New York's Anti-rent War 1845-1846

Contemporary Review, June, 2002 by Eric Ford

There remains this question. Was the antirent 'War' no more than a local flare-up which has rightly been consigned to the dustbin of history or did it have a wider significance as David Maldwyn Elliss suggests in his admirable study of the movement?

'By dramatising the evils of land monopoly and by identifying their cause with the demand for more democracy the antirenters helped to arouse the nation to the importance of land reform'.

In the process, perhaps, it can be claimed that the protesting farmers of the Hudson-Mohawk added an unofficial amendment to the American Declaration of Independence. Surely, this was indeed, in itself, no mean achievement.