of strategic
maneuvers worthy of the pen of a Balzac, succeeded in buying their
claim for $100,000.

In the thirty-three years which had elapsed since confiscation, the land
had been greatly improved. Suddenly came a notification to these
unsuspecting farmers that not they, but Astor, owned the land. All the
improvements that they had made, all the accumulated standing products
of the thirty-three years' labor of the occupants, he claimed as his, by
virtue of the fact that, in law, they were trespassers. Dumfounded, they
called upon him to prove his claim. Whereupon his lawyers, men saturated
with the terminology and intricacies of legal lore, came forward and
gravely explained that the law said so and so and was such and such and
that the law was incontestible in support of Astor's claim. The
hard-working farmers listened with mystification and consternation. They
could not make out how land which they or their fathers had paid for,
and which they had tilled and improved, could belong to an absentee who
had never turned a spade on it, had never seen it, all simply because he
had the advantage of a legal technicality and a document emblazoned with
a seal or two.

THE PUBLIC UPROAR OVER ASTOR'S CLAIM.

They appealed to the Legislature. This body, influenced by the public
uproar over the transaction, refused to recognize Astor's title. The
whole State was aroused to a pitch of indignation. Astor's claim was
generally regarded as an audacious piece of injustice and robbery. He
contended that he was not subject to the provision of the statute
directing sales of confiscated estates which provided that tenants could
not be dispossessed without being paid for improvements. In fine, he
claimed the right to evict the entire seven hundred families without
being under the legal or moral necessity of paying them a single cent
for their improvements. In the state of public temper, the officials of
the State of New York decided to fight his claim. Astor offered to sell
his claim to the State for $667,000. But such was the public outburst at
the effrontery of a man who had bought what was virtually an extinct
claim for $100,000, and then attempting to hold up the State for more
than six times that sum, that the Legislature dared not consent.

The contention went to the courts and there dragged along for many
years. Astor, however, won his point; it was decided that he had a valid
title. Finally in 1827 the Legislature allowed i