America's Secret Aristocracy (10 page)

New York made the most of the year it would have as the nation's capital, and the Jays were in the thick of things. There were parties nearly every night. There were stately and formal cotillions and allemandes that required a dance master to call out the complicated figures. There were also spirited, high-stepping rigadoons. When the president and Mrs. Washington entered the presidential box at the opera, the audience rose to its feet, European-fashion. The president, in his powdered wigs, ruffled lace jabots, and lustrous velvet redingotes, clearly relished all this pomp and circumstance. On Tuesday afternoons Washington formally received visitors, and on Thursday nights there were state dinners. The most coveted invitations, however, were to Martha Washington's formal receptions, held on Friday evenings, at which Mrs. Washington stood on a raised platform above her guests or else seated herself on what looked very much like a throne. At these grand gatherings, tiaras began to make an appearance, and bowing and curtsying seemed to be coming back into style. During the day, the president rode regally about the city in his cream-colored coach—custom-made in England and emblazoned with his coat of arms—drawn by four, or sometimes six, matched bay horses. In the meantime, the Senate debated on how the new chief executive should be addressed: His High Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of Their Liberties, or perhaps more simply, as His Patriotic Majesty. Meanwhile, it had been definitely decided that the president's wife would be called Lady Washington.

His Patriotic Majesty had, by then, named John Jay as his first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

One of the more snobbish and pretentious of the patriotic organizations that had sprung up during the Revolutionary period called itself the Society of the Cincinnati. Washington
was a member, and so were Lafayette, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. Its members were given titles—Count of This, Baron of That, and so on. John Jay was approached and offered an honorary membership in the order but declined, saying that he had no interest in a society that existed mainly for the purpose “of conferring honors on themselves.”

Of course, in the years since those perfumed and sacheted days of wigs and perukes and silver-buckled boots, we have seen how close Americans have continued to feel to the nation and the social system they rebelled against. But in 1790, it was all too much for Thomas Jefferson. Seeing what was going on in New York during that first year of republican democracy, he had deep misgivings. It seemed to him that, having overthrown a monarchy, America was simply establishing a new one, with new monarchic trappings more elaborate than those it had endured before. Having outlawed one hereditary aristocratic system, it was establishing a new one—more rigid and courtly and stratified than ever.

It seemed a case of: The king is dead! Long live the king!

7

The Great Silverware Robbery

Americans have always been blessed—or cursed, depending on how one looks at it—by a very short collective national memory. And Sarah Jay's “Dinner and Supper List” demonstrates how very quickly, once a long and hard and bitter war is over, Americans are able to forget past hostilities and get on with the more important business of moving onward and upward along life's ladder. Within four years of the Revolution's end, the hatchet between Great Britain and America had been buried, old grudges and political differences had been put aside, and mortal enemies had become dancing partners at the Jays' soirées.

In a sense, Sarah's list was the social equivalent of her husband's peace treaty. It was designed to forgive old injuries and to assuage old wounds. Though it drew from the upper echelons of New York society, it democratically bridged any factional lines that might have existed within this privileged group. It included members of the old Dutch as well as the old English families who, in earlier conflicts, had not cared for each other all that much. Her list crossed religious barriers and included Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Quakers, and members of the Dutch Reform Church. The Burr-Hamilton feud was personal and based on jealousy as much as anything else, which made it difficult to deal with. But otherwise Sarah's guest list included the widow of a British officer (Mrs. Burr) and at least one former British officer himself, Jacob Schieffelin, who had spent a year in an American prison before escaping to rejoin His Majesty's forces and taking a pacifist, Quaker wife. Invited to the Jays' dinners and suppers were former
Whigs as well as former Tories, patriots to the American cause and traitors to it. What one's stance had been during the war no longer mattered. What mattered was getting on Sarah's list.

