The Patroon System and the Last Great American Landlord

When the Dutch West India Company wanted to populate New Netherland in the sixteen twenties, they invented an incentive: enormous land grants to wealthy investors willing to bring settlers and run things. They called these investors patroons, and the grants were feudal in everything but name. Kiliaen van Rensselaer, an Amsterdam jewel merchant who never once visited America, received the largest grant of all.

Rensselaerswyck, his estate, stretched across what is now Albany and Rensselaer Counties plus parts of Columbia and Greene Counties, a territory so vast that the city of Albany sat inside it like a small boat in a wide lake. England took over New Netherland in sixteen sixty-four, but the patroonship survived. Generation after generation of Van Rensselaers collected rent from tenant farmers who worked land they could never legally own.

If a tenant sold his farm, the patroon was entitled to a quarter of the sale price. Stephen Van Rensselaer the Third, known as the Good Patroon, ran the estate with a gentler hand than most. He was famously indulgent about uncollected rents.

When he died in January of eighteen thirty-nine, his estate owed staggering debts, and his heirs sent out notices demanding roughly four hundred thousand dollars in back rent. The notices triggered something close to an uprising. Thousands of tenant farmers on the Helderberg highlands refused to pay.

They organized committees, held meetings, and compared themselves, not quietly, to the colonists of seventeen seventy-six. By eighteen forty-four they were putting on Calico Indian disguises and confronting sheriffs' deputies in the roads. It took a constitutional convention and a rewritten state constitution to ultimately dismantle the system.

Albany was the center of a feudal land war fought in calico and courthouses.