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Reviews of Books
The Revolution and the Common Man's Land
Wayne E. Lee, University of Louisville
| Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution. By Thomas J. Humphrey. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. 191 pages. $37.00 (cloth).Fries's Rebellion: The Enduring Struggle for the American Revolution. By Paul Douglas Newman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 259 pages. $29.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).
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Similar to other studies, including Leonard L. Richards's book on Shays's Rebellion, these two works seek to uncover the meaning and influence of the American Revolution on the political culture of common farmers, whose voices became most audible when raised in violent (or not so violent) protest.1 Each of these books also seeks to do more than that, yet the question of politicization and radicalization remains at the heart of both volumes. Land and Liberty and Fries's Rebellion are also studies of violence, and they add to scholars' understanding by drawing on crowd ritual and crowd violence to help place these two sets of events in context. |
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Thomas J. Humphrey turns to the much-studied discontented tenants on the great manors of the Hudson River valley, and wisely seeks to transcend the old chronological milestone of the Revolution. Wanting to document the continuity of tenants' resistance to "landlordism" (110) from the 1750s into the 1790s and beyond, Humphrey can lean on the work of others, combined with his own extensive archival research on the tenants, to show "how the rioters shaped the Revolution and how the Revolution, in turn, influenced the rioters" (5). Humphrey begins by describing the nature of the manorial system, which he sees as a fundamentally exploitative relationship in which the tenants' labor and produce were expropriated by the landlords, primarily for resale into the Atlantic economy. Though he acknowledges a certain flexibility on the part of the landlords in the collection of rents, Humphrey nevertheless interprets the leases themselves, the landlords' manipulation of the medium of payment (cash versus wheat), and their further ability to manipulate tenants' votes, as creating a deep resentment against the manorial system. That resentment led to violence beginning in the late 1750s, continuing virtually without pause well into the nineteenth century. Humphrey then divides the valley into southern and northern halves, since the history of resistance in those two regions differed in some respects, and narrates the nature and sources of resistance in each for the years prior to the Revolution. |
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These stories are complicated. Humphrey roots the conflict in competing visions of ownership. Landlords wanted to preserve and extend a manorial system of tenure and Indians sought to preserve ancestral claims, whereas white settlers dreamed of a freehold, basing their claim, says Humphrey, on a belief that occupancy and labor should confer ownership. Tenants and Stockbridge and Wappinger Indians began in the north and south by petitioning for relief, then by bringing cases to court, and finally by violently resisting the landlords and their agents. Humphrey neatly connects this process of escalation, and the nature of the violence itself, to European traditions of protest. He is even able to show some fairly direct links between individuals in New York who may have witnessed or participated in land riots in Ireland. In the end the rioters in both areas were suppressed with the help of the British army—a solution that could only be temporary. |
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