Patroons

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PATROONS

PATROONS. On 7 June 1629, the directorate of the Dutch West India Company granted a charter of freedoms and exemptions which provided for the grant of great estates, called patroonships, to those members of the company who were able to found, in what is now New York, settlements of fifty persons within four years after giving notice of their intentions. The patroon, after extinguishing the Indian title by purchase, was to hold the land as a "perpetual fief of inheritance" with the fruits, plants, minerals, rivers, and springs thereof. Before the end of January 1630, five patroonships had been registered, only one of which, that of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, was successful. The difficulties of transportation across the Atlantic Ocean, lack of cooperation from the company, quarrels with the authorities at New Amsterdam, Indian troubles, and the difficulties of management from 3,000 miles away were all factors in their failure. In 1640, the revised charter reduced the size of future patroonships, but the same factors contributed to prevent the success of these smaller grants. At the close of Dutch rule in 1644, the company had repurchased all but two of the patroonships. Thereafter, the English colonial governments of New York rewarded influential political supporters with large land grants that some families used to create manors with large numbers of rent-paying tenants. By 1750, these New York patroons formed a landed elite whose wealth was second only to the Carolina rice planters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Flick, Alexander C., ed. History of the State of New York. Volume 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1933.

Huston, Reeve. Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Kim, Sung Bok. Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978.

A. C.Flick/c. p.