Volume 4, Chapter 77, Tory Lands in New York
These conflicting tendencies are highly important in assessing the results of large-scale land compensation in New York from which the state received $3 million in proceeds.
New York's land system was uniquely shot through with feudalistic land monopoly.
Huge manorial estates derived from the land grants of the early 18th century were still largely intact and contained an oppressed and restive tenant peasantry.
Confiscation of large Tory quasi-feudal estates was therefore particularly significant in the much-needing democratizing of land ownership in New York.
in New York. A particularly vital question for justice in land was the extent to which
land ownership reverted to the tenants in this process or instead went to land speculators
privileged by the state. New York feudalism was greatly weakened by the very fact of the
breakup of the large Tory estates. This was the inevitable result of the confiscation
and Breakup of the Huge Estates of the Johnsons, Phillipsburg Manor of Phillips in Westchester,
the Roger Morris and Beverly Robinson Estates in Dutchess County, now Putnam, and the Delancey
Estate in New York City. These last four accounted for nearly 90% of the tenetry of all Tory
land holdings in New York. Thus, James Delancey's estate in southern New York was broken up
New York's land confiscation policy came in two stages. The first policy was sequestration.
In the spring of 1777, commissioners of sequestration were appointed for each county and were authorized
was to seize all personal property of Tories in the county and to sell it immediately at public auction.
Tory lands, on the other hand, were to be sequestered by the State and held in trust.
The State, meanwhile, taking over the role of landlord, exacting rents from the tenetary.
Some leases were granted by private application rather than by public auction,
Preble refugees from southern New York were to be favored in granting leases, so favoritism
was rife.
Numerous tenants were evicted to make room for favored emigres from southern New York.
The tenetries soon found to their dismay that government feudal landlords were just as oppressive
as private landlords, just as tyrannical, just as cruel to squatters, and just as prone
Firmament by the disgruntled tenetary quickly took the form of pressing for outright confiscation and sale of the Tory estates.
The greatest pressure occurred in South Dutchess County.
On the one hand, this area was the frontier nearest British control and filled with rebel refugees from Westchester.
World with Rebel Refugees from Westchester.
On the other hand, the landlords in the area were mainly Tory, and hence their tenants
had a strong economic incentive to become ardent Whigs and press for outright confiscation
and break-up of the estates.
In October 1778, 448 citizens of Dutchess County petitioned the Assembly for a Confiscation
Bill.
It is not surprising that the right wing was bitterly hostile to confiscation, and Livingston,
Gouverneur Morris and the Jays denounced the plan as a great compound of folly, avarice
and injustice.
The moderate centrist, Governor Clinton, strongly opposed the confiscation laws.
The leader in the Assembly for Confiscation was the old anti-landlord champion of the tenant
Struggles of the 1760s. The independent freeholder Dirk Brinkerhof of Dutchess County, the veteran
John Moran Scott, was also leading advocate of confiscation. The great confiscation laws
of 1779-80, in fact, were driven through solely by mass pressure from below, pressure against
both Clinton and the ultra-right. Thus a confiscation bill passed in February 1779 but was vetoed
by the Council of Revision as unjust and an attainder. The veto precipitated a great crisis
in New York politics. Radical victories swept the spring elections in 1779. Elections which
which took place in Orange and Ulster counties with pro-radical militia batteries ominously
maneuvering near the polling booths.
In the fall session of the 1779 Assembly, two-thirds of the delegates were new and radical.
It was this session that drove through the radical legislation of New York during the
Revolution.
As the fall session opened in October, the New York Legislature passed a tax law authorizing
discriminatory assessments against suspected Tories.
More important, on October 22, the same month as the peak of Pennsylvania radical strength
in the attack on Fort Wilson, it passed a law attaining for treason a long list of Tories
and confiscating their estates.
Fifty-nine Tories were thus attainted for treason and expropriated.
Once the lands were confiscated, the crucial question became, would these lands be divided
and sold into private hands?
If so, then land monopoly would be dealt a tremendous blow.
The lands would be divided and parceled out, and irretrievably democratized.
But if not, if the lands were rather kept by the state, then the land monopoly system
would be retained, the tenants kept in their place, and perhaps the lands would even be
returned to the large Tory owners.
As a result, the conservatives in the legislature, led by the wily lawyer and longtime representative
of the feudal landlords, Egbert Benson of Dutchess County, devoted themselves to trying
and to block the division and sale of the Tory lands.
Staunton Lind has pointed out that this very question, the division and sale of confiscated
feudal lands, proved to be a turning point in both the English and French revolutions.
In England, a major factor in the Cromwellian counterrevolution was strong opposition by
by Presbyterians and London Merchants to the sequestration and sale of royalist and bishop-owned lands.
And in France, a crucial feature of the Reign of Terror was to be the Jacobin decision to sell off confiscated feudal lands in small lots at low bargain prices in order to get the land into the hands of the peasantry.
