was granted a patroonship, and got the officials at Fort Orange to buy extensive tracts from the Indians. He thus, with three others, acquired a manor extending twenty-four miles along the Hudson, from Beeren Island up to the Mohawk River, and this manor, which afterwards became the sole property of his family, was subsequently enlarged to extend twenty-four miles back from the Hudson in both directions, and contained over seven hundred thousand acres. The Patroon was a feudal lord, possessing absolute title to the soil, with power to administer civil and criminal justice, and enjoying other rights that reduced his colonists to a condition little better than serfs. His son Johannes inherited this patroonship from Killian, and it went by entail through five generations, when the United States laws barred further succession. The last Patroon, General Stephen Van Rensselaer, died in 1839, and his son Stephen, the sixth of the line, still styled by courtesy "the Patroon," died in 1868, aged eighty years. The original settlement of Fort Orange in the manor of Rensselaerwyck, as it was called, became a centre of the fur-trade, and a town quickly grew around the fort, which the English, upon their occupation in 1664, named Albany. THE ANTI-RENT WAR. As population increased on the adjacent lands, they began taking leases from the Patroon, paying rent for their farms, and this produced one of the bitterest conflicts known in American politics, the New York "Anti-Rent War." After the Revolution the inhabitants increased rapidly, and General Stephen Van Rensselaer, then the Patroon, leased farms in perpetuity, upon the nominal consideration for eight years of "a peppercorn a year," and at the expiration of this time these leases drew a rent estimated at six per cent. interest on the land value, about $5 per acre, payable in the produce of the soil, fowls, and days' service with wagons and horses, the latter designed to secure road-making. When the old General died in 1839, the entail being abolished, he divided the manor between his two sons, Stephen getting Albany County on the west bank, and William, Rensselaer County on the east bank, including Troy. He had been a lenient landlord, but the tenants became anxious, especially about what was known as the "quarter sales clause" in their leases, giving the landlord the right to claim one-fourth the purchase money whenever the land passed by purchase, this condition being really inserted to prevent alienation, as it did not become operative when the land was sold or descended to one of the original tenant's family. The tenants proposed that the landlord should sell the reservations, releasing them from the rentals and making them owners in fee, but this was declined. The tenants then employed counsel, who advised that the landlord's right was absolute, but suggested, while there was no legal remedy, that it would be good policy to make the rent collections so