Hungerford stopped him and, while brandishing a large jackknife, said, “You had better go home and be in some other business. We have pledged ourselves that no officer shall travel through here to serve process for the patroon. We have made up our minds to die, and we are ready to die in the cause of resisting any officer that should come there on the patroon’s business.”
The next time a Van Rensselaer hireling came to serve the tenants writs, they set a tar barrel on fire and told the collector that they would spare his life if he burned all the writs. When he did this, they made him buy a round of drinks for everyone present—after which they took him to burn all the writs that he had already served, and then had him buy two more rounds for everyone at the tavern. After each round, the tenants lit another barrel on fire and debated whether or not to tar and feather the man. When police came to the manor to restore order, they were turned away by 300 anti-renters, wielding clubs and shouting, “Down with rent!” The next time, police were met by 1,500–1,800 protesters, who blocked the road completely.
Finally, just before the government brought in 2,000 military troops from New York City, Governor William H. Seward gave the anti-renters one last warning. He said, “Organized resistance to legal process is insurrection, and if death ensue the penalties of treason and murder are incurred. The only lawful means to obtain relief from any injuries or redress of any grievances of which they complain are by application to the courts of justice and to the legislature.”
To avoid a stalemate, both sides heeded Seward’s suggestion and attempted to employ the law to remedy their dilemma. But in order to legally deconstruct the disaster of Rensselaerwyck, anti-renters and the State of New York alike would have to determine how Rensselaerwyck was legally constructed in the first place. Every person involved was equally baffled about how the estate could have ever legally come to be.
While most property law in the United States is based on English Common Law, the brand of feudalism practiced at Rensselaerwyck had been outlawed by Parliament and King Edward I with the statute Quia Emptores almost 600 years earlier. This is explained by New York having been under Dutch control before the British acquired it. No American lawyer by the time of the revolution remembered the Quia Emptores statute; thus, it was never migrated into American property law.
Quia Emptores outlawed the form of fee-farm rent known as rent service. The closest statute that America had to the British Quia Emptores was the Act Concerning Tenures of 1787, which banned feudal properties and established all real estate as allodial—that is, owned absolutely and independently of a lord. If nothing else, the Act Concerning Tenures should have at least converted all rent-service leases into rent-charge leases, but this statute appeared to have been largely ignored in Upstate New York until 1839 when tenants began examining the legal dilemma.
If anything was more difficult to explain than where this patroonship came from, it was how to get rid of it. Any suggested method of taking away a person’s “vested property rights” was immediately dismissed as unconstitutional. The only legal way to divest the Van Rensselaers of their land was through the use of eminent domain. A process still used today, eminent domain allows the state to appropriate private property for the “public good,” as long as the owner receives “just compensation” from the state.[16] This might have worked had the whole country not been battling an economic depression in 1841: The State of New York was so under-financed that it had to abandon its work on the Erie Canal. So the idea was put on the backburner and Congress continued debating. Meanwhile, anti-renters were recruiting residents of other nearby counties to join the rent strike. And because Congress was still discussing a legal resolution to the feudal tenures problem, writ-bearing deputies were kept off the manor as the rent strike continued.
In March 1841, attempts to collect rent resumed. As residents refused, deputies took up “distress sales”—that is, the auctioning off of residents’ material goods as pre-modern repo men. But stalwart anti-renters then adopted other tactics. At auctions, crowds of people would begin bidding and continue bidding from morning until night, exhausting the auctioneer and trying the patience of the patroon. Anti-renters also began the practice of disguising themselves as Indians (a motif reminiscent of the Boston Tea Party)[b] and forming a silent ring around potential buyers at distress sales. This usually intimidated people away from bidding on items. In one case in which a man bid on a horse, the incognito anti-renters rolled him down a hillside.
The “Indians” continued their intimidation tactics until September when the military sent four companies to the manor to squelch the movement. They threw rocks at the soldiers but retreated after two anti-renters were cut by the soldiers’ bayonets. In response, a week and a half later, the “Indians” kidnapped Deputy Sheriff Bill Snyder and held and tormented him for two days. Bill Snyder’s ambush marked the last attempt to collect rent on the manor for nearly three years. All the while, Congress continued to unsuccessfully work toward land reform.
Matters became more complicated when evidence surfaced to confirm old suspicions that Stephen Van Rensselaer IV may never have been the rightful heir to the manor at all. The trouble dated back to 1685 when, under a Dutch patent, the manorial title was conveyed by King James II to Kiliaen Van Rensselaer (son of Johannes) and Kiliaen Van Rensselaer (son of Jeremias) from their common grandfather, the first patroon. But Kiliaen (son of Johannes) and Kiliaen (son of Jeremias) had a third cousin, also named Kiliaen—this one the son of Jan Baptist. The lineage of this third Kiliaen (son of Jan Baptist), who was the oldest son of original patroon (confusingly also named Kiliaen), was now pointed to as the rightful heir of the manor, according to the common law rule of primogeniture. The other two Kiliaens were suspected of covering up the existence of the third Kiliaen, who had never emigrated from Holland.
By the end of 1843, few residents at Rensselaerwyck believed that Stephen IV had the right of title. When one anti-renter was caught stealing timber from the manor, the government found it impossible to fill a jury with unbiased peers, as nearly every resident was suspected by the district attorney of belonging to the Anti-Rent Association.
The “Indians” meanwhile organized a march around the whole Hudson Valley region, along the way instructing people on how to run a rent strike, how to resist sheriffs, and how to sing the movement’s own anthem, “The Ballad of Bill Snyder.”[17] Authorities responded by having a band of thirty-five men issue a new batch of distress warrants. A hundred of these “Indians,” armed with pistols and tomahawks, surrounded them, released their horses, and forced them to march a mile and a half, at which point they searched the deputies for distress warrants. The man in possession of the warrants was tarred and feathered. At midnight, the disguised anti-renters went to the deputy’s house, snatched all the warrants he had, and burned them at a “powwow in the center of the village.” When the deputy bragged that he would get even, the “Indians” struck first by kidnapping him from his bed that night to cover him too “with a thick coat of tar and feathers.”
After this incident, the sheriff organized a formal meeting between the authorities and the anti-rent representatives, at which he offered to mediate between their association and the patroon. There was one more attempt to serve distress warrants on the manor, which ended in another tarring and feathering, after which the anti-renters were left in peace for several months. Meanwhile, the Indian costume came to be more than just a disguise—it was an identity that the anti-renters now wore with pride.
But everyone involved found that their war had reached an impasse; Congress could not sponsor land reform so long as the “Indian” resistance continued, and similarly, anti-renters could not renounce resistance without seeing the sort of change they demanded. Tipping the scales, citizen action soon turned to bloody insurrection when a stray bullet at a demonstration hit and killed a teenage spectator.[c] After that, the anti-rent movement was tainted by bloodshed, and government officials appeared less willing to work with the group, preferring instead to put down the revolt by capturing and jailing every one of the “Indians.”
