America's Secret Aristocracy (4 page)

Still, one would never have known that a great war was coming, and when news reached New York in 1773 that a group of prominent Bostonians, dressed up as Mohawk Indians, had boarded East India Company ships at Griffin's Wharf and thrown 342 chests of tea from the London firm of Davison & Newman valued at £10,000 into Boston Harbor, it was treated by New Yorkers as a great joke. It was labeled, derisively, the Boston Tea Party. After all, who cared about tea? New Yorkers were not tea drinkers and much preferred hot chocolate or spiced cider, or a tot of Madeira.

Of much more importance were the more conventional variety of parties. Even the Lord's Day, which was such a sober occasion in Puritan New England, was a festive event in the New York colony, when everyone dressed in their grandest finery and trooped off to church, with services followed by the most elaborate and dressiest dinner of the week. In his courtship of Sarah Livingston, John Jay regularly accompanied her family on its Sunday trips to the Presbyterian Church in Elizabethtown.

Almost equally important as a social rite was “visiting.” Because the mails were slow, it was customary for most visitors—who of course were always either family members or closest friends—to arrive both uninvited and unannounced, catching their hosts and hostesses by complete surprise. But this was part of the fun of visiting and having visitors. Since travel was by horse and carriage, over mainly unpaved roads, most visitors didn't just drop by for the afternoon. They came to stay for days or even weeks, bringing their servants with them, prepared to be entertained at parties and picnics and parlor games. Needless to say, one of the most frequent visitors at the William Livingstons' Liberty Hall that courting winter of 1773–1774 was John Jay.

Meanwhile, very much at the center of all this entertaining and socializing was a dashing and extraordinarily handsome young man named Alexander Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton was the era's most popular host and most sought-after guest. His appeal had to do with his looks and charm and obvious intelligence and not his family connections, because there were some people who muttered that Alexander Hamilton was actually a little common. And there were others who said that “common” was not the word for him, because he was something even worse than that. Where, for instance, had he learned those exotic—and even a little erotic—West Indian dances that he performed so well? Though still in his teens, he was mature and sophisticated well beyond his years and was included at every skating party and turtle roast that winter when John Jay was courting Sarah Livingston. Indeed, there were those who had supposed Sarah would eventually marry Hamilton, since he was also an admirer and was closer to her in age.

Alexander Hamilton was an eighteenth-century reminder that, if one is attractive and amusing enough, one doesn't need to be rich or of exalted family lineage to rise rapidly in high society. Has anything changed that much, more than two hundred years later?

John Jay was not handsome or amusing. He was slightly built and pencil-thin, with a Frenchman's figure, which was not surprising, since part of his ancestry was French. At twenty-eight, his thin hair—which, in the fashion of the times, he kept powdered and tied at the back of his neck in a ponytail—had already begun to recede from across his broad forehead. But his deep-set eyes, his long, hooked nose, and
firm jawline gave him a decidedly patrician look—the look of a young Caesar. His friend and sometime rival Hamilton was a fashion plate. Jay, by contrast, nearly always dressed in black. The commonest contemporary adjective used to describe his appearance was “sedate.”

He seems also to have suffered from something of an inferiority complex. In writing to his friend Robert Livingston of what he saw as their personality differences—and to explain why they might work to balance each other as law partners—Jay said,

It appeared to me that you have more vivacity. Bashfulness and pride rendered me more staid. Both equally ambitious but pursuing it in different roads. You flexible, I pertinaceous. Both equally sensible of indignities, you less prone to sudden resentments. Both possessed of warm passions, but you of more self-possession. You formed for a citizen of the world, I for a College or a Village. You fond of large acquaintance, I careless of all but a few. You could forbid your countenance to tell tales, mine was a babbler. You understood men and
women
early, I knew them not. You had talents and inclination for intrigue, I had neither. Your mind (and body) received pleasure from a variety of objects, mine from few. You were naturally easy of access, and in advances, I in neither.…

There is irony here. For it would be John Jay who would go on to become “a citizen of the world,” while Robert R. Livingston, Jr., would go on to live a life at home in comparative obscurity.

