America's Secret Aristocracy (5 page)

“That Englishman Dale!”
—as he is referred to today in the family that prefers not to remember, or has made it a point to forget, this villainous fellow's Christian name—took Harriet off to England with him, where he quickly spent what was left of Harriet's considerable Livingston fortune.

When Harriet died, her last request was that her body be returned to America for burial. The Englishman Dale complied
and shipped Harriet Livingston Fulton Dale in her coffin back to the Livingstons—collect.

Not even an aristocracy is spared the vicissitudes of anguish and humiliation.

3

Manor Lords

Mr. Henry H. Livingston of New York City is a securities analyst specializing in transportation issues (after all, an ancestor financed the first steamship) with the aristocratic, Boston-based firm of Kidder, Peabody & Company. In his middle sixties, Henry Livingston is a tall, trim, ruggedly good-looking man, impeccably tailored and wonderfully well spoken, as befits a Livingston and an alumnus of the Hotchkiss School and Yale University ('40). His are a particularly
American
sort of good looks—weather-beaten, tanned, his face lined in all the right places—the looks of a proper country gentleman, which he is at least part-time. He is a member of either the ninth or the eleventh (depending on how one counts in this large and complicated family) generation of American Livingstons, and he has the prominent Livingston nose. Or perhaps, since the blood of Livingstons became commingled with the Jays' long ago, it should be properly called the Jay nose (both the earliest Jays and Livingstons had Roman noses). Thus, whether the nose today is a Jay nose or a Livingston nose is as debatable a point as any taken up by the pre-Revolutionary Moot club.

Henry and Maria Livingston keep an apartment on Manhattan's fashionable East Side, and their country place—Oak Hill, on the Hudson River—sits on two hundred acres of the vast demesne that in the seventeenth century became known as Livingston Manor, the largest and the first of the great manorships created in America by the English king. Oak Hill itself was built in 1795 by Henry Livingston's great-great-great-grandfather John Livingston and has been handed down
through the family since then. A cousin, Honoria Livingston McVitty, owns a ninety-acre parcel of the old manorship nearby, and still other cousins own smaller lots of this scenic and historic land.

Oak Hill was the first house in the region built with large windows, seven feet tall and three feet wide, to command a river view. Built of brick that was baked on the premises, the walls of the house are two feet thick. Large, formal rooms—the smallest twenty-six by twenty-four feet—extend off a wide central hallway, and these are filled with Livingston family heirlooms and artifacts, eighteenth-century dining room chairs, and fine old family portraits.

“Yes,” Henry Livingston says, “I was brought up always reminded that I was a Livingston, and that I was expected to conduct myself as one. The family was always very proper on manners. And we grew up surrounded by family portraits, and so it was hard not to get the impression that these people, who had died two hundred years ago, were a part of us, part of the family, and that we were a living part of their past. And yes, of course there are upper-class values that show up in people, that are born into people, and that tend to come out in a more affluent class—elements of taste, discretion, and morality which help to create people who know how to handle themselves, and who know how to accept responsibilities. It isn't something that was taught from my father's or grandfather's knee, exactly. It's something that, in a family like ours, comes through almost by osmosis—the knowledge that, as Livingstons, we were expected to rise to occasions.”

By rising to occasions, Henry Livingston does not refer just to the grand occasions when numbers of his ancestors gallantly marched off to wars, to be decorated for bravery or to die on the field of honor, though he admits that this is part of it. There were also the small occasions, such as the time Mrs. Peter Van Brugh Livingston caught fire. She had appeared at a New York reception wearing a fashionable headdress of the day, a tall, nodding affair composed of blue ostrich plumes. The party was illuminated by glass lusterware candelabra, and at one point in the evening she became so engrossed in conversation that she stepped under one of these and nodded her plumes directly into the flames. The fire was quickly extinguished by other guests, and Mrs. Livingston was unhurt, although her headdress was ruined. But rather than make a fuss, she apologized to her hostess for the trouble she
had caused and later told the story as a joke on herself.

