Impact of Class Relations and Warfare in the American Revolution: The New York Experience

Abstract

Class conflict between landlords and tenants on the great Hudson River estates has been the central theme in the historiography of the American Revolution in New York since the publication in 1909 of Carl Becker's classic study of the province. It has been argued that the lease system as practiced by landlords like the Livingstons, Beekmans, Van Rensselaers, Philipses, and Van Cortlandts in the mid-eighteenth century was onerous, oppressive, and exploitative, with the result that the tenants became impoverished, resentful, and radicalized socially and economically, and that their radicalism, first manifested in the widespread antirent agitation in the 1750s and 1766, was carried on into the revolutionary period, affecting both the course and outcome of the Revolution. The stubborn pursuit of socioeconomic justice by the tenants not only made their Whig landlords reluctant revolutionaries but also accounted for several democratic achievements, such as the confiscation and distribution of the huge Loyalist estates and the establishment of the secret ballot as a mode of voting in elections. In the evolution of the historical drama, the tenants were never passive agents. Although they were not the precipitants of the Revolution at its beginning as the urban radicals in New York City were-so the argument goes-they nevertheless consciously used the Revolution as a vehicle for obtaining socioeconomic justice, a freehold estate, at the expense of their landlord's land title. In sum, because of the radical behavior of the tenant class, historians have maintained that the Revolution in New York was a struggle for 'who should rule at as well as for home rule. '