Conceived in Liberty (275 page)

Lord Granville’s estate, it should be remembered, constituted one-third of North Carolina, while Fairfax’s Northern Neck domain totalled over five million acres. Interestingly enough, Lord Fairfax had settled down in permanent residence in Virginia in the 1740s, and he was never a Tory. Virginia therefore graciously waited until his death to confiscate his estate —a sign that elimination of this feudal land monopoly was a concern of Virginians separate from the urge to punish Tories. Furthermore, land monopoly was significantly attacked by the confiscation, division, and sale of ungranted royal estates and timberlands in New Hampshire, New York, and the southern states.

Whenever the State has privileges to dispense, they will tend to be granted to the State officials themselves or their favorites, or to be sold to the highest bidder. Hence, inevitably, corruption and special privilege entered into the lucrative disposal of the confiscated lands. Haskett shows this process of privilege as it developed in New Jersey. Confiscations and dispositions were made by appointed county commissioners. These commissioners were therefore suppliers of special privileges. Accordingly, they generally failed to advertise the land sales, doctored the auditing of assets, and rigged the bidding so as to sell the land parcels to favored
buyers at bargain prices. Moreover, the county commissioners often kept the sale money, invested it for their personal accounts, and only paid the money into the government later, in highly depreciated currency. Indeed, one shrewd commissioner of Somerset County, Federick Frelinghuysen, ended up as owner of two of the seven confiscated estates he helped to sell. By 1781, New Jersey had only received $28,000 from its sales of land.

Neither Attorney General Patterson nor the assembly ever acted to stop this wholesale corruption. Not surprisingly, since Patterson was an old friend of Frelinghuysen; indeed, both Patterson and his brother-in-law became owners of confiscated Somerset estates. In fact, Frelinghuysen, Patterson, and Patterson’s family wound up as owners of over half the confiscated Tory estates in Somerset County.

Yet despite the widespread corruption, land distribution in New Jersey was still significantly broadened and made more democratic as a result of the Revolution. Over 500 Tory estates in the state were confiscated, parcelled out, and sold in New Jersey.

*
Cited in North Callahan,
Royal Raiders
(Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1963), p. 8.

*
See Leonard W. Levy,
Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 33ff. Levy’s work is indispensable for revision of the common over-inflation of the extent of Jefferson’s libertarianism.

**
Richard C. Haskett, “Prosecuting the Revolution,”
American Historical Review
(April 1954), pp. 578–87.

*
Robert R. Palmer,
The Age of the Democratic Revolution, I: The Challenge
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 189–90.

*
See C. H. Van Tyne,
The Loyalists in the American Revolution
(Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959, original edition, 1902), pp. 280–81.

**
On the other hand, Penn’s private manors in Pennsylvania and their quitrents, totalling over 500,000 acres, were reconfirmed by the Pennsylvania legislature rather than confiscated!

These conflicting tendencies are highly important in assessing the results of large-scale land confiscation 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 eighteenth 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-needed democratizing of land ownership 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, Philipsburgh Manor of Philipse 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 percent of the tenantry of all Tory land holdings in New York Thus, James DeLancey’s estate in southern New York was broken up and sold to 275 different persons, and Roger Morris’ to 250 persons.

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 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 tenantry. Some leases were granted by private application rather than by public auction, and rebel 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 émigrés from southern New York. The tenantry 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 to compel eviction for nonpayment of rent.

Ferment by the disgruntled tenantry 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 West-chester. 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 breakup 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 antilandlord champion of the tenant struggles of the 1760s, the independent freeholder, Dirck Brinckerhoff of Dutchess County. The veteran John Morin Scott was also a 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 ultraright. 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 took place, in Orange and Ulster Counties, with proradical 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 attainting 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 parcelled 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 to block the division and sale of the Tory lands.

Staughton Lynd 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 counter-revolution was strong opposition 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 of slave-holding plantations), and the resistance far smaller.
*

The radicals kept up a drumfire of pressure on the New York Assembly for sale of the lands throughout the 1779–80 session. 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 the confiscated lands. The bill became law on March 11, 1780. To make things easier for the tenantry, the patriotic tenants were excused from all arrears in rent, and the lands leased to the émigrés 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 Tory land: how were the sales conducted? In the French Revolution, monied 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, and that a significant leveling and democratizing of the feudalistic land structure in New York did take place. Staughton Lynd 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 Lynd 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 100–200 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 tenanted estates. The land speculators made their main acquisitions in scattered urban or unoccupied land holdings.
*

The majority of the purchasers were residents on their lands. The disposition of Westchester’s largest Tory estate, Philipsburgh Manor, has recently been studied by Beatrice Reubens.
**
This huge estate composed one-fifth of present-day Westchester County, or 50,000 acres, centering
on Yonkers. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Philipsburgh, the domain of the Philipses, contained over 270 tenants on farms of about 200 acres each. The manor, moreover, contained no freeholds and the tenantry was theoretically on a highly insecure “at will” contract which also prevented them from voting in colonial elections 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. Philipsburgh Manor was therefore disposed of under the 1784 confiscation law, which was not as liberal in granting preemption rights as the law of 1779. Yet the result of the disposition of Philipsburgh, 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 at Philipsburgh was therefore obviously enormous.