Antirent War

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(183946) Civil protest by leaseholding farmers in upper New York state. Protesting outdated laws based on semifeudal leaseholding practices of the early Dutch estate owners, the leaseholders of Albany county in 1839 refused to pay back rent. The governor called out the militia to quell the violence. Sporadic acts of resistance against rent and tax collection spread across the state, and in 1845 the governor declared martial law. In 1846 a new state constitution abolished the leasehold system.

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Centered in the Catskill counties of New York state, the Anti-Rent War of 1839–1846 was a rebellion against the old patroon system of estate landownership. Protest took the form of harassment of rent collectors by farmers disguised as "Indians," who shot seized livestock and broke up rent sales. In 1845, however, protesters killed a deputy sheriff, prompting a sheriff's posse, reinforced by state militia, to begin wreaking havoc in Delaware County while searching for the killers. Ninety-four anti-rent men were arrested and indicted for murder, while 148 were charged with other crimes, including arson, theft, and rioting.

However, this heavy-handed reaction against a system largely obsolete outside New York drew great sympathy for the anti-renters, and in the 1845 New York elections, a governor gained office on the promise of pardoning all the anti-renters, reforming the land system, and beginning the practice of electing the New York attorney general, all of which were done by 1846.

Bibliography

Christman, Henry. Tin Horns and Calico: A Decisive Episode in the Emergence of Democracy. Cornwallville, N.Y.: Hope Farm Press, 1975.

Huston, Reeve. Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

—Margaret D. Sankey

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Antirent War, in U.S. history, tenant uprising in New York state. When Stephen Van Rensselaer, owner of Rensselaerswyck, died in 1839, his heirs attempted to collect unpaid rents. Tenants on the estate resisted, and an angry mob forcibly turned back a sheriff's posse that tried to evict them. Resistance to landlord authority quickly spread to landed estates throughout the Hudson valley; tenants disguised as Native Americans harassed landlord agents and sheriffs. When a deputy sheriff of Delaware co., N.Y., was killed (1845), Gov. Silas Wright declared a state of insurrection and called out the state militia. Armed resistance ended and the antirenters turned to politics. They helped elect a Whig, John Young, as governor of New York; the legislature passed ameliorative measures; and the 1846 state constitution outlawed future long-term leases. The Antirent War hastened the breaking up of the large landed estates as worried landlords began selling their holdings.

Bibliography

See E. P. Cheyney, The Anti-Rent Agitation in the State of New York, 1839-46 (1887); H. Christman, Tin Horns and Calico (1945, repr. 1961); D. M. Ellis, Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region, 1790-1850 (1946, repr. 1967).


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Poster announcing an Anti-Rent meeting in the town of Nassau

The Anti-Rent War (also known as the Helderberg War) was a tenants' revolt in upstate New York during the early 19th century, beginning with the death of Stephen Van Rensselaer III in 1839.

There is also the 1766 Anti-Rent war of Dutchess County which was provoked by similar land-title problems.

Van Rensselaer, who has been described as "[having] ... proved a lenient and benevolent landowner" was the patroon of the region at the time, and was a descendant of Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, the first patroon of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck. The patroons owned all the land on which the tenants in the Hudson Valley lived, and used feudal leases to maintain control of the region.

Before the American Revolutionary War, the patroons acted as feudal lords, with the right to make laws. The Anti-Rent War led to the creation of the Antirenter Party which had a strong influence on New York State politics from 1846 to 1851.

The first mass meeting of tenant farmers leading to the Anti-Rent War was held in Berne, New York on July 4, 1839. In January, 1845 one hundred and fifty delegates from eleven counties assembled in St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Berne to call for political action to redress their grievances.[1]

Trials of leaders of the revolt for riot, conspiracy and robbery were held in 1845. Participants as counsel in the trials included Ambrose L. Jordan, as leading counsel for the defense and John Van Buren, the state attorney general, who personally conducted the prosecution. At the first trial the jury came to no conclusion. During a re-trial in September 1845, the two leading counsels started a fist-fight in open court. Both were sentenced by the presiding judge, Justice John W. Edmonds, to "solitary confinement in the county jail for 24 hours." At the conclusion of the trial, one defendant, Smith A. Boughton, was sentenced to life imprisonment, but after the election of John Young, who had the support of the Anti-Renters, Broughton was pardoned.

For further information on how the following years convinced landed proprietors to sell out their interests, see Anti-rent movement and downfall.

See also

References

  1. ^ Christman, Henry. Tin Horns and Calico, a Decisive Episode in the Emergence of Democracy. ISBN 0-685-61130-2. 

Further reading

  • "New York's Anti-rent War 1845-1846," Contemporary Review, June 2002 by Eric Ford
  • Dorothy Kubik, A Free Soil - A Free People: The Anti-Rent War in Delaware County, New York (1997) ISBN 0-935796-86-X
  • Charles W. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839-1865 (2001) ISBN 0-8078-2590-5
  • Candace Christiansen, Calico and Tin Horns (1992) ISBN 0-8037-1179-4
  • Huston, Reeve. (2004) "Popular Movements and Party Rule: The New York Anti-Rent Wars and the Jacksonian Political Order," in Beyond the founders : new approaches to the political history of the early American republic / edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, pp. 355-386.

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patroon (history, business, United States)