THE SECRET WHITE ‘SLAVE’ REVOLT THAT SPARKED THE REAL AMERICAN REVOLUTION: PART 1 OF 2
The War for Independence from Great Britain was won with the Peace of Paris in 1783 but the American Revolution is an ongoing, perpetual struggle for social justice that will last as long as the Republic survives. That fight started in 1766, when farmers and native American allies rebelled against slave-like conditions on massive manors owned by a wealthy, privileged few in the Hudson Valley and laid siege to New York City to free captured comrades.
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American militia in action during the War for Independence, under the command of mortally wounded Gen. Nicholas Herkimer, stopping British forces’ advance in the Mohawk Valley, Battle of Oriskany, Aug. 6, 1777. Painting by Frederick Coffay Yohn, 1901 via Uitica Public Library.
The “shot heard round the world” that ignited the American War for Independence from Great Britain was fired in the town of Concord, Massachusetts in 1775. Every American school kid knows that, or should, thanks to Ralph Waldo Emerson. What most Americans don't know, because they don't teach it in school, is that the War for Independence was separate from, and only part of, a greater American Revolution. That greater American Revolution never ended. It persists to this day.
Its first shot wasn't fired in 1775, in Massachusetts, either. It was fired 9 years before in New York.
Destruction of the Turtle Kingdom
The glaciers of the last Ice Age were retreating and Mastodons still stalked the earth when a group of people scientists call the Algonquin first inhabited the Hudson River valley in New York. That was 10,000 or so years ago. The Algonquin called the Hudson River Mahicannituck—the water-that-flows-both-ways. That's because the Hudson, south of Albany, is a tidal estuary.
Algonquin settled the valley in small tribes, usually numbering between 10 and 100. Their total population from Delaware Bay in present-day Maryland to the Hudson was probably around 10,000 in 1600, scientists estimate. These native Americans called their association of tribes the Lenape or Lenni-Lenape, “the real or original people.” Their tribal sign is the turtle.
The sign of the native America Lenni-Lenape people is the turtle. Photo credit: screenshot.
It was the Lenape who allegedly “sold” Manhattan to Dutch colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant in 1626. Historical research by legal scholars suggests the Lenape understood the agreement to be more like a lease or a license to use the land, not the kind of total, forever “sale” comprehended by the Dutch.
The Lenape lived on land they cleared of forest along creeks and rivers, usually on terraces above the floodplain. They built shelters called “wigwams.” Wigwams were round, square, oval or rectangular. They were made of bent tree branches covered with bark or animal skin. A hole in the roof vented smoke from fire pits dug into the ground.
They hunted bear, elk, deer, rabbit, squirrel, turkey, river otter, raccoon, woodchuck and waterfowl. They fished and caught sturgeon, striped bass, shad and herring. They grew corn, beans and squash. They gathered hickory, nuts, butternuts, walnuts, acorns, chestnuts and various berries. They tapped maple trees for syrup and sugar. Their bounty was smoked or dried and stored in deep pits lined with grass or bark.
“When night had come and the roasted meats and the loaves of maize bread had been eaten, the Indians sat outside their houses and watched the stars as their fathers before them had done-until the pinpoints of light in the deep blue arc above them could make no movement they did not anticipate,” Carl Carmer described in his definitive 1939 history of the land and its people, The Hudson.
“They measured the time of their plantings by the alteration of the constellations, their harvestings by the autumn moons.”
One day the Lenape saw what must have been to them a strange, perhaps dangerous sight swimming up the river. It was a sail ship named Half Moon. Unknowable to the Lenape at the time, Half Moon heralded the end of their world. The 80-ton Dutch yacht was captained by an Englishman, Henry Hudson, and manned with a joint British and Dutch crew. It sailed up the Hudson as far as it could near present-day Albany in 1609.
Captain Hudson called the waterway, “River of the Mountains.”
“The Land grew very high and Mountainous,” Half Moon officer Robert Juet wrote in his journal about the ship’s passage upriver through the rugged, imposing Hudson River Highlands. “The river is full of fish.”
Tom Austin, 2009. Photo credit: courtesy of the artist.
The Dutch soon returned and settled colonists at Albany and where the Hudson meets the Atlantic Ocean at Manhattan Island.
Dutch colonists waged several “wars” against the Lenape that were thinly disguised land grabs. The Wappinger War or Kieft's War, the Peach Tree War, the two Esopus Wars, in 1659 and 1663, murdered hundreds if not thousands of Lenape and exiled thousands more by requiring they vacate land in exchange for largely token payments and what the Dutch called “peace.” A 100 years of smallpox, measles, diphtheria, and scarlet fever, for which the Lenape had no immunity, did the rest. Survivors fled and were absorbed or annihilated by other native American tribes.