In both revolutions, it was this decision to take the crucial step to smash feudalism
and turn the lands over to the peasantry that alienated the middle-class land speculators
and helped wreck the revolution.
Fortunately, the United States did not suffer from that great weight of feudal land.
Hence, the task of the revolution against feudalism was far easier, except in the case
The Radicals kept up a drum-fire of pressure on the New York Assembly for sale of the lands throughout the 1779-80 sessions. Every county sent petitions for immediate sale. Finally, after a great deal of resistance by the Senate, the final step was taken in democratizing and liberalizing the land system, sale of land.
of the Confiscated Lands.
The bill became law on March 11, 1780.
To make things easier for the tenetry, the patriotic tenants were excused from all arrears
in rent, and the lands leased to the emigres were sold on the same terms as the rest.
We come now to a critical problem in judging the social effects of the confiscation of
In the French Revolution, moneyed speculators, instead of small peasants, acquired the feudal lands.
In the English, most confiscated land found its way back to the original owners.
What of the New York lands?
Recent researchers have shown that the bulk of land sales did go to tenants rather than speculators,
Stanton Lind has found that in Dutchess County, some cases occurred of Whig relatives returning land to the original Tory owners, with more cases of middle-class land speculators acquiring one or two tracts to lease to the existing tenants.
Some tenants, unable to buy their farms in competition with the speculators, did demand that the government lease the land to them at low prices.
But Lind concludes that the fact remains that the ledgers of the commissioners bear out the older view that most of the confiscated land went to small farmers and so contributed to the destruction of aristocracy in New York.
This happy result was largely due to the sale law, which provided that confiscated land be sold in parcels of 500 acres or less, and the typical farm in Dutchess was 100 to 200 acres, and especially that existing tenants be given first option in acquiring their land.
The tenants were allowed preemption for eight months to purchase the land at an appraised price.
The appraisal was to be made by three men, one of them the tenant himself, another a commissioner, and the third selected jointly by the other two, so that the tenant had a large share in deciding how much he might have to pay.
During the 1780s, it is true, the law was altered by a more conservative assembly to
the disadvantage of the tenants, including the weakening of tenant preemption rights.
But time was sufficient for the tenants to reap the benefits of this liberal measure.
Thus, in Dutchess County, 496 confiscated lots were sold, of which 471 belonged to four
prominent Tories, Beverly Robinson, Roger Morris, Henry Clinton, and Charles Inglis.
And 414 lots belonged to Robinson and Morris alone.
These 414 lots in South Dutchess were sold to no fewer than 401 persons and in very few
cases did one person buy more than one lot.
Almost all the lots were farms under the 500-acre limit, and the average price per lot was
inexpensive, less than 100 pounds. A large proportion of these small, cheap and widely
shared lots, perhaps a majority, were bought by the actual pre-existing tenants.
For Westchester, democratizing took place where it was most needed, in the large, heavily
Tory tenanted estates. The land speculators made their main acquisitions in the scattered
urban or unoccupied land holdings. Lind points out that in Bergen County, New Jersey, where
Tory land holdings were small farms rather than large estates, the confiscation policy
led to no decrease in concentration of land, nor did it have to, since the real need for
for Social Change was precisely in the tenanted estates.
The majority of the purchasers were residents on their lands.
The disposition of Westchester's largest Tory estate, Phillipsburg Manor, has recently been
studied by Beatrice Rubens.
This huge estate composed one-fifth of present-day Westchester County, or 50,000 acres, centering
on Yonkers.
At the outbreak of the revolution, Philipsburg, the domain of the Philipses, contained over
270 tenants on farms of about 200 acres each.
The manor, moreover, contained no freeholds and the tenetree was theoretically on a highly
insecure at-will contract, which also prevented them from voting in colonial elections and
and from holding major offices in later state elections.
Since Westchester was occupied by the British throughout the war, the Confiscation Law could
not be applied to it until the war was over.
The same was true of New York City and other occupied areas.
Phillipsburg Manor was therefore disposed of under the 1784 Confiscation Law, which
It was not as liberal in granting preemption rights as the law of 1779, yet the result of the disposition of Phillipsburg, first and foremost, was to replace one powerful landlord with more than 50,000 acres and 270 tenants by 287 independent farmers, owning an average of 174 acres each.
Moreover, more than two-thirds of the purchasers bought farms which they themselves had worked as tenants of the estate.
Various heirs of tenants are not included in these figures, and many purchasers were really stand-ins who resold the land to tenants who had not been ready to preempt at the designated time.
Furthermore, the commissioners were very lenient and helpful to the preempting tenants,
extending their credit for payment beyond the letter of the law.
The extent of liberalization of land tenure in Phillipsburg was therefore obviously enormous.
It is true that throughout the confiscated lands of New York, the tenants, not being granted their tracts outright,
were often forced to buy the lands on mortgage and sometimes lost their lands to the mortgageor.
But this was only a fly in the ointment of their newly found prosperity and status as owners of their land.