The Parties and "The People": The New York Anti-Rent Wars and the Contours of Jacksonian Politics

Abstract

In early fall of 1845, Horace Greeley, editor of New-York Tribune, sought to explain causes of an explosive controversy in Empire State politics: Anti-Rent Wars. New York had long been home to dozens of leasehold estates, ranging in size from 3,000 to 750,000 acres. When Greeley wrote, some 260,000 New Yorkers-a twelfth of state's population-lived on farms, town lots, and mill sites rented from landlords in perpetuity or on long-term leases. Six years earlier, tenants on Manor of Rensselaerwyck rose up to destroy these estates and distribute among those who farmed it. By 1845, movement had spread to eleven counties and had won support of between 25,000 and 60,000 estate residents, making Anti-Rent Wars largest farmers' movement in United States before Civil War.1 True to both his hatred of ancient hierarchies and his suspicion of autonomous popular action, Greeley simultaneously endorsed tenants' desire to destroy leasehold system and denounced what he saw as their ideas and violent methods. The deep roots of conflict, he reasoned, lay both in oppressiveness of leasehold system and in poverty and ignorance of tenantry. This latent discontent had been given life by commonplace teachings of day: Much of of our day-our Fourth of July gatherings, Orations, c wherefore, laws which give some men a thousand times as much as they can use and thus deprive millions of any at all, are invalid, being contrary to fundamental principles of our Government.2 Greeley's depiction of these backwoods agrarians was caricatured, but he saw what most contemporaries missed: that even seeming radicals like anti-renters drew their ideas from a shared national culture. Greeley knew that main carriers of that culture were Whig and Democratic parties, and his description can be read as an implicit criticism of Democrats' belligerent egalitarianism. Fourth of July celebrations had been strictly partisan affairs since 1820s; especially in countryside, Democratic Party was main arena for political theorizing that editor blamed for anti-rent agrarianiSM.3 In hands of discontented constituents, partisan messages could be transformed in new and dangerous ways. These transformed party teachings could, in turn, help transform parties themselves, as Greeley's ideological career attests. Within a year of his editorial, Greeley became a champion of a Whig-anti-rent alliance. Swayed by anti-renters' growing influence as well as by his association with Fourierists and National Reformers, he adopted many of agrarian beliefs which he had denounced a year before. Announcing that land can not be property of individuals in same complete and unrestricted sense in which products of human industry are property, he became nation's most prominent advocate of a homestead act.4 Greeley's initial appraisal of anti-rent movement and its subsequent influence upon him fly in face of prevailing interpretations of part played by the People in Jacksonian order. Progressive and neo-progressive historians depict party platforms and ideologies as moreor-less unmediated reflections of aspirations of particular constituencies; in their narratives, hopes and demands of urban wageearners and frontier farmers found expression in program of Democratic Party. …