For example, the Peace Tree War started when a young native named Tachiniki was murdered by a Dutch migrant-turned-farmer named Fiscal van Dyk. He killed her because she allegedly "stole" a peach from an orchard belonging to Dutch West India Company accountant Cornelis van Tienhoven, according to Documents Relating to the Colonial History of New York. Native American tribes retaliated for Tachiniki's murder by attacking Dutch colonists, their farms, their outposts and driving them out of Staten Island and land west of the Hudson.
Yet, in the end, the Dutch gained more territory by buying and stealing it all back and then some.
A young native American named Tachiniki was murdered for allegedly "stealing" a peach from an orchard belonging to Dutch West India Company accountant Cornelis van Tienhoven. Mural in Jersey City, New Jersey memorizing it by Distoart. Photo credit: Distoart via Instagram.
Slavery by Any Other Name
To facilitate Dutch settlement of their conquered land, the Dutch Government-chartered West India Company granted select individuals legal jurisdiction over blocks of land-provided they obtain legal title from “the Indians of that place for the land” by purchase or trade. However, as detailed above, the Dutch used war to force native Americans to forever sign away their legal rights to land most thought they were only renting or leasing.
Additionally, Dutch land "lords" perpetrated fraud of all kinds on a massive scale, according to Irving Mark's Agrarian Revolt in Colonial New York, 1766. "Huge grants were inspired by bribes, family connections and fee hunger." Boundaries were also vaguely defined, which facilitated "stretching" of land grants beyond their lawful bounds. For example, the Philipse family was granted land in the Hudson Highlands adjacent to the Hudson River. It also acquired title to Wappinger tribe land that gave him 15,000 acres bounded to the east by "a marked tree."
"By omitting the reference to the marked tree in his own patent, properly the eastern terminus, Philipse carried his boundary to the Connecticut River and included 190,000 acres which really belonged to the Indians," Mark reports.
Dutch claims to native American lands were rarely challenged in colonial courts. When they were, they were swatted aside by land-owning judges who had an interest in solidifying or expanding their own land holdings.
The Dutch fiefs came with an aristocratic title: Patroon. Once granted, a Patroon “shall forever own and possess” the land “and hold it as a perpetual fief of inheritance.” The Patroons subdivided their “Patroonships” and sub-leased land to subsistence farmers recently migrated from Europe.
The leases generally required farmers surrender a percentage of their crops and livestock every year. They also required the farmers perform a specified period of labor every year for the Patroon as ordered by him or his hired henchmen. Like French medieval peasants, they had to build roads, fell trees and perform other labor-intensive tasks for Patroons. Farmers could not will their land as they wished without the approval of the Patroon. Patroons had the legal right to approve or refuse farmers' bequests of land, absolutely, on whatever conditions the Patroons imposed.
Patroons rarely approved. When they did, they typically demanded a large percentage of its total value or a year’s rent. Sometimes they likely demanded even more. One readily imagines the sexual demands especially evil Patroons and their henchmen might demand-although the historical record is barren of such abuses, as of course it would be since the Patroons themselves controlled what was put into that record.
Tenants who resisted the Patroon, his rules, rents or other demands, legal or not, were subject to summary corporal punishment and imprisonment by private “Patroon courts.” One such Patroon Court is skeptically described by Captain Franklin Ellis in his 1878 History of Columbia County, New York: “Killian Van Rensselaer held a patroon's court in his manor of Rensselaerswyck, where he dispensed justice (?) after the manner of feudal times.”
Van Rensselaer “made his tribunal a court of last resort, by rendering nugatory all rights of appeal therefrom by a pledge exacted from his tenants in advance to forego their privileges in that respect, as a condition precedent to occupancy of his estates,” Ellis reports.
The farmers had zero political power to change anything because, without owning land, the law deprived them of the right to vote or serve on juries.
Scholars have used many pejoratives to describe the Patroon system. To me, it sounds like slavery, so that's what I call it.
Before the Patroon system was finally dismantled by a special amendment to the New York State constitution in 1846, a few intermarried families controlled nearly two million acres of land and the lives of roughly 300,000 people in the Hudson River Valley. One family alone, the Van Rensselaers, sucked an estimated $41 million dollars out of farmers over the decades.
That's all according to Henry Christman’s definitive history of the two century-long fight against the Patroons, Tin Horns and Calico, 1945.
