Is built on a Dutch foundation."
From the Taghkanic range of the Berkshire hills, behind Hudson City, a pretty stream comes down in many falls and cascades to the river just northward, whose charming valley was known among the Dutch as "Het Klauver Rack," or the "Clover Reach," modernized since, however, into the Claverack Creek. The Columbia Springs are in this valley, and farther on is Kinderhook Village, while back on the hills at a thousand feet elevation above the river, most picturesquely located, are the Lebanon Springs. Here is the noted Shaker settlement of New Lebanon, founded by "Mother Ann" in the eighteenth century. The sect has been declining in recent years, however. This is the governing Shaker community, and it has been well said, of these celibates, that "by frugality and industry they give us many useful things, but they do not produce what the Republic most needs—men and women." They cultivate large tracts of land, produce and sell quantities of herbs, seeds and botanic medicines, and make baskets, brooms and sieves. Ann Lee was the wife of a blacksmith in Manchester, England, and had been the mother of several children. She had what she claimed as Divine revelations, and was confined in a lunatic asylum for reviling matrimony. Being released in 1770, she founded the new sect, announcing, "I am Ann, the Word," and to escape further persecution migrated to New York, where she was made its spiritual head. Converting many, she established at New Lebanon the capital of the Shaker world, which has been called "the rural Vatican which claims a more despotic sway over the mind of man than ever the Roman Pontiff assumed." She claimed her Divine revelation to be that she was the female manifestation of Christ upon earth, the male manifestation having been Jesus, and the Deity being considered a duality, composed of both sexes. The Shakers call themselves the "United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing." They have entire community of property, believe idleness to be sinful, and everyone able to work is employed. In worshipping they "exercise both soul and body," singing and dancing, and at times of fervent excitement making, with regularity and perfect rhythm, rapid bodily evolutions. In these they form in circles around a band of singers, to whose music they "go forth in the dances of them that make merry." Since the death of "Mother Ann" the Shaker community has been ruled by what is known as the "Holy Lead," composed of the first and second elders and elderesses. A peculiar tenet is that persons may join the sect after death, and among these posthumous members are Washington, Lafayette, Pocahontas, Napoleon and Tamerlane; and they hold that woman is supreme over mankind. Near the village and among the Berkshire hills, just over the border in Massachusetts, is their "Mount Sinai," where, according to the tradition, the Shakers hunted Satan throughout a long summer night, finally killing and burying him. They tell us that Washington and Lafayette still keep guard over his grave, mounted on white horses, and can be seen on summer nights by any of the truly faithful who may pass that way.
The village of Kinderhook is in the Claverack Valley, and out in front on the Hudson is its port, Stuyvesant Landing, where the testy old Governor, Peter Stuyvesant the "Headstrong," made his landing when he came up the river to attack the great Patroon, Killian Van Rensselaer. Hendrick Hudson is said to have first named Kinderhook, or "Children's Point," because he saw here a crowd of Indian children watching his vessel. On the Lindenwold estate at Kinderhook, embowered in linden trees, lived for many years President Martin Van Buren, a descendant of the early Dutch settlers, and the shrewdest New York politician of his time. Over on the western bank is the Chaney Tinker Lighthouse, mounted on a crag a hundred feet high, and the distant horizon is bounded by the Helderbergs, a long range of peaks, lower, however, than the Catskills. Above, at Schodack Landing on the eastern shore, was the seat of the council-fire of the Mohicans, called by the French the Loups or Wolves. The word "Is-cho-da" in their language means the "fireplace," and from this has come the name. When Hudson ascended the river, he found the Mohicans occupying its shores for a hundred miles above Rondout Creek, but the race dwindled, until it became the handful to whom the noted Jonathan Edwards ministered in the eighteenth century, at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Hudson passed a day with them at Schodack, was treated hospitably, and wrote that their land was "the finest for cultivation he ever set foot on." Two centuries later, Cooper lamented the Last of the Mohicans.
THE LAND OF THE PATROONS.
We have now come to the high and rocky Bear or Beeren Island, which in New York's early days was the southern boundary on the river of the domain of the great Patroon, Killian Van Rensselaer. It marks the limit of two counties on either bank, Greene and Columbia below, joining Albany and Rensselaer above. Here stood the proud castle of Rensselaerstein, cannoned and fortified, where the Patroon's agent, the bold and doughty Nicolas Kroon, compelled all the Dutch sloops coming up from New Amsterdam to dip their colors in token of his sovereignty, and pay tribute for the privilege of entering the sacred domain. We are told that all passing craft yielded homage excepting two large whales, which in 1647 swam by and went up to the Mohawk, greatly terrifying the honest Albany burghers. Above the island, the Normanskill and other streams come down from the Helderbergs, making the shoals of the "Overslaugh," which the Government has improved by an extensive dyke system to deepen the river channel up to Albany. There are long and narrow alluvial islands on these flats, among which tows of Erie Canal barges thread their careful way; and ahead, the city of Albany comes into view with its bridges in front, and the grand new Capitol building elevated high on the hill above the town, its red-topped pyramidal roofs seen from afar.
