America's Secret Aristocracy (6 page)

Nicholas Van Rensselaer was an altogether curious man.
He was given to periodic spurts of extravagant spending, and his family may have sent him to Albany—where there was nothing to buy except furs—to keep him out of the luxurious jewelry shops of Brussels, Amsterdam, and London, where he enjoyed purchasing emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, rubies, and pearls. He also occasionally went into spiritual trances, in which he heard voices and had prophetic visions. In one of these, he had seen Charles II sitting on the throne of England, and when he relayed this news to Charles—then still a prince and in exile in Belgium—Charles liked what he heard. When, a year or so later, Charles did ascend to the throne, the new king decided that Nicholas might have something, and Nicholas found himself named the official chaplain to the Dutch ambassador in London. Nicholas arrived in Albany bearing royal documents appointing him pastor and spiritual leader of the settlement, though how he obtained his ordination has never been quite clear.

To the residents of Albany, the arrival of Nicholas Van Rensselaer was probably not a welcome event. A patroonship without a resident patroon had been a much more easygoing place. And the fact that Nicholas was also the personal pet of the new British monarch can have done little to endear him to the Dutch settlers. But there was very little they could do about it. Nicholas had the king's blessing, and he owned the place—the town and all the countryside for miles around, as far as the eye could see or the imagination wander, the biggest patroonship of them all.

But it was clear from the outset that he had no idea how to run such a place. Having been handed Rensselaerwyck, he seemed to want to have nothing to do with it and rarely spoke to his neighbors and tenants—who were also officially his diocesal flock—though he was often observed in the streets of Albany sermonizing excitedly to himself. His first move was a frivolous one. It was to marry Alida Schuyler, the young daughter of the almost as rich and powerful Dutch Schuylers. Nicholas was his new wife's senior by a full twenty years.

Nicholas Van Rensselaer was as odd-looking as he was acting. Though only thirty-eight, he looked much older. Thin and stooped, with peering, myopic eyes, he was nearly bald and, with the exception of a skimpy, sandy moustache, he appeared beardless, with a sallow, waxy complexion and a thin, blue-veined nose. By contrast, his eighteen-year-old wife was a handsome, buxom, pink-cheeked Dutch girl who
was so outgoing that she seemed positively bouncy. Still, since she was an aristocratic Schuyler and he was an aristocratic Van Rensselaer, they were Albany's
only
important couple, and when Robert Livingston arrived in Albany, Nicholas and Alida were the only right people to get to know. In an outpost the size of Albany, this was not difficult to do.

Sizing up the situation, and recognizing Nicholas's inability to run Rensselaerwyck, Robert Livingston quickly offered to give the Van Rensselaers a helping hand, and this was just as quickly accepted. To give Nicholas credit, he seems to have known that he was quite out of his depth with the estate. And so, with the title of secretary of Rensselaerwyck, Robert Livingston became what amounted to Nicholas Van Rensselaer's chief executive officer, leaving Nicholas happily with his visions and his voices. Soon Nicholas conferred another title on the fast-rising Robert: secretary of the city of Albany. And soon after that he was given a third and even more important post: secretary to the Board of Indian Commissioners, because by then, as he had promised, he had become one of the few white men to learn the Iroquois tongue. Now Robert Livingston wore four hats, because he was still the Albany representative of John Hull, fur trader of Boston. And if being on the Board of Indian Commissioners while simultaneously trading with the Indians represented a conflict of interest, no one bothered to mention it at the time.

As Nicholas Van Rensselaer's secretary, handling all his personal and business affairs while Nicholas was lost in the confusion of his mystical reveries, Robert Livingston may have noticed that Nicholas and Alida's marriage was a loveless one. It was certainly a childless one, and it may have been a sexless one. Alida was a beautiful young woman in her early twenties. Robert was a lusty young man just two years older. Nicholas was only in his early forties, but he seemed to be aging rapidly. Suddenly, in the autumn of 1678, after Nicholas and Alida had been married not quite four years, Nicholas Van Rensselaer became desperately ill, and his illness defied diagnosis and treatment as he worsened daily. According to a family story, Nicholas Van Rensselaer lifted himself from his deathbed that November and cried out for his secretary to take down his will. Robert Livingston rushed in, pen in hand, to take down the patroon's last wishes. But if such a will was ever dictated, it was never
found, and Nicholas Van Rensselaer died intestate at age forty-two.

