In August, as I traveled through the Catskills, a small roadside sign in Andes, New York, caught my attention. It announced that the Anti-Rent Wars had reached their fever pitch at the grassy spot I was driving past. In 1844, impoverished farmers in the area, facing lease fees they couldn’t afford, staged protests and rent strikes. From 1839 to about 1845, 25,000 people signed Anti-Rent petitions challenging the landlords, while roughly twice that number identified as Anti-Renters. Some of these dissenters were farmers who wore outlandish “Calico Indian” costumes and blew tin horns to get attention, looking like prototypes of Bread and Puppet performers.
Theatrics aside, the struggle was mostly nonviolent. They posted signs on the sides of pubs and barns and home windows that had sayings like “Attention! Anti-Renters! Awake! Arouse!” and “The land is mine saith the Lord.” They chased off collection agents and tried to renegotiate their leases. And some hit back with lawsuits against landlords and their land titles. There were also a few incidents of more violent resistance. Rebellious farmers tarred and feathered sheriffs and deputy sheriffs who tried to serve them writs. And finally, in Andes, in August of 1845, an outlying moment of tragedy: tenant farmers exchanged gunfire with officers of the law who had been going to extremes to get back the landlords’ land, and killed an undersheriff named Osman Steele.
The Anti-Renters were an early iteration of tenant activists we see today. They were so successful overall that the New York Constitution of 1846 provided for tenants’ rights by getting rid of the quasi-feudal system of tenures, as well as leases of more than twelve years. That battle, more than 175 years ago, has its legacy in the quieter war many Americans are fighting today against skyrocketing rents, eviction, housing scarcity, and homelessness. The form this activism has taken—sometimes dramatic, as when a group led by Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, recently protested the end of the eviction moratorium by sleeping for three nights on the steps of the D.C. Capitol with signs reading “Cancel Rent”—also recalls aspects of the way the Anti-Renters, who used the slogan “Down with the Rent,” fought for their homes so long ago.