We are now at the domain of the great Patroon, the region around Albany and Troy. When Hudson anchored his ship below the shoals, he came with five of his sailors up to Albany in a row-boat and examined the location. The result was that from his report Albany was actually settled, five years later, in 1614, by the "United Nieu Nederlandts Company," who built a trading-post, thus making Albany, after Jamestown in Virginia, the oldest European settlement in the original thirteen colonies. The post was located on an island just below the city, near which the Normanskill flowed out through the forest on the western bank—the Indian Tawasentha, or "place of many dead." This island was called the "Kasteel," and in the "castle" a garrison of about a dozen Dutchmen conducted a profitable fur-trade with the Mohicans. Ultimately a freshet drove them to the mainland and they built a fort at the mouth of the Normanskill, and in 1623 a stockade was constructed above, at Albany, named Fort Orange in honor of the Prince of the Netherlands. In 1629 colonists were sent out from Holland, and the patroon system established. The Dutch West India Company made arrangements for extensively colonizing the New Netherlands, and passed a charter of exemptions and privileges to encourage patroons (or patrons) to make settlements. Every patroon establishing a colony was to have there within four years, as permanent residents, at least fifty persons, over fifteen years of age, of whom one-fourth were to arrive the first year. A director of the company, Killian Van Rensselaer, a pearl merchant of Amsterdam, was granted a patroonship, and got the officials at Fort Orange to buy extensive tracts from the Indians. He thus, with three others, acquired a manor extending twenty-four miles along the Hudson, from Beeren Island up to the Mohawk River, and this manor, which afterwards became the sole property of his family, was subsequently enlarged to extend twenty-four miles back from the Hudson in both directions, and contained over seven hundred thousand acres. The Patroon was a feudal lord, possessing absolute title to the soil, with power to administer civil and criminal justice, and enjoying other rights that reduced his colonists to a condition little better than serfs. His son Johannes inherited this patroonship from Killian, and it went by entail through five generations, when the United States laws barred further succession. The last Patroon, General Stephen Van Rensselaer, died in 1839, and his son Stephen, the sixth of the line, still styled by courtesy "the Patroon," died in 1868, aged eighty years. The original settlement of Fort Orange in the manor of Rensselaerwyck, as it was called, became a centre of the fur-trade, and a town quickly grew around the fort, which the English, upon their occupation in 1664, named Albany.
THE ANTI-RENT WAR.
As population increased on the adjacent lands, they began taking leases from the Patroon, paying rent for their farms, and this produced one of the bitterest conflicts known in American politics, the New York "Anti-Rent War." After the Revolution the inhabitants increased rapidly, and General Stephen Van Rensselaer, then the Patroon, leased farms in perpetuity, upon the nominal consideration for eight years of "a peppercorn a year," and at the expiration of this time these leases drew a rent estimated at six per cent. interest on the land value, about $5 per acre, payable in the produce of the soil, fowls, and days' service with wagons and horses, the latter designed to secure road-making. When the old General died in 1839, the entail being abolished, he divided the manor between his two sons, Stephen getting Albany County on the west bank, and William, Rensselaer County on the east bank, including Troy. He had been a lenient landlord, but the tenants became anxious, especially about what was known as the "quarter sales clause" in their leases, giving the landlord the right to claim one-fourth the purchase money whenever the land passed by purchase, this condition being really inserted to prevent alienation, as it did not become operative when the land was sold or descended to one of the original tenant's family. The tenants proposed that the landlord should sell the reservations, releasing them from the rentals and making them owners in fee, but this was declined. The tenants then employed counsel, who advised that the landlord's right was absolute, but suggested, while there was no legal remedy, that it would be good policy to make the rent collections so difficult, the landlord would be willing to come to terms; that they band together and give each other notice of the approach of bailiffs, so the service of legal process would be troublesome. William H. Seward, Governor of New York, espoused their cause, and to this advice, he being a candidate for re-election in 1840, he added the recommendation that the "anti-renters" should organize and send to the Legislature men who would hold the balance of power between the great parties, thus forcing the passage of laws relieving them.
Then began the "anti-rent" conflicts convulsing New York politics for years. They formed an active and powerful political party, and created other organizations, disguised as Indians, who attacked the law officers. These supposed red men killed a man at Grafton in Rensselaer County, and all legal efforts failed to discover the culprits. Other similar manors existed in different parts of New York State where payment of rents of much the same character was resisted, and these regions also were excited. Outbreaks continued several years, until in 1845 Governor Silas Wright issued a proclamation declaring Delaware County, on the western verge of the Catskills, in a state of insurrection. This caused additional trouble, but the "anti-renters" disposed of Wright by defeating him for re-election in 1846, and he died soon afterwards. They elected their own candidate for Governor, John Young, who pardoned out of jail nearly everybody imprisoned for "anti-rent" crimes. The disputes finally got into the courts, and the Van Rensselaers, fatigued with the controversy, sold all their rights to a Colonel Church. He was sustained by legal decisions, and then adopted a compromising policy, which quieted the agitation. He released the rentals and gave fee-simple titles, so that at least three-fourths of the old manor became without rental. His method of compromise was based on a scale: for a farm of one hundred and sixty acres where the annual rent was twenty-two and one-half bushels of wheat, four fat fowls and one day's service, the value was fixed at $26, being six per cent. interest on $433, and by paying this the tenant got his fee-simple title. Thus the harassing conflict which frequently required troops to be called out at Albany and elsewhere was finally adjusted.
THE CITY OF ALBANY.