Run out on a rail

What happened

In 1713 the Palatine refugees, who had already been worked like servants by the Crown and by Robert Livingston, settled on the Schoharie and bought their land from the Mohawks. A governor's patent then handed the same ground to landlords from Albany, who told the Germans to lease it or leave. Governor Hunter backed them and issued a warrant for the arrest of Johann Conrad Weiser, the settlers' leader. The sheriff of Albany County, Adams, rode up to serve it. At Weiser's Dorf the villagers pulled him off his horse, and according to two local histories the women of the village took the lead, carrying him out of the valley on a fence rail. Rothbard calls the Palatines "doughty Germans" who insisted on defending their hard-earned land by force, and says they "gave Sheriff Adams a thorough trouncing" (CiL, p. 541). The victory bought little. Hunter answered by ordering them to submit or be removed and then forbade them to farm the land at all. Weiser slipped away to England to plead for free possession and failed. Half the Palatines moved west along the Mohawk River, and Weiser and his followers went on to Pennsylvania. New York's treatment of them, Rothbard adds, discouraged German immigration into the colony for good.