Antirent War

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (May 2009)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2009)

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

• Dragonwyck, a 1944 novel by Anya Seton that takes place during the Anti-Rent War

References

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.