The
Gazette
had been right, however, in describing Jay's bride as beautiful. Contemporary portraits show a young woman with gently curling, golden-brown hair, wide blue eyes beneath arched brows, full, humorous lips and a perfectly shaped nose, and the skin of a Dresden porcelain figurine. John Jay and Alexander Hamilton were not the only men of the period who were taken with Sarah Van Brugh Livingston. Both Aaron Burr and John Adams were smitten by her. And even the famously unsentimental George Washington snipped off and mailed to her a lock of his hair.

In the weeks before her wedding, Sarah and her mother worked at collecting the clothing and linens, the silver and
pewter and china and glassware that she would need for her new house in New York. While her mother gave the bride-to-be lessons in running a household, dressmakers worked on Sarah's wedding dress and traveling costume, and servants prepared Liberty Hall for a wedding.

The main house, approached at the end of a gravel drive lined with maples, was a sprawling two-story Georgian affair built of brick and local stone. At one side of the entrance was a large double parlor, with a fireplace at either end. Across the hall was the dining room, and behind this was a cozy library. Upstairs were seven principal bedrooms, including a huge master bedroom, and there were fireplaces in every room, plus one tall enough to stand in, in the kitchen, where all the cooking was done. In a gabled attic at the top of the house were unheated cells—the servants' rooms.

But Liberty Hall was really a working farm and was very nearly self-sufficient. Outside were barns for the cattle, a dairy, stables for the horses, coops for the chickens, and folds for the sheep. There were vegetable gardens and cornfields, an herb garden, and an orchard of apple, cherry, and pear trees. Two ponds were stocked with trout and perch, and all around were pasturelands where the livestock could graze. Across one hillside stood several acres of original climax forest, which provided lumber for the farm and firewood for the house. A small regiment of barnyard cats kept the rodent population under control, and a troop of family collies—with names like Hannibal, Old Brutus, and Xerxes (to be memorialized as they entered the pet cemetery)—protected the sheep from predators. And of course no household was complete without its kitchen dog, whose duty was to lick the plates clean before they were washed by the scullery girl.

The wedding was to be only for family and close friends, but in the hundred years since the first Livingston had come to America, the family had gone forth and multiplied in quite dramatic fashion. The first Jay, who had arrived only a few years later, had done very nearly as well in producing offspring, and so family alone meant nearly three hundred people. Also invited were Verplancks and Brevoorts and Beekmans, Boudinots, Kissams, Alexanders, DeLanceys, and Schuylers, many of whom were already connected to the Livingstons or the Jays through marriage, along with the Van Cortlandts, De Peysters, Morrises, and Philipses—most of the reigning landed gentry of the colony.

On the day of the wedding, the carpets in the double parlor had been rolled back and tucked against the walls for dancing, the furniture had been sheeted and removed and stored in a barn, and fires burned in every fireplace, because it had been an unseasonably chilly spring. But bulbs had come up in the gardens, and Liberty Hall was filled with vases of jonquils and tulips and daffodils, and tall tallow tapers guttered from heavy silver candelabra. The guests arrived, both the men's and women's hair properly powdered, the women under huge hats swagged with tulle and feathers, carrying parasols, because the most disgraceful badge of shame a woman could display in those days was a freckle, which marked her instantly as
déclassé
. The men wore their pigtails, their cutaways, their ruffled jabots, their long doeskin vests, their tight-fitting knee breeches, calf-length hose, and patent-leather slippers with silver buckles. In terms of fashion, wealthy colonists had abandoned the hausfrau-ish look that had prevailed under Dutch rule and were openly dressing in the modes of the royal courts of London and Paris.

The bride looked radiant. She wore a cream-colored dress of silk brocade, embroidered with silver-gilt thread and appliquéd with vines and rosebuds of colored silks. Its sleeves were the fashionable elbow-length, adorned with tiered layers of white lace, while more white lace cascaded from her throat and across her bosom. She carried a white prayer book marked with a single white silk rose.

