dicial. Without their leave no law can pass, no law can be repealed. On them more than half the House of Assembly is dependent for reappointment as justices, as judges, or for promotion in the militia. By their will each year there are brought into official life six judges of the Superior Court, twenty-eight judges of probate courts, forty of county courts, and five hundred and ten justices of the peace, and all the sheriffs. Not only do the seven make laws and appoint judges to administer the laws, but as lawyers they plead before the judges they annually appoint, and as a Court of Errors interpret the laws of their own making. Is this, it was asked, a constitution? Is this an instrument of government for free men? And who may be a free man in Connecticut? No one who does not have a freehold estate worth seven dollars, or a personal estate on the tax list of one hundred and thirty-four dollars. We demand a constitution which shall separate the legislative, executive, and judicial powers; which shall extend the free man's oath to men who labor on the highways, who serve in the militia, who pay small taxes, but possess no estates. We demand the free exercise of all religions, independent judges, and the district system of choosing assistants and representatives in Congress. By the constitution adopted in 1818 many of these demands were secured. The three departments of government were distinctly separated. The council was replaced by a Senate, whose members did not sit as a Court of Errors; the franchise was extended to men who served in the militia, or paid a State tax, or had a freehold estate of the value of seven dollars. Judges of the Supreme Court of Errors and the Superior Court were made independent of the Legislature, and an injunction was inserted that no person should be required by law to join or support or be classed with any congregation, church, or religious association. That all men should vote and all judges be independent; that people should be represented, and not mere political areas as towns and counties; that there should be fewer appointed and more elected officials, were now self-evident truths. They were to be applied, not justified, and in the course of the next 1821. THE FRANCHISE IN NEW YORK. 383 decade serious efforts to apply them were made in four old States. The struggle in New York was most interesting, for it was a struggle between the rights of property and the rights of man. As the constitution then stood, any male of full age who had resided six months in any county, and was possessed of a freehold of the value of twenty pounds within the county, or had rented a tenement therein of the value of forty shillings, and had been rated and paid taxes to the State, might vote for member of assembly. But to vote for senator or governor he must be possessed of a freehold of the value of one hundred pounds over and above all debts charged thereon. The constitution apparently arranged the males in the State in three great classes: those who could not vote for any State official; the twenty-pound freeholders and forty-shilling renters, who could vote for members of the assembly; and the one-hundredpound freeholders, who were electors of assemblymen, senators, lieutenant-governor, and governor. But the narrow interpre tation which the law placed on the word freehold deprived of a vote many a man who, from the language of the constitution, would seem to be entitled to it. In the eye of the law, a man who possessed a piece of land for his own life or the life of another was a freeholder, and if the land was worth twenty or one hundred pounds-that is, fifty or two hundred and fifty dollars-he might vote. But a man who held an estate in a farm, or city lot, or tract of land for nine hundred and ninety-nine years, was a leaseholder, and could not vote, though the land was worth one hundred thousand dollars. In this class were the many lessees of Trinity Church in New York city, and the thousands of farmers who, as lessees of the great Dutch manors, held their land for nine hundred and ninetynine years. A second class of disfranchised landholders were the equitable freeholders, as they were called-the men who, in northern and western New York, had purchased farms on the instalment plan from the Holland Land Company or the Pulteney, the Hornby, or other estates. In place of selling in fee simple, and taking back a mortgage, these great landowners would sell on long credit, with payments at certain intervals, and execute a contract to convey by deed when the last instalment of the purchase money had been paid down by the farmer. Were or were not these holders of land contracts freeholders within the meaning of the law? The common belief was that they were not, so they could not and did not vote. Nevertheless, a statute had been enacted permitting them to serve as jurors. But a juror must be a freeholder, and the question whether equitable freeholders were or were not electors under the constitution became more complicated than ever. In other parts of the State it was customary to give a deed and take back a mortgage as security for the payment of the purchase money. Who owned such a piece of land, the mortgageor or the mortgagee? With which did the freehold rest? The law said with both, and gave a vote to whichever one happened to be in actual possession. The doubt cast on the meaning of freeholder by statutes such as these, the degradation to the place of leaseholders of fifty thousand tax-paying farmers, purchasers from the great landholders of northern and western New York, the growing belief that manhood suffrage was the true principle of democratic government, and the shameful abuse of