A NOTED LAND TRANSACTION.
In 1809 a browsing lawyer informed Astor that those seven hundred families had no legal title whatever; that the State had had no legal right to confiscate the Morris property, inasmuch as the Morrises held a life lease only, and no State could ever confiscate a life lease. The property, Astor was informed, was really owned by the children of the Morris couple, to whom it was to revert after the lease of their parents was extinguished. Legally, he was told, they were as much the owners as ever. Astor satisfied himself that this point would hold in the courts. Then he assiduously hunted up the heirs, and by a series 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.