If you believe a Van Rensselaer rumor, still circulated to this day, Nicholas was poisoned. But by whom? Alida? Robert? Robert and Alida conspiring together? Whatever the dark facts may have been, Robert Livingston and Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer were married less than eight months later, and nine months after that—almost to the day—the new Mrs. Robert Livingston presented her husband with their first child, a son named Johannes, a nod both to Robert's father, John, and to Alida's Dutch antecedents.

Thus with Robert and Alida's marriage had begun the inexorable transformation of the vast patroonship of Rensselaerwyck into the even vaster Livingston Manor, with Robert as its first lord. Much more would have to happen, of course. There would be long legal battles over Nicholas Van Rensselaer's estate. Loyalties would have to be tested, relationships strained. Fires would be set, and blood would be shed. More land would be acquired, by fair means and foul, and from Indians only too willing to trade their lands for European goods and guns, until Livingston Manor would grow to a million acres.

4

Ancient Wealth

“Aristocracy,” states a Chinese proverb, “is ancient wealth.”

In America, of course, no wealth is really very ancient. But it is still a rule of thumb that the longer a family has had its fortune, the loftier is its degree. In America's unwritten class system, as little as ten years' added tenure can mark the difference between an “established” family and parvenus. By the time of John Jay's marriage, the Jays in America were already quite rich and well connected. But the difference in status between the Livingstons and the Jays was based on the fact that in 1679, when Robert Livingston took Nicholas Van Rensselaer's rich widow to the altar, securing her properties for his heirs, the first American Jay was still an impoverished youth in Europe, drifting from country to country, looking for his own main chance.

This was John Jay's grandfather Augustus Jay, a descendant of a once prominent French Huguenot family that traced its lineage in France back to the early sixteenth century. Augustus's father, Pierre, had been described as “an active and opulent merchant” in the city of La Rochelle, and at the age of twelve Augustus (or Auguste, as he was then named) had been sent to England to be educated. It is said in the family that the original name was
J'ai
—“I have it.” But by 1685 they no longer had it. The position of Protestants in Catholic France had always been shaky, and when the Edict of Nantes was revoked that year, all the family's property was confiscated. Augustus, then twenty, decided to seek his fortune elsewhere: first in Holland, then England, and finally in America, where he arrived in 1686. This was, coincidentally,
the same year that Livingston Manor was ceded to the first Robert Livingston, with Robert as its first lord.

In New York, Augustus Jay found a pleasant and well-to-do Huguenot community of French escapees like himself, which worshipped at L'Eglise des Réfugiés, the “French Church.” And soon Augustus Jay was also prospering as an importer and merchant. From England he imported homespuns and woolens and mohair, hats, gloves, and beer. In the West Indies he traded cargos of flour, bread, and pork in return for shipments of sugar and rum. Augustus Jay's merchant trading ships even journeyed to such remote ports as present-day Suriname, on the northeast coast of South America.

Like Robert Livingston, Augustus Jay was able to make a socially and financially auspicious marriage. In 1697, he married Anna Maria Bayard, a granddaughter of Govert Loockermans, who, when he died in 1670, was the richest man in the colony. On her mother's side Anna Bayard counted members of most of the great manorial families of New York—the Van Cortlandts, the Van Rensselaers, the Schuylers, and the Philipses—as her cousins. Anna Bayard's father, furthermore, was a nephew of Governor Peter Stuyvesant, and the Stuyvesants and Bayards were even more intricately related. Peter Stuyvesant's wife had been the former Julia Bayard, and Peter Stuyvesant's sister had married his wife's brother. Thus there had been a Mrs. Stuyvesant née Bayard and a Mrs. Bayard née Stuyvesant. In one quick marital maneuver, Augustus Jay had succeeded in collecting nearly the entire catalogue of Old Knickerbocker names as his in-laws.

This would mean that John Jay and his bride, Sarah Livingston, were cousins by marriage in a complicated sort of way through “the Schuyler Connection”; Sarah's great-grandmother had been a Schuyler.

