Land, Law, and History

Reeve Huston. Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ix + 291pp. Figures, maps, appendixes, notes, and index. $35.00.

Charles W. McCurdy. The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839-1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xvii + 408pp. Maps, appendixes, notes, and index. $49.95.

In recent decades, historical consideration of politics has moved away from studying institutions and instead focused on the social and cultural contexts within which new movements emerge. These contemporary studies of "political culture," as it is called, have greatly expanded our knowledge of some aspects of American politics, but consequently our understanding of what an institution actually is and how it relates to the broader society in specific periods of change has become less certain. The two studies under review here, Reeve Huston's Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest and Party Politics in Antebellum New York and Charles McCurdy's The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839-1865, use divergent methodological approaches to examine the same upheaval, the conflict known as the New York Anti-Rent wars. Huston seeks to understand the prolonged unrest by situating it in relationship to changes in the broader society and political culture, while McCurdy examines the institutional origins of the problem and its effect on legal and political processes, focusing on the legal system that maintained the New York manors. A very clear picture of the Anti-Rent wars emerges from reading these fine, scholarly studies, yet at the same time, they illustrate the methodological disjuncture between those who study political culture and those who study institutional structures.

The Anti-Rent wars came at the end of a century of dramatic changes in eastern North America that fundamentally altered traditional patterns of life. The supplanting of a Calvinist religious order with an Arminian one, the shift from a monarchical to a democratic polity, westward expansion of white and enslaved African-American populations at the expense of Native Americans, and explosive economic growth were all intertwined and interlocked in complex ways. But the central questions of who would be free, what would freedom mean, and what would be the relationship of freemen to property remained unanswered 50 years after the Revolution's outbreak. A series of agrarian rebellions between the 1740s and 1840s were in large part a response to this political and legal ambiguity. The Anti-Rent wars that began in 1839 are properly seen as the last of a type of upheaval over property and political rights that began in the 1740s. This final episode of social and political violence helped to break the power of the great landholders who had dominated portions of the New York countryside for two centuries.

By the early nineteenth century, upstate New York was one of the few areas in the country with a workable manorial system and relatively stable tenant populations. These great estates, encompassing tens and even hundreds of thousands of acres, had been established by a series of grants made by first the Dutch and then the English to members of the Anglo-Dutch elite who dominated the colony before 1776. The legal basis of this system was what McCurdy calls "an archaic legal form, unique to the Hudson-Mohawk region . . . lawyers called it a 'lease in fee'" (p. xiii). Populations with their roots in New England, Europe, and downstate New York established communities on the manors based on this legal mechanism.

The manor system had, at least in some areas, survived the Revolution intact because it offered social and economic advantages to landlords and tenants. The patroons received a considerable income, and just as importantly the social respect that they craved as refined gentlemen with landed property. "Landlords expected," Huston notes, "the income, the deference, and the votes they received from their tenants to underwrite a bid for genteel status and public power in the wider world" (p. 19...