A New Look at the Great Landlords of Eighteenth-Century New York

Abstract

TwNT his report to the Board of Trade in I700 on the state of affairs of New York, Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, then governor of the _ province, fixed for his successors their unfavorable opinion of the great landowners. Bellomont, in the midst of a last-ditch effort to revoke what he called extravagant land grants given by his predecessor Governor Benjamin Fletcher, wrote: people are so cramp'd here for want of land, that several families within my knowledge are remov'd to the new country (a name they gave to Pennsylvania and the Jersies) for, to use Mr. Graham's expression to me . . . what man will be such a fool as to become a base tenant to Mr. Dellius, Col. Schuyler, Mr. Livingston ... when, for crossing Hudson's river, that man can for a song purchase a good freehold in the Jersies.'l Royal officials often portrayed the landed magnates-the Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Philipses, Beekmans, Schuylers, and Van Cortlandts, to name a few-as responsible for the many problems that plagued the province. The home-bound reports of colonial bureaucrats give the impression that the landowners served as scapegoats when officials could find no solution to administrative difficulties. Such officials blamed the proprietors for the slow population growth of New York, comparing the colony unfavorably with her neighbors, particularly Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and blamed them too for the agrarian unrest on the great landed estates in the I750S and I760s. Specifically, they charged that immigrants as well as native New Yorkers were deserting the colony for the neighboring provinces due to the lack of free land in New York. Governor Robert Hunter, chagrined at his