Augustus and Anna Jay's union produced four children, three daughters and one son, Peter, John Jay's father. Peter Jay had been trained to follow in his father's international mercantile footsteps from an early age. At eighteen, he had been sent to Europe, where he transacted business in London, Bristol, Paris, and Amsterdam for the family firm. Returning to New York, he continued to follow his father's example by making a dynastic marriage. Peter Jay's bride was his mother's young second cousin, Mary Anna Van Cortlandt of Cortlandt Manor, the daughter of Jacobus and Eve Philipse Van Cortlandt and a granddaughter of the first lord of the
manor of Philipsburg, Frederick Philipse (pronounced “Philipsee”). Thus it is possible to see why their son John, by the time he reached King's College, could consider himself very much to the manner, if not to the manorship, born.

John Jay cannot have had a particularly happy childhood. Of the ten children born to Peter and Mary Jay, in those days of high infant mortality, only seven lived to adulthood, and four of these suffered from mental or physical handicaps. An older sister, Eve, was emotionally disturbed from the time she was a litte girl, and an older brother, Augustus, was mentally retarded and could never learn to read or write, despite the family's continued efforts with private tutors. Another older brother, Peter, Jr., and sister, Anna, had been completely blinded by smallpox in the epidemic of 1739. Despite their children's afflictions, Peter and Mary Jay had tried to raise their family in Manhattan until a few months after John Jay's birth in December 1745. Then, as Peter Jay wrote, “considering the helpless condition of part of my family,” he decided to move to the country. The Jays settled in a large, rambling house in Rye, New York, overlooking Long Island Sound, where “the little blind ones” would be protected from “the dangers and confusions of the city life.”

John Jay's education was somewhat eccentric, though aristocratically Spartan. As a child he had been taught “the rudiments of English, and the Latin grammar” at home by his mother, and by age seven he was deemed ready to enter grammar school. The school chosen was a church-run affair in nearby New Rochelle, which, as the name suggests, had been settled mainly by French refugees, from the provinces of Aunis and Saintonge. The school was run by the curmudgeonly Reverend Peter Stoope, a French Swiss who had been pastor of the French Huguenot Church, which had recently joined New Rochelle's Episcopal Communion. Dr. Stoope spent most of his days pondering arcane mathematical theorems and seemed unaware that his parsonage, in which his school was kept, was collapsing into near-ruin. John Jay would later recall that, in order to keep the snow off his bed in winter, he would have to stuff the broken windowpanes with chips of wood. Dr. Stoope's wife was in charge of the school's domestic arrangements and was “as penurious as he was careless.” If there was anything at all served at a meal beyond a cup of thin soup, it might be a small piece of boiled potato or a bit of stale bread. Jay would also later tell of how,
to avoid what to a teenage boy seemed like imminent starvation, he and his classmates would take to the woods in search of nuts and berries, which they would bring back concealed in their stockings, lest they be confiscated by Mme. Stoope. Dr. Stoope's school offered one advantage—the classes were taught in French, which would stand Jay in good stead later on when he was named a colonial emissary to Paris. John Jay endured three years of Dr. Stoope's school and its rigors before being brought home to Rye to be prepared for college by a private tutor.

At the time, the entrance requirements for King's College were that a boy be able to translate “the first three of Tully's orations and the six first books of Virgil's Aeneid into English, and the first ten chapters of St. John's Gospel into Latin”; to have a mastery of Latin grammar, and to be “expert in Arithmetick as far as Reduction.” All this he was able to master, and when he was admitted to college he was just fourteen.

Politically, the man who would be hailed as a great Revolutionary patriot was already beginning to emerge, but it would be wrong to see him as a budding socialistic firebrand or militant anti-Royalist. On the contrary, the Jays and their friends were political conservatives. Like other well-to-do New Yorkers of the period, the Jays worried that a revolution would lead to government by the proletariat, a most unsettling thought.

The Livingstons, by contrast, were outspokenly Whigs. The literary circle of the era regularly met at the home of William Livingston, and at one of these gatherings John Jay's future father-in-law had rather shocked his guests by reading some ballads he had composed that appeared to mock the king and the monarchy. The Revolutionary movement, of course, was still only a matter of whispered speculation, something that was only vaguely in the air, and since the Livingston ballads might be considered seditious, it was decided that they should be burned, for safety's sake, by the public hangman.