The sheriff made gallant attempts to enforce the law, but his deputies
were killed, and a legal investigation in which two hundred persons were
examined, failed to reveal the perpetrators of the crime. The militia
were called out, but they were no more successful than the sheriff. In
the case of one murder committed in Delaware County in 1845, however,
two persons were convicted, but their sentence was commuted to
imprisonment for life. Various others concerned in the disturbances were
convicted of minor offences, but when Governor Young succeeded Governor
Seward after an election in which the anti-renters showed considerable
voting strength, he pardoned them all on the ground that their crimes
were political. The dispute was finally settled by a compromise--that
is, the Van Rensselaers and the Livingstons both sold their estates,
giving quit-claim deeds to the tenants for what they chose to pay, and
the granting of agricultural leases for a longer term than twelve years
was forbidden by the State Constitution of 1846.

This anti-rent agitation is described by Professor Johnston of
Princeton, in the _Cyclopædia of Political Science_, as "a reign of
terror which for ten years practically suspended the operations of law
and the payment of rent throughout the district." Suppose all the land
of the State had been held under similar tenures; that the controversy
had lasted one hundred years; that the rents had been high; and that the
Van Rensselaers and the Livingstons had had the aid of the Federal army
in enforcing distraints and evictions, and in enabling them to set local
opinion at defiance, what do you suppose the state of morals and manners
would have been in New York by this time? What would have been the
feelings of the people towards the Federal authority had the matter been
finally adjusted with the strong hand, in accordance, not with the views
of the people of the State, but of the landholders of South Carolina or