Guns at the polls

Rothbard’s account

From Conceived in Liberty, chapter 77, pp. 1543–1546 (2011 edition). Every sentence here comes from Rothbard’s text; the words in quotation marks are his.

Rothbard writes that New York’s land system “was uniquely shot through with feudalistic land monopoly,” with restive tenants on huge manorial estates (p. 1543). Confiscating the large Tory estates was therefore, he argues, “particularly significant in the much-needed democratizing of land ownership in New York” (p. 1543).

Under the sequestration begun in 1777 the state held Tory lands in trust as landlord, and the tenants “soon found to their dismay that government feudal landlords were just as oppressive as private landlords” (p. 1544). Their ferment “quickly took the form of pressing for outright confiscation and sale of the Tory estates,” most of all in south Dutchess County, the frontier nearest British control and full of rebel refugees, where the landlords were mainly Tory and the tenants had “a strong economic incentive to become ardent Whigs” (p. 1544).

“The great confiscation laws of 1779–80, in fact, were driven through solely by mass pressure from below, pressure against both Clinton and the ultraright,” Rothbard writes (p. 1544). A confiscation bill passed in February 1779 was vetoed by the council of revision “as unjust and an attainder,” and the veto, he writes, “precipitated a great crisis in New York politics” (p. 1544). “Radical victories swept the spring elections in 1779, elections which took place, in Orange and Ulster Counties, with proradical militia batteries ominously maneuvering near the polling booths” (p. 1544). In the fall session of the 1779 Assembly two-thirds of the delegates were “new—and radical,” and it was this session, he writes, “that drove through the radical legislation of New York during the Revolution” (p. 1544). On October 22 the legislature attainted fifty-nine Tories for treason and confiscated their estates.

Under “a drumfire of pressure” from the radicals and over the Senate’s resistance, the sale of the confiscated lands became law on March 11, 1780 (p. 1545). The bulk of the sales, Rothbard reports from recent research, went to tenants rather than speculators, a “happy result” he credits largely to the sale law’s 500-acre limit and especially its first option for existing tenants (p. 1546).