Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

sets of troops remained to take opposite sides in the boundary dispute. Van
Rensselaer tenants, led by Hallenbeck and Robert Noble, formed an alliance
with Massachusetts militia in Albany County to battle New York troops, and
warfare raged throughout the area until 1757, with numerous armed raids and
daring captures on either side. The armed conflict reached peaks in early 1755
and in 1757, pitting Massachusetts troops and armed tenant rebels against the
private armies of Livingston and Van Rensselaer. Only a boundary proclamation
by the Crown in 1757 effectively ended the Massachusetts claims to the
tenants.
New York's other great land dispute was with New Hampshire, over its
western territory (now Vermont). New York had begun the arbitrary parceling
out of New Hampshire lands in 1696, with an eighty-four-square-mile
grant to the Reverend Godfridus Dellius. But it was in the late 1760s that the
carving up of Vermont land was pursued in earnest, in a wild race with the
New Hampshire government. From 1765 to 1776, New York governors
handed out claims to over 2.1 million acres of Vermont land, and over 2.4
million additional acres were military grants purchased by the New York
grantees. Of the grantees, eight New York lawyers, merchants, and land speculators
were given over 375,000 acres. Leading recipients of New York's largesse
were James Duane and Goldsbrow Banyar.
One of the most unfortunate groups of sufferers from New York's policy
of land monopoly was a band of German refugees from the Palatinate who
were known as the Palatines. England had prided itself on admitting all Protestant
refugees from Europe, and the French Huguenots, mainly businessmen
and financiers, were a welcome dividend from this policy. But in 1709, a
group of several thousand Protestant Palatinate refugees fled to London from
the devastation of their homes and lands that was ravaging Germany during
the War of the Spanish Succession. Now that the Palatines were there, what
could be done with these poor and homeless peasants? With England's own
land engrossed by feudal lords, there seemed to be no room for the Palatines
there. The British government decided to combine "humanitarianism" with
profit by shipping the Palatines as indentured servants to New York, a colony
with a severe shortage of labor and an abundance of land. The catch, of
course, was that the land was also being engrossed there, and that the shortage
of immigrants to the colony was largely because of that preemption of
land.
Indeed, Britain decided to kill several birds with one stone; New York was
eager to develop a staple product other than furs, and the Crown was also
interested in increasing production of naval stores such as tar and pitch for
the Royal Navy. What better way than to force the Palatines to produce such
naval stores ?
And so the hapless Palatines, who wanted nothing but to farm land of
their own, were shipped to New York and coerced into working for the
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