activity had resulted in the deaths of several authorities, including a deputy sheriff. After this, the “Indians” who weren’t yet in jail burned their disguises and went into hiding, collapsing the militant movement. A few of those who were unlucky enough to be caught were sentenced to death, while most received either prison time or fines. Other anti-renters continued the resistance by blaring a horn whenever a law enforcement official was in the vicinity so as to make his presence known. They also occasionally arranged for the disappearance of livestock and other chattels advertised for distress sale.
All the while, anti-renters were holding out for the “title-test” scheme, by which they hoped to disprove the patroon’s legitimacy of title and instantaneously be granted their land in accordance with the adverse possession law—which required that a person “openly and notoriously” occupy a property for (at that time) twenty years in New York state.[d] The patroon himself could not argue adverse possession, as he had not personally occupied the entire manor for twenty years. Only the residents could make the claim.
In many other counties, landlords had already agreed to sell their interests to the rent-striking tenants, thus mollifying much of the broader regional movement. When manor lords wouldn’t sell, residents sometimes burned down their own houses and threw down their own fences rather than allow the landlords to benefit from their generations worth of property improvements. By 1850, only the Van Rensselaers still refused to sell, and the Rensselaerwyck residents found themselves alone in the struggle.
In the title-test suit, the court surprisingly found that the plaintiff was not technically a landlord at all and that the defendant was not technically a tenant. Instead of a “lease in fee,” the parties had engaged in a “grant in fee” because none of the living residents had signed the original contracts. Instead, they had inherited the perpetual debt from their ancestors. It was the classic terms of an indenture—the sort that hadn’t existed in England since the year 1290 but somehow thrived in Upstate New York in the mid-nineteenth century. This shift in definitions altered the terms of the entire case. The suit was thrown out, and the only escape from manorial tenure now would be for the patroon to sell out, which he still refused.
In 1853, after fourteen years without income from rent, Stephen Van Rensselaer IV finally sold the manor to a speculator named Walter Church for a lower price than he had ever offered manor families. He was so bitter over the rent strike that he purposefully sold the farms to Church rather than to the residents themselves. Once Church had the land, he offered to sell families their individual farms at an inflated rate, and about half the families took this option. The other choice he gave them was to pay their back-rents and continue their leases in perpetuity. Anyone who refused both options would forfeit their farm. Following this, Church issued 2,000 writs of ejectment. By 1859, only 580 of the 3,063 original leases still existed.
In 1860, one Peter Ball was evicted from his farm for withholding back-rent. If Ball paid his rents in arrears he would be allowed to keep the farm—and though he indeed had the money, on principle, he refused to pay. The sheriff even offered him $50 out of his own pocket to avoid the unpleasantness of eviction. But Ball had been an anti-rent militant for twenty years, and he would not turn. Almost every inhabitant of the town was present as authorities emptied the house and placed all of Ball’s possessions on the snowy side of the road. No one objected to the eviction, but after all the authorities had returned to Albany, a resurgence of “Indians” moved Ball back in and occupied the property with him for several years afterward.
During this same time, soldiers around the country were fighting the Civil War, and those who were not fighting were suppressing anti-draft riots in Manhattan. Short on military assistance, Church was poised to do little in the way of aggressive evictions—so he did not confront Peter Ball again until May 1865, after the Civil War ended, and with the help of the state militia.
A mere month before, the New York legislature had ratified a thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude. Yet the eviction of Peter Ball went ahead unhindered, and the same soldiers who had fought against slavery the year before, now ironically reinforced the feudal servitude at Rensselaerwyck. To prevent the anti-renters from reclaiming Ball’s farm the way they had in 1860, soldiers packed a thousand rounds of ammunition and several barrels of provisions, and they camped that night on Ball’s land. The next day, the troops marched up every road in the county’s western townships and began their forced ejections of all remaining tenants. Most had already left to avoid the indignity of eviction.
That August, in one last attempt at justice, thirty “Indians” sneaked onto Ball’s former farm at first light to harvest his crop. But the militia had arrived before them and turned them away. The next day, Church hirelings harvested Ball’s crop and shipped it to market; a profit from nothing for Church.
After twenty-six years of litigation and uprisings, the Anti-Rent movement was finally over. Its conclusion was as embarrassing as it was disappointing. The Anti-Rent incident dispelled the American notion of democracy for many nineteenth-century contemporaries who questioned how, in a country of “free” people, the violence of the state could be utilized as an arm of private tycoons to silence the majority. Even when every lawmaker in Congress agreed that feudal tenures were outmoded in modern society, they still shrugged their shoulders at the legal roadblocks and avoided alternatives suggested by logic and practicality.[e] As late as 1884, 300 leases in perpetuity were still active in the Hudson River Valley. Even today, traces of this failure of democracy are evident when astonished homebuyers in Albany County are compelled to pay a nominal rent charge every year to some remote assignee of Stephen Van Rensselaer III.[18]
The story of Rensselaerwyck is indeed an unusual property tale for the United States. But that the story grew from Dutch property law does not make it impertinent to American law. If nothing else, it reflects an important trend of what could be called trickle-down land distribution and the refusal to allow settlements to occur organically. Instead, land is used as a buy-and-sell commodity that one is paternally granted the right to use. Patricia Nelson Limerick describes the phenomenon this way: “Conquest basically involved the drawing of lines on a map, the definition and allocation of ownership (personal, tribal, corporate, state, federal, and international), and the evolution of land from matter to property.”[19]
This transition from matter to property, as Limerick describes, was the cornerstone of the development of the United States as a country. After the revolution, property began to be discussed in terms of fee simple—a concept antithetical to feudal ownership systems that tethered individuals to pieces of land. The United States prided itself on its freedom to accumulate and dispose of land at will, and property owners’ freedom from meddling feudal or royalty lords. James Howard Kunstler points out the advantages and disadvantages of such a system in The Geography of Nowhere: “America’s were the most liberal property laws on earth when they were established.... Our laws gave the individual clear title to make his own decisions, but they also deprived him of the support of community and custom and of the presence of sacred places.”[20]
Kunstler points to a developmental oversight that is endemic throughout U.S. history. The haphazard methodology of land distribution was a federal scheme; only the government and speculators were able to profit from the mammoth raw resource that was North America. Nearly anyone else who gambled at real estate entered into a perpetual state of debt. In fact, while pioneering the West remains romanticized to this day, settlers were sometimes more realistically trapped by the credit-debt system than they were forging a lawless frontier.[21]
Settlers of the West were often poor, and those who couldn’t afford to enter into a credit-debt arrangement resorted to squatting the public land rather than buying it. With great hordes of these squatters occupying farms in the West, their communities became difficult for authorities to disperse. The squatters formed what they called “settlers’ associations,” which not only lobbied state
