92 The Story of The Bronx 



from those who were gentlemen at home, as they usually called 

 England, and the other elasses was strongly marked. While, 

 perhaps, the upper classes were not supercilious nor the lower 

 obsequious, there was condescension on the one hand and 

 deference on the other. The influx of New Englanders, whose 

 democratic ideas rendered them obnoxious to the phlegmatic 

 Dutch as well as to the English New Yorker, tended to break 

 down this barrier, and the Revolution and the Constitution 

 together swept it away at the end of the eighteenth century. 

 Some historians, so far as New York is concerned, ascribe the 

 revolt against the mother country to the higher classes, whose 

 interests or ambitions led them into it. That they did not 

 voice the great mass of the population, nor carry it with them, 

 is shown very strikingly in Westchester County, which became 

 Tory, or at least remained neutral — or as neutral as the con- 

 tending parties allowed it to be — during the struggle. The 

 mass of the inhabitants considered the strife as one in which 

 their betters had a greater stake then they themselves. 



The principal cause of the difference in caste was due to the 

 land tenure. Many of the farmers were tenants of the landed 

 gentry, occupying their lands on long and liberal leases, which 

 did not, at first, begin to pay the landlords for their expense 

 in obtaining settlers, but which, as time passed, became 

 valuable. The New Englanders frequently preferred the 

 leasehold property to holding property in fee. In the former 

 case, they could, if seized by that desire for improvement of 

 which Irving speaks, quit at the expiration of the lease or even 

 before, by disposing of their betterments to a new-comer and 

 migrating to "green fields and pastures new." If they were 

 owners in fee, they were, to a certain extent, bound to the land 

 which they owned. There thus existed between landlord and 

 tenant that relation which has prevailed in England since 