Cases in point were the Alsops, who were on the very first Jay list. It mattered not at all that the heroic and patriotic Jays should be welcoming at their dinner table the unheroic and unpatriotic Alsops. John Alsop, for example, had been an uncompromising Tory and anti-Revolutionist who considered Thomas Jefferson a dangerous radical. For a while John Alsop had been a member of the New York delegation to the Continental Congress, but when the Declaration of Independence was presented to him for his signature, he refused to sign it. As he wrote in his letter of resignation, he felt that the Congress had rashly closed the door to “reconciliation with Great Britain on just and honorable terms.” In the Alsop family, John Alsop would become known as “John, the non-signer.”

During the war, furthermore, an Alsop relative of the distaff branch named Peter Corne kept a secret life-size portrait of King George III in his cellar. Every night throughout the war, and even after it, Mr. Corne would lead his large family down into the cellar by candlelight, where he would solemnly command them, “Bow down to thy master.”

John Alsop's son, Joseph Wright Alsop I—the first of many Joseph Wright Alsops—had refused to be conscripted into George Washington's army and had paid another man to serve in his place.

In fact, when researching his family's history, the writer Stewart Johonnot Oliver Alsop was struck by the fact that no male member of his family had ever fought in a war until his own tour of duty as a World War II paratrooper. Another Joseph, Joseph Alsop III, had followed his ancestor's example in the Civil War and purchased a substitute to fight for him. During the same war, Theodore Roosevelt's father, who was Stewart Alsop's great-grandfather, had gotten himself appointed to something called the Sanitary Commission, “an elegant draft dodge,” according to Stewart Alsop. In his researches, Alsop also noted that no ancestor had ever worked for a salary, and he drew a parallel between these two phenomena. “It was not so much that my ancestors were cowards, though no doubt some of them were,” he wrote. “They just hated the idea of being in a subordinate or dependent
position.” Alsops disliked taking orders from anyone, unless it was a king.

At Sarah Jay's parties, John Alsop and his wife were still unreconstructed Royalists. The Alsops had only one complaint about the British. During the war, the British had made off with the Alsops' family silver. “It was done by enlisted men or Hessian mercenaries, of course,” John Alsop would explain. “No British officer or gentleman would have tolerated such a thing.”

The Alsop family had been early settlers of Middletown, Connecticut, which had become an important colonial river port and where John Alsop had made a considerable fortune in ice—though not, it should be added, as a peddler with a horse and wagon. It had been John Alsop's canny notion that ice, which was free for the taking and in plentiful supply in the winter lakes and ponds of New England, might have much more value in the tropics, where refrigeration was a luxury. The Alsop ice was therefore loaded in great blocks aboard ships, insulated with thick layers of sawdust (which was also free, at local sawmills), and transported to the West Indies, bringing a fine price. In the West Indies, John Alsop bought sugarcane, which he transported back to sell to refineries and rum makers in New England. Thus there were profits at both ends of his Caribbean journeys, and his growing fleet of merchant ships was always well ballasted in both directions.

John Alsop maintained a country place in Middletown and, a few years before the war, had built himself a palatial mansion in Manhattan at the corner of William Street and Maiden Lane. It was in the garden behind this house that, when the first Revolutionary shots were fired, John Alsop had unwisely buried all the Alsop silver and jewels before retreating with his family to the relative safety of Middletown. Unfortunately, a number of other New Yorkers had the same idea, and gardens became a favorite spot for invading soldiers to look for buried treasure.

Six and a half years later, when the family returned to New York, a shock awaited them. Their house had been used as a barracks for British troops, and the place had been completely ransacked. The garden had been spaded up, and all the jewelry and silverware were gone. This included what was then considered the finest Oriental pearl necklace in America at the time and great quantities of solid silver dinnerware—complete
table settings for forty-eight, as many silver service plates, silver trays, tureens, compotes, chafing dishes, candlesticks, candelabra, wine goblets, and finger bowls, all of them embossed with the Alsop family crest: a parrot clutching a cherry in its claws. All of it, futhermore, was American coin silver, with a higher silver content than sterling. It was considered an irreplaceable loss.

