The economic crisis of 1837 had filled…

The economic crisis of 1837 had filled the Catskills region and the area around Albany with unemployed, their ranks swollen by the layoffs accompanying the completion of the Erie Canal and a slowdown in railroad construction.

The heirs of Stephen Van Rensselaer, a large landowner in Albany County, insist that back rents of farmers be collected to settle his estate, the national depression notwithstanding.

The farmers of Albany County refuse to pay, and in the summer of 1839, the region's tenants hold a mass meeting filled with the rhetoric of independence and revolution.

In neighboring Rensselaer county, roughly ten thousand farmers, their friends, and sympathizers in organize into Anti-Rent Associations to prevent evictions by the landlords.

They agree on calico ‘Indian’ costumes as a symbol of the Boston Tea Party and common ownership of the soil.

The tin horns they carry represent an ‘Indian’ call to arms.

Handbills appear in dozens of towns, spreading the Anti-Rent movement throughout nine counties of the Hudson Valley: Albany, Rensselaer, Columbia, Green, Ulster, Sullivan, Schoharie, Delaware, and Otsego.

The Hudson Valley's patroonship system dates to the 1600s when the Dutch ruled New York State.

Adopted by the English, and continued by the post-Revolution policies of Alexander Hamilton, this feudal system has by the late 1830s concentrated the ownership of nearly two million acres in the hands of a few intermarried old families.

The Rensselaer family—worth about forty-one million dollars—owns the largest manor, an eighty thousand acre estate, whose tenants pay taxes and rents to the owners.

Farmers do not own the land on which they work and build their homes and farms; instead, they own the title to the lease, and owe the landlords a fixed annual rent.

The tenant farmers are responsible for all taxes on the land, but have no right to the timber, minerals, or waterpower on the property.

Should a tenant choose to sell his title to a lease, the landlord is owed a quarter of the sale price.