Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York

During the early nineteenth-century, two million acres of New York's farmland were controlled by a handful of great families. Along the Hudson Valley and across the Catskills lay the great estates of the Van Rensselaers, the Livingstons, and a dozen lesser landlords. Some two hundred and sixty thousand men, women, and children-a twelfth of the population of New York, the nation's most populous state-worked this land as tenants. Beginning in 1839, these tenants created a movement dedicated t...