power by the Council of Appointment and the Council of Revision, at last forced the rulers of the State to give way. In April, 1821, the question of a State convention to amend the constitution was submitted to the people, and carried by a majority of seventy-four thousand votes. In August the convention met at Albany and began the work of extending the rights of man. The Council of Appointment-a body of five men—had then at its absolute disposal seven hundred offices in the city of New York, and fourteen thousand nine hundred and fortythree in the State. It was the greatest political machine of the day. Fitness had long ceased to be a qualification for office. The worker was alone considered, and so corrupt had the council become that it had even dared to give a justiceship of the peace to a man in Columbia County whom the people had seen looking through the bars of the jail for having hired some one to burn his neighbor's barn. The council was swept away without one dissenting vote. Next went the Council of Revision. At the head of the board sat the Governor, and before him the chancellor and 1821. STRUGGLE FOR THE RIGHTS OF PROPERTY. 385 judges of the Supreme Court. Yet the body had exceeded its powers, had passed bills known to be tainted by corruption, and, by rejecting others which could not secure the two-thirds vote of both Senate and Assembly, had made itself a third and the chief legislative body in the State. This, too, was abolished without defence and without regret. The real struggle was between the rights of property and the rights of man, between the political ideas of the century but lately gone out and those of the century just come in. It was generally conceded that the old property qualifications for electors of the governor and Assembly should be abolished. But a strong minority insisted that in the Senate property should be represented, and that no man should vote for senator who did not have in his own or his wife's right an interest in law or in equity in lands or tenements in the State of the value of two hundred and fifty dollars. Why, it was asked, do we have two branches to the Legislature? In order that the one may be a check on the other. But if the members of the two belong to the same social class, are animated by the same sympathies, and elected by the same voters, will they not be the same sort of men, and exercise no check on each other? Is not property desirable? Is it not worth protection? All that goes to embellish society depends upon it. Churches and hospitals are erected, and schools established by property, and every government that has the interest of the governed at heart must feel bound to protect it. Is it safe, then, to put every branch of government in the hands of men destitute of property and without landed interests? Foremost in the ranks of those who stood for a property qualification for electors of the Senate was Chancellor Kent, the most renowned judge and legal commentator the State of New York has yet produced. He did not, he said, object to making men who were not freeholders electors of the governor and members of the Assembly, but the Senate was the sheet anchor of the people's safety. Without it, said he, the agricultural interest is committed to the winds. It should be the representative of the landed interest and its security against the caprice of the motley assemblage of paupers, emigrants, journeymen, manufacturers, and those undefinable classes of inhabitants which a State and city like ours is calculated to invite. This is not a fancied alarm. Universal suffrage jeopardizes property, and puts it in the power of the poor and the profligate to control the affluent. This democratic principle cannot be contemplated without terror. We have seen its career in Europe, and the things done there should be a warning to us here. It is madness to expect an exemption from those passions by which other nations have been first inflamed and then destroyed, and if we borrow no wisdom from their misfortunes our posterity will deplore in sackcloth and ashes the delusions of this day. In the ranks of those who stood up for the rights of man was Martin Van Buren, then one of the ablest lawyers and political leaders in the State. Van Buren was born on the fifth of December, 1782, in a log building at Kinderhook, an old Dutch village on the east bank of the Hudson river, where his father, Abraham Van Buren, was a thrifty farmer and tavern-keeper, if the campaign stories of the Whigs may be believed. The boy Martin obtained what education he could in such schools as the village afforded, attended the Kinderhook Academy, and at fourteen began to read law in the office of a local attorney. After the custom of the day, he was janitor, errand-boy, and student all at the same time. He swept the office, lighted the fires, carried messages, copied and served papers, and read the shelf of books members of the bar were expected to peruse. After six years spent in this wise at Kinderhook, and one at New York city-for no man could then be admitted to the bar who had not passed seven years in preparation-Van Buren returned to his native village in 1803 and plunged at once into politics. The State was torn by the struggles of the Federalists and Republicans for power, intensified by the bitter faction quarrels of the followers of the great families, the Clintonians, the Livingstonians, and the Burrites. Van Buren, who had been a Republican from boyhood, and who, before he was eighteen, had been a delegate to a Republican convention for Columbia and Rensselaer Counties, espoused the cause of the Clintonians, became a strong partisan and active worker, and soon received his |