Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Van Cortlandt manor very gradually disintegrated into legitimate settler-ownership.
But this was to take time; in the meanwhile, in 1769, five-sixths of
the inhabitants of Westchester were the subjects of six manorial lords, with
one-third of them on Van Cortlandt and Philipse manors. Other leading manorial
lords of the province were the Schuylers—whose leases were long, covering
three lives, and who were willing to sell land in fee simple—the Duanes,
the Beekmans, and the Heathcotes.
With the renewal of arbitrary land grants in the eighteenth century, domination
of the entire governing machinery of New York by the landed oligarchs
was far stronger than in the previous century. The leading lawyers of
the colony—and hence the main politicians—were connected by intimate
family ties with the great manorial lords. Of the thirty-three lawyers licensed
to practice in New York from 1730 to 1776, the remarkable number of thirty
were connected with the great landlord families and two of the remaining
three were smaller landlords. This also meant that almost all the judges and
attorneys general of the colony were closely tied to the big landlords, and
such landlord-connected judges as Robert R. Livingston and William Smith
never hesitated to decide cases in which they or their relations were involved.
Of the eight governors of New York from 1750 to 1776, six were large landlords.
As we might expect, the Council, the upper house of the New York legislature,
was an ironclad stronghold of the big landlords. Of twenty-eight councillors
from 1750 to 1776, fully twenty-five were connected with large landlord
families. On the other hand, domination of the Assembly, the lower
house, was less overwhelming; of seventy assemblymen during this period,
fifty-two came from the great landed families. One-third of the representatives
outside New York City came from pocket boroughs—from the manors
—and a forty-pound-sterling property qualification for voting added to the
factors making for landlord domination. Of a total of 137 executive, legislative,
and judicial officers of New York from 1750 to 1776, eighty percent, or
110, were connected to large landed families, while five percent, or six, were
small landholders.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, rising resentment against the
manorial lords set off tenant uprisings against their masters. In 1750, a tenant-settler
revolt occurred in Dutchess County, and in the 1760s, similar
revolts occurred in the manors of Albany and Westchester. Discontent centered
in the largest manors of the big four landlords, and the movement of
the New York "peasantry" was to culminate in the general Hudson River
Uprising, or "Levellers' Uprising," of 1766.
Apart from such eruptions from below, politics in New York reflected the
aristocratic feudalism of the social structure. Parties vying for control were
largely personal factions within the landed oligarchy. Sharing a common ideology
and a common devotion to the basic social structure, political struggles
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