parent, besides numerous separate applications, to be redressed of grievances on rent, but a deaf ear has been turned to all their entreaties. The landlord has acted his own pleasure, taken his own time to make his price on the rents, and to any amount he chose. The tenants have not had the liberty to trade on their own earnings. The landlord's pleasure has been a law with the tenants. Under these circumstances the tenants have organised themselves into a body and resolved not to pay any more rent until they can be redressed of their grievances, and to carry the above resolution into effect the tenants have pledged their honour and fortune even to the last extremity. The tenants now assume the right of doing to their landlord as he has for a long time done to them, namely as they please. You need not think this to be children's play, for the tenants have arisen in the name of justice, and it will need a stronger hand than you are aware to put them down, their strength is fast gaining. The best of the inhabitants from off the patent advise never to give the subject up until we have our rights restored to us, and if you come out in your official capacity you come against a great strength, and I would not pledge for your safe return. Therefore, if you come, you come at your own risk, for it is difficult to regulate such large companies of men and keep them in such bounds as we would wish. A tenant. Sheriff Archer reconsidered, to the extent of sending Daniel Leonard in his place the following Sunday morning, Leonard was an active and fearless young man who had no misgivings about his errand, although it was directed against Hugh Scott and thirteen other ringleaders. The first on the list was Paul Vincent. Leonard arrived in Byrne by the early stage, while the hills were still hazy and the grass was wet with dew. He found the farmer out in the barnyard with his young son, finishing Sunday morning chores. Vincent paused to take the paper handed him, cast his eye over the formal legal verbiage, and without a change of expression turned to his son. Boy, he said laconically, go tell them that one of the Patroon's men is out serving papers. The boy's bare feet kicked up a trail of dust as he disappeared across the fields into the woodlot beyond. Vincent turned on his heel and walked briskly back to the barn. As Leonard was departing, somewhat bewildered, the farmer came tearing out of the barnyard on his horse. Just beyond the gate he reigned in and called out to the deputy, if you want to get back a whole man you'd better get as quick as possible. He straightened in the saddle, dug in his heels, and was off down the road. As Leonard cut across lots to young Andris Underdonks congratulating himself that he was getting on with his task so easily, he heard something that startled him. Not far away, a tin dinner-horn blared out suddenly. A second blast came from another quarter, and the sound was taken up and repeated, growing fainter in the distance. Even a brash young man like himself found something disquieting in this man-made echo that seemed to go on forever. It was a signal with which all the landlord's emissaries were to become increasingly familiar in the next few years, but this was the first instance of its use to relay a warning from farm to farm. Daniel Leonard quickened his steps and walked straight into Andris Underdonks' house, where he found the family at breakfast. He hurriedly laid the writ on the table and departed without giving the farmer time for inquiry. For the story of his next encounter we have Leonard's own written report to Sheriff Archer, which undoubtedly puts the best possible face on his dismay. I went to the home of James Leggett and met him by the house. I told him I had a paper for him and offered it to him. He then ordered me off his land. I threw the declaration down by him and was going off when he said to me if I wanted to get off alive I must pick up the paper and clear out with it. I told him I was not going to take it up. He then told his son to get in the house and bring out that. I suppose he meant the gun. After some time I picked up the paper and came off with it. Leggett and his son and another person followed me, and Leggett threatened to kill me if I served any more papers. He called me scoundrel, traitor, rascal and villain, put his fist frequently up toward my face and appeared very much excited and angry. He said he would shoot a man in a minute that came on such business. He abused me greatly. I then offered him the paper again. He refused to take it. I then laid it on the ground again. The other man then came up and said I must take the paper immediately or they would maul me. I took it. They then made me promise not to serve any more. Then they left me. Promise or no promise Leonard was determined to finish serving his papers. From Leggett's he went to the farm of Isaac Wilsey, who