It was a wonderful day for the Livingstons. It would seem even more wonderful a few months later, when John Jay began to emerge as one of the most important and powerful men in the colonies. It was an even more wonderful day for the Jays, for the family into which they were marrying was the closest thing to American royalty.

The Livingstons were colonial manor lords.

Marriage—that was what propelled a dynasty, a family empire, just as it does today, as prominent family joined prominent family at the altar in mergers of both romance and power, weaving a web of privacy and privilege over the years that would be almost impenetrable to outsiders, a network that in time would seem almost incestuous, confounding genealogists.

Livingstons, for example, either already had married or soon would marry Beekmans, Van Rensselaers, Astors, Jays,
Bayards, and other Livingstons. Jays married Bayards, who married Stuyvesants, who also married Bayards, who married Van Cortlandts, Van Rensselaers, Schuylers, and Philipses. Alexander Hamilton would marry a Schuyler, and Hamiltons would marry Fishes and Stuyvesants. Alsops would marry Robinsons and Roosevelts, and Roosevelts would marry Lispenards and Halls and other Roosevelts. Lispenards would marry Schieffelins, and Schieffelins would marry Jays and Trevors and Vanderbilts, while Jays would marry Iselins and Chapmans until nearly everybody was related to everybody else in some way or another, and until everybody could trace a tenuous relationship to either Charlemagne or Mary, Queen of Scots, or both. Royalty.

Of course this is not to say that all these marriages would be happy ones, that there would be no internecine family feuds, no faithless wives, no cuckolded husbands. There would be all of this and more. There would be scandals. There would be drunkenness and mental illness. There would be adulterous relationships, illegitimate children, divorces, bitter battles over money and inheritances, even a murder or two. All the things that can happen “even in the best of families” would happen within the American aristocracy, just as they have happened in every aristocracy from the beginning of time. And just as they happen today.

But the point is that the drama of America's interwoven aristocratic families has been played out—horror stories and all—against the tapestried background of American history. Their lives have managed to touch nearly every important event in some way or another, but often in ways that might surprise the average history student because, for the most part, American aristocrats have been able to keep their personal ordeals very private.

Only once in a while did chinks in the armored facade of the American aristocracy appear, providing a public glimpse of private agonies. By 1774, the year of the dynastic Jay-Livingston marriage, this had already happened to the Livingstons at least once. Runaway wives were no more a novelty in the eighteenth century than they are in the 1980s, but in the case of another Sarah Livingston, the allegation that she intended to sell her children into indentured servitude added a lurid fillip. This adventurous lady was the subject of the following public notice posted in the
Virginia Gazette
on April 6, 1769:

Whereas my wife Sarah Livingston under the pretense of visiting her father and mother who live in Worcester County Maryland has eloped from me and taken her children with her, whom I am informed she intends to bind out as she gets over the bay; this is to forewarn all persons from receiving indentures of her for the said children and from crediting her on my account from the date hereof.

George Livingston

Otherwise, a concerted effort has been made to keep disturbing family secrets under careful wraps and family skeletons securely locked in family closets. For example, it is a well-known historical fact that Robert R. Livingston, Jr., who was John Jay's classmate and best friend, in later years (when that friendship had soured considerably, as we shall see) was the principal sponsor of Robert Fulton's experiments with steam propulsion. In gratitude, Fulton named his first steamship the
Clermont
, after his sponsor's Hudson Valley estate. Less well known are some of the more sordid details surrounding that relationship.

Fulton, perhaps to secure himself with his benefactors in the Livingston clan, married one of Robert Livingston's numerous cousins, Harriet Livingston. Theirs was a far from happy union. Soon Harriet was complaining to her Livingston relatives of her husband's infidelities, and presently she had even more serious charges. He was stealing, she claimed, her Steamboat Company stock and secretly selling it. Robert Fulton, his wife wrote, “is involved in the horrible sin against a defenseless woman, I must appeal to you for justice.”

But her relatives elected not to involve themselves in Harriet's marital problems, and justice was not forthcoming. But when Robert Fulton died, Harriet had her revenge. She married a man of whom no one in her family approved, an Englishman named Dale.