| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thomas J. Humphrey. Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 191. $37.00.
This book provides an outstanding contribution to a robust recent literature on backcountry rebellions that flared periodically from the mid-eighteenth century through the Civil War in the United States. Thomas J. Humphrey examines the particular case of New York's Hudson Valley, a region dominated by massive leasehold estates distinguished by highly exploitative tenancy arrangements, a proprietor class that insisted on the deference of the working poor, and a restive tenantry that resented subjugation and demanded land and independence. In this setting, tenant rioters from 1740 to 1815 transformed calls for title to the land based on occupancy and improvement into a broader demand for land ownership as a right of all citizens of the republic. Humphrey makes it clear that tenants considered freeholds, political democracy, and liberty inseparable.	1
Humphrey maps with astonishing clarity the day-to-day interactions among landlords, tenants, Native Americans, and New Englanders that went into the construction of a distinctive agrarian notion of political economy in colonial and revolutionary New York. Tension between landlords and tenants began with the former's effort to place their estates on a sound commercial footing in the 1740s by tapping international markets readily accessible via the Hudson River. This entailed forcing tenants to pay higher rents, sign formal contracts, and stop using unoccupied lots as commons for grazing and timber. Tenants resisted in a variety of ways, employing classic weapons of the weak while making more formal challenges to landlord titles in the legislature or the courts. Tenants lost their legal battles because proprietors dominated both bodies, a pattern repeated throughout the period.	. . .

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