The Dutch killed and cleared the last of the Lenape from their land in the second Esopus War that ended in 1663. Their conquest was short-lived. A five-boat British war fleet sailed into New York harbor a year later, in 1664. That was the end of the Dutch in the New World. The small British force seized control. New Amsterdam was now New York. Little changed in the Hudson Valley. The Patroons kept their property. The farmers who worked Patroon lands remained slaves.
It took a 100 years, but they eventually rebelled in 1766-a decade before the War for Independence started in 1775.
Rise of the Levellers
William Prendergast and his family lived and farmed 200 rented acres in Putnam County, New York. Prendergast's modest farm was along the East Branch Croton River between the town of Pawling and Quaker Hill near the present-day Connecticut border. When he first took residence there, Prendergast rented the land from a native American tribe, the Wappingers, according to the Historical Society of the New York State Courts.
That changed when a Patroon named Adolphus Philipse went to court in 1765 and won the legal right to enforce his fraudulently obtained legal title to the area-and added it to his growing plantation which he named Philipsburg Manor.
The Patroon owned not just Prendergast's farm but tens of thousands of other fertile Hudson Valley acres. He lived large off the backs of his slaves and kept a huge mansion overlooking the Hudson River in Yonkers. Even if Pendergast could save enough money to buy his farm from the Patroon, Philipse would never sell it. The law gave him right to it almost forever. Only the King of England could take it.
"The law covered the landlord, though not the tenant," is how Mark describes it. The law "encouraged the maintenance of a landed aristocracy. This aristocracy jealously guarded its privileged status."
Patroon Philipse demanded Prendergast pay four British pounds and 12 shillings in rent every year, according to Carmer's Hudson. It was 12 shillings more than the four pounds he, Philipse himself, paid to the King of England for not just Prendergast's farm, but all of his vast landholdings in the Hudson Valley. Everything else the greedy Philipse got from his other slave farmers was profit.
Prendergast asked for more time to come up with the cash. Philips threatened to throw him in jail and his family off the farm.
Prendergast and the farmers allied themselves with the Wappingers and their powerful leader, sachem Daniel Ninham.
Ninham was a shrewd political leader and a soldier. He served the British during the French and Indian War and learned not just the English language but British customs. When he returned to his tribe's native land along the Hudson after the war, he discovered Patroon Philips had taken control of his tribe's land and rented it out to migrant farmers from Europe. Ninham sued to enforce his tribe's rights to the land. No lawyer would take the case and the Crown jailed his legal advisor.
Ninham lost in the colonial court in New York City because it was stacked with land lords like Philips, but he successfully appealed.
Ninham and three Mohican chiefs actually traveled to London, England to personally argue the Wappinger cause before the Lords of Trade, Aug. 30, 1766. The trip was funded by farmers like Prendergast . The Lords of Trade reversed and remanded the case back to the colonial chancery court in New York for reconsideration. That court reaffirmed its previous decision. Ruling for the Wappingers, it said, would set a dangerous precedent that threatened Crown rule in all of its colonies.
Daniel Nimham by Michael Keropian, 2021, Town of Fishkill. Photo Credit: By Gregorytotino via Wikipedia.
One right the farmers maintained under the Patroon system made them distinct from slaves: the right to keep and bear arms.
The Hudson Valley farmers formed a militia in November 1765. Its leaders were "William Prendergast, Samuel and Daniel Munroe, Joseph Crow, Stephen Wilcox, Elisha Cole, Isaac Perry, Silas Washburne, and Jacobus Gonsales." They pledged to "stand by each other with Lives & fortunes." They promised not to pay a penny in rent to the Patroons, banned arrest and property confiscation warrants, promised to reinstate farmers thrown off their farms pursuant to bogus Patroon court judgments and promised to break out of jail any farmer arrested for refusal to pay rents or for any activity in furtherance of their movement, according to Mark.
The militia numbered about 1,700 tenant farmers, armed with firearms. Captain Prendergast recruited, trained and commanded it.
"Poor men were always oppressed by the Rich," Captain Prendergast famously declared.
Their rights, he explained, "could not be defended in a Court of Law because they were poore therefore they were determined to do them[selves] Justice."
Farmers on both east and west banks of the Hudson River, from New York City to Albany, joined farmers as far away as Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They seized 1000s of acres of Patroon lands starting in March 1766. Though they shared this task and purpose, their organization was loose and decentralized. What kept the coalition together was their shared mission to dethrone the Patroons.
Colonial Attorney General John Tabor Kempe issued arrest warrants and the Westchester County sheriff collared three of the rebellious farmers. The sheriff handed the prisoners over to the British, who imprisoned them in Fort George-at the southern tip of Manhattan island.
The stage is set for the siege of New York City.
TO BE CONTINUED …
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