had been born on the patent in 1798. At that time his parents had only a cabin of peeled elm logs, roofed with poles overlaid with bark, but they kept the latch string on the outside and never turned away a visitor. When Daniel Leonard interrupted the family at breakfast that cool September morning, Wilsey greeted him so affably that a shrewder man might have been suspicious. The farmer took the writ without protest and even let Leonard tell him about the shameful behaviour of his neighbour James Leggett. It was a little past eight in the morning when Leonard left Wilsey's, but already the blasts of the horns were beginning to unnerve him. They followed him whichever way he turned and seemed to grow louder by the minute. Wisdom dictated that he take the first stage back to Albany, though he had not served Hugh Scott and still had eleven rits left in his pockets. He hurried down the road to Gallop's store in Byrne to wait for the stage, but he had scarcely made himself comfortable in a splint-bottom chair when fifteen horsemen appeared. Others were not long and arriving on foot, and by the time the stage rumbled up the road was crowded with Helderburg brawn. Leonard opened the door to make a dive for the coach, but his path was blocked and the stage went on without him. He recognised Vincent and Wilsey and then James Leggett shouldering his broad frame through the crowd. Give me the papers you've still got on you, said Leggett roughly. Leonard did not argue, but quickly emptied his pockets. While Leggett was shuffling through the rits, the crowd began to yell, take him away, let's be on with the business. Young Underdonk edged up threateningly. Do you think you'd have got away if I'd known what that paper was, he growled? We'll teach him to serve papers, someone shouted from the outskirts of the throng. An Andrus Underdonk added a threat, he'll never get home alive. With several men at his heels Underdonk went around the corner of the store, and in a moment came back rolling a barrel of tar. They set it upright in the centre of the road, and Underdonk held a taper to it. The tar caught and roared into flame. Thomas Whitbeck gripped the deputies' arms and swung him around so that the heat stung his face. The crowd pressed closer. Burn the papers Leggett ordered, and made Leonard thrust them into the fire. The blaze crackled and the crisp black ash rose on the upcurrent of hot air. Someone shouted, down with the rent, and an echo roared from the crowd, down with the rent. The excitement rose. Now we'll get the paper he left at Underdonk's, Leggett yelled to the horseman, as he half carried the terrified deputy to a waiting wagon. No shouted a voice from the crowd, let's drink to the patroon, his agent shall pay. The mob hooped in sudden good humour. Leonard bought the drinks, and then the party rode off with a clatter, roaring along the country road to Squire Filcans, where they hauled out another barrel of tar and fired it. According to Leonard's report they kept him busy the rest of the day. They took him to Underdonk's and made him burn the writ he had left there. After that they all went to Lawrence's tavern on the Delaware Turnpike, where they insisted on his treating again, not once but twice, at considerable expense. From that time on he was the butt of a good deal of horse-play, the humour of which escaped him. Thomas Whitback led him out of the tavern and threatened to put him into the fire, but another tenant interfered. Whitback wanted to cut off Leonard's hair and again was dissuaded, though he did snip some from the young deputy's crown. Leonard repeatedly begged the men to let him go home. If it was money they wanted they might have all he had. The crowd assured him that they did not want his money, nor did they wish to hang him, for hanging was too good for him. They had a worse fate for him than that. They called him their prisoner and hurried and blew their horns from time to time. After a while they carted him down to Reedsville, where they wanted to be treated again, but when they saw how little money he had left they told him to keep it, and one of the farmers treated him instead. After this round of drinks a bloodthirsty cry went up, tar and feather him, throw him into the pond. Nobody made any move to carry out either suggestion, however, and presently one of the leaders came into the tavern and told Leonard he could go home. It was past four o'clock when he started off, on foot, down the road to Albany, thoroughly shaken but unharmed. Reviewing the day's events the tenants' standing committee approved the burning of the Ritz. They deplored the tavern episodes, yet felt they had given Sheriff Archer fair warning that the farmers might get out of hand. On the whole they were elated, for the deputy's reception had demonstrated that the farmers could unite for action. End of Section 2. Recording by Maria Casper.