| Book Review | Law and History Review, 22.1

Book Review

Charles W. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839–1865, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xvii + 408. $45 (ISBN: 0–8078–2590–5).

Antebellum Americans believed that the abolition of feudal tenures fundamentally distinguished their democratic, freeholding republic from corrupt Old World regimes. But in New York State, eighteenth-century laws ending feudal tenures ended neither landed families' monopoly on prime agricultural land nor their claims to ground rent from tenants who held leases for ninety-nine years, three lives, or in perpetuity (in fee). In the era of Jacksonian democracy, a small war raged in the Hudson Valley as leaseholders used legal, extra-legal, and political means to challenge rentiers' right to collect rent or fines for the sale of leases—a feature of manorial tenures so feudal that Parliament had, in fact, ended it in the thirteenth century. Charles McCurdy has written a meticulously researched, exemplary study of the Anti-rent wars, explaining when, how, why, and with what consequence landlords and leaseholders appealed their respective causes of property rights or republican land reform to sheriffs, to a wider newspaper-reading public, to party leaders, to lawmakers, and to judges.

In 1839, modestly prosperous leaseholding farmers, indistinguishable from their freeholding neighbors, organized themselves into a movement by refusing to pay rents, arrears, or fines demanded by rentiers after a long period of irregular collection. When landlords called in sheriffs to evict tenants or seize their property (an action known as distress), the leaseholders disguised themselves as Indians and fought back. By 1840, with thousands of tenants drawn into rent protests, both Whig and Democratic party leaders saw an opportunity to win votes by championing anti-renters' fight against monopolists. Whigs proposed using eminent domain to buy the rentiers out and convert long-term leases into fee simple estates. But defining the public good as land reform ran afoul of New York judges' moves in the early 1840s to end the use of eminent domain to promote private enterprise. Democrats' first efforts to capture the mantle of land reform crashed when militant tenant resistance resulted in the murder of a sheriff in 1844.

In order to capture anti-rent votes without offending propertied constituents, party strategists and state legislators sought state actions that would not violate vested property rights or the status of long-term leases as contracts. Thus the legislature imposed a tax on ground rents and modified landlords' remedies by abolishing distress. Since inheritance law was always a matter of policy rather than vested rights, lawmakers devised a plan to allow tenants to buy out their leases whenever a landlord died. But the 1846 Constitution, which reiterated the ban on future feudal tenures, abolished the courts of chancery that would have overseen the commutation, thereby eliminating one remedy that McCurdy suggests might have resolved the controversy. Where legislation failed, litigation took over, especially after lawmakers threw the fight into the courts by directing the attorney general to challenge suspect rentier land titles, even though state laws had long aimed to quiet title disputes arising from fraudulent colonial grants.

New York's courts were no less political than its legislature. But judges—even those elected as Anti-rent candidates—were as much constrained by precedent, constitutional doctrine, and conventions of legal reasoning as they were open to the new readings of old laws offered by lawyers for both sides. The Court of Appeals accepted the anti-rent argument that New York colony had been subject to an English statute, passed in 1290, which banned subfeudalization and prevented landlords from fining tenants for selling leases; but judges discounted the reach of that same English law when it came to evaluating rentiers' land titles. Wrestle as they might with the exact nature of a contract that granted land in fee but reserved "fee services" and the right of reentry to the grantor, in the end judges accepted its essential inviolability.

McCurdy's narrative is not for the faint of heart as he marches through the thicket of Jacksonian legal reasoning and party factionalism. But he quite brilliantly shows the intersecting constraints that law and politics placed on one another, even as both operated on a playing field constantly reconfigured by unanticipated grassroots actions, judicial rulings, factional quarrels, and national politics. McCurdy takes the concept of a nineteenth-century American government of "courts and parties" down from the shelf of theory and exposes the strategic calculations that animated both institutions. Still, for all his attention to the unevenness and contingencies of the democratic process, McCurdy also takes the measure of ideological power in the outcome of the rent wars. Monopolistic landlords were easily demonized in Jacksonian America, but landlords belonged to the same class as other property holders; if the republic was democratic, it was also bourgeois. Antebellum judges, who might be prepared to construe common law instrumentally to promote the "sound republican policy" of freely circulating land, could not reason their way around that status of leases as contracts, however anomalous their terms. When, in 1865, the state used military power to uphold landlords' right of reentry against the last resisting tenants, it was merely exposing the foundations of the enforceable claims of republican property rights.

McCurdy also holds the democratic claims of tenants to a clarifying light. Extra-legal actions could arouse public opinion and exert political pressure, but to secure victory, those protests had to fit themselves to a political process that was factionalized, opportunistic, and ultimately remote from tenants' own struggles. The wonder of it is that the tenants persisted as long and as effectively as they did, especially given that more fertile lands beckoned from the West, where extralegal appropriations of public land—squatting—had been legalized precisely because opposing interests were not entrenched in courts, parties, or social networks.

McCurdy narrates the struggle to end manorial tenures as a story of Dickensian proportions. Even today Hudson Valley landowners find covenants in their deeds requiring them to pay ground rents to the descendants of the original rentiers.

Elizabeth Blackmar

Columbia University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.