George Washington's inaugural ball, meanwhile, was also the first official debutante party in the United States of America. At the English court, young women of good family were presented to the monarch at Buckingham Palace, and it was deemed appropriate that America should adopt this custom and invite young ladies to be presented to society while making deep curtsies to the president of the United States. It was an indication of the extent to which President Washington had forgiven the Alsops for their lack of Revolutionary zeal that among the first young women invited to participate in this honorary rite was John Alsop's pretty daughter, Mary, who, like all Alsops, had a pertly independent streak.

At the ball, furthermore, the new president personally introduced Mary Alsop to a young lawyer friend of his, the Harvard-graduated Rufus King, who fell in love with her. When Mary Alsop and Rufus King were married a few months later, President and Mrs. Washington attended the wedding and sent a gift of a Georgian tea service with a note saying they hoped that this would at least in part replace the family's loss of its heirloom silver.

In 1796, Washington further honored the Kings by naming Rufus King the American ambassador to the Court of St. James's, a sensitive and important position in this post-Revolutionary period and one that would set King on a long course of distinguished public service, culminating in an unsuccessful campaign for the presidency against James Monroe. Possibly Washington dispatched the Kings to London to give the Royalist Alsops a firsthand taste of what the British ruling class was really like. More likely, he considered sending Americans with known Royalist sympathies to be a suave and mollifying diplomatic move. In any case, he cannot have expected one of the outcomes of the appointment.

In London the Kings were politely, if somewhat frostily, entertained by members of the nobility, who still had not quite gotten used to the idea that Britain had lost a war. And one evening, dining at a noble house in Mayfair, Mary Alsop
King suddenly became transfixed by the silverware she was using. Looking about at the heavy pieces that adorned the table, she realized they were all familiar. All of them were emblazoned with a crest depicting a parrot holding a cherry in its claws.

“Are you interested in silver, Mrs. King?” her hostess asked.

“I am interested in this,” she replied. “Has it been in your family long?”

“My husband brought it from America,” the hostess said. “We are very fond of it.”

“I don't blame you,” the wife of the American ambassador said bluntly. “I used to be myself.” She then told of the cache of family silver that had been buried in her father's garden.

There was a little silence, and the subject of the conversation changed. But the next morning a large crate of silver was delivered to the American embassy. No note accompanied it.

For years until her death in the summer of 1971, one of the reigning
grandes dames
of Hartford, Connecticut, was Mrs. Corinne Douglas Robinson Alsop Cole, the mother of the journalist Alsop brothers, Stewart and Joseph. Mrs. Cole—Francis W. Cole was her second husband—was one of the last women of her era who was never seen without a hat. She wore a hat even in her own house and carried a reticule slung across her arm as she moved from room to room. Because of her cousinship to Roosevelts, Mrs. Cole was an Alsop by inheritance as well as by marriage, and one genealogist had actually managed to demonstrate that Mrs. Cole was her own cousin, a finding that amused her.

“I think that what my ancestor did in London was absolutely right,” she said not long before her death. “It was Alsop silver, it had been stolen, and Mary King was quite right to speak up and get it back. I still have some very nice pieces from that service. If you ask me, that's one of the differences between the British aristocracy and American ladies and gentlemen. The British are too stiff and pompous, and hate having to admit they're ever wrong. Americans are more open, forthright, honest and forgiving. Americans are more—accommodating to the whims and shortcomings of other people. They're more
gracious
.

“For example, when my cousin Eleanor came through Hartford she would usually stay with me. But Eleanor was
always rushing about the countryside on some mission or other for Franklin, and there were times when she'd say to me, ‘I have to catch a five o'clock train in the morning for Cleveland, and so I'm afraid I'm going to need my breakfast around three-thirty
A
.
M
. But don't you get up. I'll fix myself something in the kitchen.' But I would say to myself, ‘Well, if the first lady of the land is going to be up for breakfast at three-thirty in the morning, I shall be up to join her.' And I would be. Would that happen in England—even for the queen? Not likely, I say. They'd send a servant up with a tray and spend the rest of the night in the land of Nod.