Henry Livingston has four grown children, two sons and two daughters, but only one of his eight grandchildren so far—little John Henry Livingston—has the family name. “We intend to keep Oak Hill in the family if we possibly can,” he says. “My children have always loved the place. There's a way you can set up a trusteeship so it's permanent. Also, since it's a landmark, there's a possibility we might get a special tax break if the house were opened to the public at certain times.”

He can't help but grow a little wistful thinking about the old days of the colonial manor lords. “The manors were run like early corporations,” he says. “Livingston Manor was run like an early version of IBM, and the point of the manorial system was to encourage the growth potential of the country. The manor lord was given the rights to hold courts, collect taxes, maintain roads, and to maintain his own militia, but the point was to develop the land and make it productive. The first lord sensed that there was lead and iron ore here, and Livingston Manor provided ninety-nine percent of the iron used in the Revolution. Settlers were encouraged to come as tenants, to provide a labor force. A tenant was given tools, food, seed, and the wood to build himself a house within a year. Then it was his to live in for his lifetime, plus one generation. Some manors had disgruntled tenants. Not us. The manor system was very carefully structured, and out of it the lords gained a perception of government, and a perception of what the land and the surrounding environment could yield. For instance, all the trade up and down the Hudson River was developed and managed by the Livingston manor lords. Breaking up the manors resulted in the same sort of mess that's come from the breakup of AT&T. You can't just keep dividing up land, and then dividing it again, every time someone dies. I'm not a Royalist, but the manorial system was a system that
worked
.”

Needless to say, Henry Livingston is a member in good standing of the Order of Colonial Lords of Manors in America, a patriotic society of proven descendants of manor lords.

Looking back from a distance of all those generations, Henry Livingston can perhaps be forgiven for looking at the manorial system somewhat romantically. In fact, it was neither as pretty nor as simple as he describes it in the 1980s.

In the early seventeenth century, when the New York and
New Jersey colonies were under Dutch rule, the Dutch West India Company had created a system of patroonships—
patroon
translates as “patron” or “master”—under which the company's more important officers were rewarded with large tracts of land to do with as they wished. The first of these was Rensselaerwyck, purchased in 1630 for Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, an Amsterdam-based director of the company, and Rensselaerwyck set the tone of the other land grants that followed. It consisted of more than seven hundred thousand acres on the west bank of the Hudson (including the town of Albany) and was purchased from the Indians for “certain quantities of duffels, axes, knives, and wampum,” making it, along with the purchase of Manhattan Island, one of the better bargains in the history of real estate. Kiliaen Van Rensselaer never bothered to visit his property, but his descendants did, including, eight generations later, Stephen Van Rensselaer, who inherited the estate at the age of five and went on to found America's first scientific college, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in 1824 at Troy, New York, just across the river from his family's property.

During the British colonial period, the British monarch continued the Dutch policy, granting manorships to important colonists who had proven useful, in one way or another, to the British cause or to British trade with the colonies. Among these manors were Pelham Manor, granted to Thomas Pell; Philipsborough, to Frederick Philipse; Morrisania, to Lewis Morris; and Cortlandt Manor, to Stephanus Van Cortlandt; these properties were always in choice locations, either in the Hudson River valley or along the Atlantic coast or Long Island Sound. But the very first of these British manorships, along with the title of lord of the manor that went with it, had been ceded to Robert Livingston in 1686 by James II. Thus, just as in the British House of Lords a premier peer is one bearing the oldest title of his degree, the Livingstons could consider themselves the premier American family.

On the other hand, if the Livingstons today tend to create the impression that they were granted their great manorial lands as the result of some noble and meritorious service to the king, this is incorrect. They earned their original land in quite a different way. They married it.

