In 1839, Stephen van Rensselaer IV assumed the role of a Dutch aristocrat in the place his family had ruled since 1629: upstate New York. Stretching across more than one thousand square miles of what is today New York’s Hudson Valley, his vast estate soon brought him into armed conflict with farmers who had owed his family obligations of perpetual rent for generations. In response to the growing violence, remembered today as the “Anti-Rent Movement,” New York convened a constitutional convention that aimed to abolish perpetual grants. But litigation over these estates lingered well into the 1860s. Much has been said about the Anti-Rent Movement and its origins—from the social unrest it fueled, to the masks and “Indian dress” its participants donned as they confronted local officials, rent collectors, and surveyors. Some have examined the movement’s impacts on the laws of New York, particularly the constitutional revisions it triggered. Far less has been done, however, to understand the full extent of the Anti-Rent Movement’s earliest traces in New York’s legal history: the advent of the Dutch “patroonship.”
The peculiar and paradoxical legal enterprise known as the patroonship, as this Article will reveal, began centuries earlier. A system of property ownership, the patroonship started as a tool for colonial administration through which powerful Dutch families controlled vast tracts of land and supported colonial expansion into present-day New York. The patroonship’s unique constitution, a creature of Dutch civil law unencumbered by English laws of common recovery and rules against perpetuities, afforded “patroons” a seemingly feudal right with no analog in Anglo-American law: the ability to sell his land yet still demand rent from his former “tenants.”
Among the earliest and most powerful patroons was Kiliaen van Rensselaer, an Amsterdam diamond merchant and once-owner of hundreds of thousands of acres in what is now the Hudson Valley. Although his was not the only family to control such a vast estate, Van Rensselaer’s patroonship was the only one to far outlast the Netherlands’s brief colonial rule. To administer his colonial estate, known as Rensselaerswyck, from across the Atlantic, Van Rensselaer employed a retinue of agents and administrators, including religious ministers, secretaries, bookkeepers, and a lawyer (or schout), all under the authority of the directors of the Geoctrooieerde Westindische Compagnie (Patented West India Company, or GWC) that governed New Netherland. The rich and extensive body of legal records Van Rensselaer and his agents left behind, from the founding of his patroonship in 1629 to his early death in 1643, reveals that Van Rensselaer’s patroonship, like the patroon system as a whole, formed a five-pronged legal structure. The patroon first received an all-encompassing grant of land, with more extensive rights than even the largest estates in England or elsewhere in North America at the time. Along with this land came four unique and interlocking rights: the patroon gained not only a perpetual right to rent but also to control the labor of the land’s inhabitants, broker debts, direct local commerce, and even establish his own laws and courts—generating vast wealth, power, and privilege for the Van Rensselaer family.