Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-03, Section: A, page: 1091.

Director: David Montgomery.

This is a case study in democratic politics and in the struggle to create a society defined by "free labor" in the northern United States before the Civil War. It examines the Anti-Rent Wars, a tenant farmers' movement that destroyed the leasehold system in New York state--a system of farm tenancy under which some 260,000 people labored. The largest farmers' movement in American history before the 1870s, the Anti-Rent Wars helped shape the fierce contest in the North over the precise meaning of "democracy" and "free labor."

The Anti-Rent Wars provide a unique window into the cultural and political process by which northern farmers came to terms with the emergence of an industrial capitalist order. Members of independent, patriarchal, productive households with increasing ties to the broader capitalist economy, anti-renters remained ambivalent and divided over the rules that governed that economy. They embraced a producerist social vision, but fought bitterly over whether that vision would be best realized in a society marked by private property, economic competition, and social mobility, or by making land available to all as a natural right.

This conflict was resolved in politics. In the process, it revealed the contentious, dialectical relationship between party and popular politics during the late Jacksonian era. The anti-renters won allies among Whig and Democratic activists, but clashed repeatedly with them over the nature of democracy, the legitimate boundaries of political action, and the proper meaning of "free labor." Party activists worked to reshape tenants' social vision, limit their eclectic style of politics, and wean them of their commitment to absolute popular sovereignty. Anti-renters resisted these efforts, but lost.

In losing, however, the anti-renters helped transform politics and society in New York. Manor farmers made their peace with the capitalist order, embracing a double-edged identity as producer-entrepreneurs. In the process, they destroyed the manorial system, helped transform the political order, and aided in forging a new, producerist vision of capitalist development. Like the conflict over slavery, the Anti-Rent Wars created deep schisms in both parties and helped destroy the second party system in New York. They also helped bring new ideological and policy commitments into Empire State politics: an ideology of free labor, a commitment to a homestead act, and a taste for using the power of the state to transform social relations. During the 1850s, anti-rent leaders and voters helped form the Republican party, and, with other constituencies, made these commitments articles of faith in that party.