The first American Livingston—known as Robert the First or the first lord by his descendants, and who was Sarah Van Brugh Livingston Jay's great-grandfather—was born in Scotland
of poor but genteel parents. His father, John Livingston, was a Presbyterian clergyman, a man of stern and uncompromising principles. When Charles II (who, it was rumored, had Papist sympathies) ascended to the throne of England in 1660, John Livingston refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the new king. As punishment, he and his family were ordered into permanent exile. The Livingstons fled to Rotterdam, where Robert Livingston spent his boyhood years.

Perhaps because he had seen what refusal to compromise or bow to the wishes of higher-ups had done for his father, young Robert Livingston appears to have decided two things as a youth: He would adapt to situations with chameleonlike ease, and he would cultivate friends in high places. As a young teenager, Robert had gone to work in the Dutch shipping trade, and by the time his father died, when Robert was eighteen, he had put aside sufficient savings for his next big step: America and the booming—and very lucrative—fur trade.

Tall, muscular, and rugged of countenance, as are many of his male descendants today, Robert Livingston was, essentially, an adventurer. In today's parlance, Robert would probably be called a hustler, a high roller, a social and entrepreneurial Alpinist, a seventeenth-century Donald Trump. In Europe, American beaver was in great demand and commanded high prices. Beaver muffs and tippets adorned the most fashionable European ladies, and beaver trimmed or lined the coats and headgear of kings and courtiers. In America, beaver pelts could be bought from the Indians for wampum, and wampum was easily counterfeited. Indeed, the manufacture of counterfeit wampum had become something of a cottage industry in Holland. A number of New England fortunes had already been made from the hides of the little dam-building mammal, but by the mid-1670s the New England fur trade was in trouble. In fact, when Robert Livingston arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1674, the odds against his achieving success in the fur trade seemed formidable, even for an ambitious young man of twenty.

For one thing, the ponds and streams and swamps of New England had been hunted nearly clean of beaver, and the animal was close to extinction in the region. The only fresh supply of beaver lay west of the Hudson River, beyond the small trading settlement of Albany, New York. But, although New York had become a British colony ten years earlier, Albany remained a staunchly Dutch settlement, firmly under
the sway of the Dutch Reform Church, and anything English was anathema. New Englanders in particular were distrusted. Furthermore, the beaver-rich lands west of the Hudson were controlled by the Five Iroquois Nations, and the Iroquois refused to trade with either the English or New Englanders, dealing only with the Dutch. This stood to give the Dutch traders of Albany something of a monopoly on the fur business. If the New England traders were to stay in business, Albany somehow had to be penetrated. Robert Livingston saw himself as the man uniquely suited to do this. He might be a Scots Presbyterian, but he spoke Dutch fluently. He could go to Albany and pass himself off as a Dutchman.

In Massachusetts, Robert had some tenuous but important connections: the powerful Winthrop family, a member of which had been an acquaintance of Robert's father. In Massachusetts, the Winthrops were very much the right people to know, and once the personable young man had presented himself to them, he waited for them to introduce him to the person he was looking for—ideally, someone in the fur trade who was interested in hiring a bright young man to be his agent in Albany, thus advancing Robert Livingston up to the next rung of his ascent. It wasn't long before just such a person appeared. His name was John Hull, and he had been frustrated in his attempts to deal with either the Iroquois or the New York Dutch. To Hull, Livingston pointed out that he was already bilingual and foresaw no difficulty in learning the Iroquois language. He had also foresightedly brought with him a freshly minted supply of Dutch wampum. Hull, who had nothing to lose, agreed to let the young man give the venture a try, and Robert Livingston promptly set off across the Berkshire and Taconic mountains.

Fortuitously, another very important person had just arrived in Albany. Or perhaps it was not so fortuitous, and Robert, who kept an ear to the ground in the shipping business, may have been well aware that Nicholas Van Rensselaer was heading for the Dutch settlement and would be arriving just a few weeks before Robert did; the timing seems too close to have been pure coincidence. Nicholas Van Rensselaer, son of Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, had been dispatched by his family in Holland to assume command of Rensselaerwyck, if “command” is not too strong a word, considering Nicholas's limited abilities.