Pre-Emptive Rights in the Disposition of a Confiscated Estate, Philipsburgh Manor, New York

Abstract

JN New York during the Revolutionary era the confiscation of loyalist property was conceived as a punitive measure and was implemented as a fiscal device. Yet, on the basis of New York's treatment of tenanted loyalist estates it can also be maintained that confiscation seemed on paper to be the most social revolutionary step taken by the American patriots.' New York's basic confiscation law of 1779 showed a marked solicitude for the patriotic tenants of convicted or attainted Tories, permitting tenants to become owners of their own farms through pre-emption, that is, the first right of purchase at fair market value.2 This measure might be viewed merely as an attempt to win active adherents to the American cause, but the friction between landlords and tenants was so widespread and long-standing that a promise of land ownership to any tenants must be related to prewar conditions as well as to the politics and finances of the Revolution.3 John Watts drew no distinction between Tory and Whig landlords when he commented in I777 on the vassalage of the Hudson River counties and declared that an offer to make freeholders of the tenants of