The Anti-Rent War, Calico Indians in the Helderbergs

The first mass meeting was held on July Fourth, eighteen thirty-nine, on top of the Helderberg mountains at a town called Berne, southwest of Albany. The date was not accidental. The tenants who gathered there declared, in terms their grandparents would have recognized, that they were taking up the ball of the Revolution where their fathers had stopped it.

What they meant was this: two centuries after the Dutch had first carved out Rensselaerswyck, thousands of farming families still owed perpetual rent to a family they had never met, for land they could never own. The Good Patroon was dead. The new heirs wanted the money.

The farmers said no. The movement grew. By eighteen forty-four, protesters fighting sheriff's deputies in the rural roads were wearing disguises, calico dresses and painted faces, invoking the Boston Tea Party's memory of men dressed as Indians to protest an unjust tax.

They were armed, and they were organized. In December of eighteen thirty-nine, they turned back a posse of five hundred men sent to enforce collection. The violence peaked in August of eighteen forty-five, when an undersheriff named Osman Steele was shot and killed during a forced sale on a farm in Andes, a hamlet in the Catskills south of Albany County.

Two men were convicted and sentenced to death, though the sentences were later commuted. The political pressure worked. The New York Constitution of eighteen forty-six abolished feudal land tenures and prohibited leases longer than twelve years.

Rensselaerswyck began to be sold off. The tenants had won, but it had taken blood, and courts, and a constitutional convention to do it.