The First Constitution of New York. 



great families managed the public affairs almost exclusively. On 

 Manhattan Island there was an aristocracy of culture which shared 

 the honors of the aristocracy of land, whose manors included nearly 

 the entire counties of Albany, Rensselaer, Columbia, Green, Ulster, 

 Westchester, Orange and Tryon — about all the interior then settled. 

 But it was only two years after the adoption of the Constitution of 1777 

 that a law was passed for the gradual abolition of ail feudal tenures. 

 The proprietors of the great manor grants, unwilling to yield their 

 feudal privileges to public sentiment, contrived forms of deeds by 

 which the grantees covenanted to perform services and pay rents sim- 

 ilar to the feudal incidents which had been abolished. Hence sprang 

 the anti-rent troubles, and twenty years of blood and disorder through- 

 out the State. These are not chargeable to the framers of the Con- 

 stitution, who simply acted on John Jay's doctrine, that " those who 

 own the country ought to govern it." 



Another singular proof of the undemocratic instincts of these first 

 statesmen of New York is the timidity with which they ventured upon 

 the innovation of the secret ballot. They acknowledged the existence 

 of a widespread belief that " voting at elections by ballot would tend 

 more to preserve the liberty and equal freedom of the people, than 

 voting viva voce," and, therefore, provided for a temporary test of the 

 ballot system, " to the end that a fair experiment be made which of . 

 the two methods of voting is to be preferred." Indeed, the conserva- 

 tism of these men in every direction, shows that the present widely ! 

 misjudges the spirit of the age for which they acted. They ventured 

 upon no wider departures than were rendered necessary by their en- 

 forced rejection of the supreme authority of the king and the parlia- 

 ment. There is not in the whole instrument a trace of speculative 

 theory, or of metaphysical distinction, or of platonic tendency. They 

 labored to invent no new popular rights. They sought only to secure 

 to the colony the rights of which it already deemed itself possessed. 

 They were not the inventors of a new system of government — they 

 were the conservators of an old system. They accepted the trial by 

 jury, the writ for personal liberty, the practice of representative gov- 

 ernment, the limited suffrage, the separation of the three co-ordinate 

 branches of government, the independent tenure of the judiciary — 

 just as they inherited them. They went further, and accepted the 

 common law of England, the statute law of England, and the acts of 

 the colonial assembly, as the law of the new State, "except in so far 

 as repugnant to the government established by this Constitution." 

 They even preserved the customs of government they had grown into 



