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12. Leases and the Laboring Classes in Revolutionary America
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12 Leases and the Laboring Classes in Revolutionary America Thomas J. Humphrey In April 1767, William Lowry leased approximately eighty unimproved acres for two lives, his life and that of his wife, Elizabeth, from Robert Livingston, Jr., the proprietor of Livingston Manor. He agreed to deliver annually a rent of twenty-five schepples of wheat, roughly fifteen bushels, and four “fatt hens” to the Livingstons’“Mansion House.” Lowry also arranged to labor one day per year for the manor lord; clear at least two acres every year; build a barn; plant an orchard of one hundred apple trees; fence in the lot; maintain the roads near his leasehold; pay all taxes and assessments; pay six shillings per year to support a Protestant minister; and offer the manor lord the first chance to buy any produce the tenant may want to sell. Although tenants could never sell the land they rented, they could sell the improvements they made to the leasehold. If Lowry decided to sell the improvements, he had to clear the sale with Livingston, who would take as much as one-half the sale price. After paying off any debts to the landlord, the tenant would receive whatever remained.1 William Lowry was hardly unique. Over the course of the Revolutionary period, thousands of people moved into the American countryside without the capital necessary to buy land and became tenants.2 In New York’s northern Hudson Valley, for example, between 1769 and 1785 at least twentyone hundred people signed leases for land on Rensselaerswyck, an estate of one million acres, and more moved onto the estate before the end of the century . One might expect such increases in the Hudson Valley, where tenancy predominated, but tenancy spread into western New York too. William Cooper prospered by making land available on credit. He offered tenants good land and long mortgages. While the land ultimately reverted to the farmers, Cooper had to act as landlord during the mortgage period, regularly pressing farmers to pay off their debts. And tenants moved onto the medium and smaller estates that dotted parts of Delaware, Schoharie, Ulster, Sullivan, and Greene Counties, and the Mohawk and Susquehanna Valleys.3 Nor was the growth of tenancy specific to New York in the Revolutionary era. Tenancy thrived in parts of Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, South Carolina, Virginia , and even Massachusetts.4 The growth of land tenancy was critical to class formation. While few historians would deny that capitalism and industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced deleterious, class exploitative relationships , historians such as Gordon S. Wood have contended that “no classes in this modern sense yet existed” in early America. In so arguing, Wood and like-minded historians have created a kind of declension narrative for colonial America and capitalism in which they describe a glorious preindustrial past followed by the rise of democratic capitalism replete with class struggle, which, circularly, demonstrates both the strength of capitalism and the power of democracy. People only waged class conflict, they continue, because society was democratic enough to allow it and because people believed that they too could strike it rich. The Revolution acted as the tipping point. Samuel P. Huntington, however, reinterpreted for non-industrial societies Karl Marx’s general theme that people in industrial societies divided over their relationship to capital—the goods integral to survival, profit, and the reproduction of surplus. He concluded that in agrarian societies such as early America property not capital served as the means of production. Of course, in early America, property took on two forms. Plantation owners relied on one kind of property, enslaved Africans, to extract agricultural raw materials from the other kind of property, land. Thus, in early America, people were separated according to their relationship to land, slaves, or both.5 In many respects, Huntington was rephrasing what John Locke had written nearly three hundred years before. In his Two Treatises of Government , Locke noted that labor on the land had given some men living in early modern England “a Right to Property.” Some of these men subsequently obtained secure possession of “the Property which Labour and Industry began” through a “Compact and Agreement.” For Locke, that “Compact,” a paper title derived from a political authority, was the ultimate proof of legitimate ownership of property. In England at the time, however, some men owned property while many others did not and those who owned it were trying to legitimate their growing power in England and, specifically, in relationship...