The Anti-Rent War, Calico Indians and the End of Feudal New York

When Stephen Van Rensselaer III died in January of eighteen thirty-nine, he left behind the largest private landholding in the state of New York, more than one million acres in the Hudson Valley and the Helderberg Mountains, and an estate that held the unpaid back-rent of several thousand tenant farmers.

Van Rensselaer had been called the Good Patroon. He had forgiven the back-rent year after year during hard times. When he died, his heirs did not forgive it. They sent out the bills.

The patroon system was a Dutch colonial inheritance. The Van Rensselaers and a handful of other families had received enormous land grants from the Dutch West India Company in the sixteen hundreds, grants that gave them the right to collect perpetual annual rent from anyone who farmed the land. The farmers could never own the land, could never buy it, could only pay rent in perpetuity, in produce and labor and money, to families who had done nothing to earn the land except inherit it.

The tenants organized. They knew that sheriffs would enforce the eviction orders, so they devised a system to intercept them. They dressed as "Indians," with calico dresses over their farm clothes, sheepskin masks over their faces, and tin horns in their hands. The tin horns were the signal system. Lookouts on ridgelines would blow a horn when a sheriff's party approached; the signal relayed across counties. By the time the deputy arrived at a farm, a crowd in calico was waiting to take the legal papers and destroy them.

The movement ran candidates for office, organized a press strategy, and built a political wing. In eighteen forty-six, New York rewrote its state constitution to prohibit perpetual agricultural leases. The feudal land tenure system that had operated in the Hudson Valley for two centuries was abolished. The death toll during the Anti-Rent War is not fully established in the publicly accessible record. Accounts vary. What is settled is what the tenants won.