America's Secret Aristocracy (7 page)

The Jays, however, were merchants and resented any sort of outside government interference. John Jay's father had often spoken of how intolerable the situation had become, that a continent as large and as prosperous as America had grown should be ruled by a tiny island three thousand miles away. Independence was a much more recurrent theme in
family conversations than revolution, and if independence from Great Britain could be achieved without the untidiness of war, that was what wealthy colonists like the Jays would have much preferred. Families such as the Jays felt they owed Britain nothing for their success in America. They had succeeded despite the burdens of British taxation. The fact that none of John Jay's eight great-grandparents had been English was important to him; three had been French, and five had been Dutch. Therefore, he was one of the few men of the Revolution who could say, as he did in 1796, “Not being of British descent, I cannot be influenced by that tendency towards their national character, nor that partiality for it, which might otherwise be supposed to be not unnatural.”

The Jays and other early New York families like them were also, in a genteel way, opposed to slavery, and John Jay himself would later help organize the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves. Though New York families such as the Jays kept slaves themselves, most had adopted the practice of paying their slaves small wages that were designed, in time, to permit slaves to purchase their freedom. On the other hand, these New Yorkers were willing to admit that theirs was a somewhat special situation. In New York, slaves were used primarily as household servants. In the South, slaves ran the vast factory-plantations and were considered indispensable to the southern economy. An anti-slavery stance was easy in the North. As one of John Jay's relatives once commented, “Freedom … greatly helps their morale and from a selfish point of view it makes a staff much easier to deal with.”

John Jay's attitude would be a cautious one of wait and see. “Even if we could free all slaves now,” he once said, “I do not think it would be wise. But we should prepare now for eventual abolition of slavery by educating our Negroes and giving them opportunities to learn a trade and earn their independence.” As an independent merchant's son, he tended to equate freedom with free enterprise.

At college, John Jay had decided upon a career in law. An older brother, James, had already joined the family import-export business and was more or less running it while Peter Jay, now semiretired, busied himself managing his big farm and country estate in Rye.

John Jay's decision to become a lawyer had made his father a little nervous. The law had become the most snobbish of
professions in New York and, through such institutions as The Moot club, had become an elite fraternity that welcomed no outsiders. A few years earlier, an association of New York lawyers had adopted a resolution designed to keep the profession, and the business, to themselves. It was a perfect catch-22 rule: No one could become a lawyer who had not apprenticed as a clerk, while, on the other hand, no clerk “who proposed to enter the profession” could be hired. But this stricture had proven to be impossible to enforce, and it had been loosened a bit. Clerks, the legal profession had conceded, could in fact train to be lawyers and even be licensed as such, but “under such restrictions as will greatly impede the lower class of the people from creeping in.” Would his son be deemed a gentleman enough to be a lawyer, or would he be labeled a lower-class creeper? This worried Peter Jay.

Then, in the spring of 1763, when John Jay was in his last year at King's College, an incident occurred that could have ruined his career forever.

It seemed that, as a lark, a group of high-spirited young students had decided to set upon and smash a certain table that sat in a corner of College Hall. The sounds of splintering furniture attracted several professors to the scene, who proceeded to summon Dr. Myles Cooper, the college president, who was not amused. He lined the errant students up in military fashion and asked each young man, in turn, two questions: “Did you break the table?” and “Do you know who did?” To both questions, the young men answered “No” as Dr. Cooper moved down the line. Near the end of the line, the president approached Jay. “Mr. Jay, did you break the table?” Dr. Cooper asked. “No,” was the reply. “Do you know who did?” “Yes,” replied John Jay.

Dr. Cooper then demanded to know the names of those responsible for the nefarious deed, to which John Jay responded with a lawyerly argument in which he pointed out that nowhere in the college's regulations was there a rule that required a man to inform on his fellow students. Dr. Cooper was unimpressed, and John Jay was given a one-year suspension from King's College over the affair. Returning the following year, however, Jay completed his studies with honors and, in front of His Majesty's Council, General Thomas Gage, and other colonial worthies, he delivered an impressive dissertation on the blessings of peace and was given his bachelor's degree in 1764.

Two weeks later, in return for the sum of two hundred dollars, he was admitted as a clerk-apprentice in the offices of Mr. Benjamin Kissam, a barrister “eminent in the profession,” to serve for five years. He completed his training in four years, was admitted to the New York bar in 1768, and was ready for the next step upward—the dynastic marriage.

John Jay may have seen himself as a man more suited to the contemplative life of “a College or a Village,” but his lively and ambitious young wife saw herself as someone cut out for far more than that. Sarah Livingston Jay was a woman who seemed to be designed for grand entrances, for great, theatrical descents down marble staircases, for red carpets and gilded ballroom chairs, for royal courts and courtiers and thrones where turbaned Nubians waved peacock-feathered fans. She seems to have been born with presence, with an ability, wherever she went, to take the center of the stage and hold the spotlight, and whatever her new marriage consisted of, she was determined that she and her husband were going to be in the thick of things—important things, national things, international things. She had brought into the marriage her Livingston dowry and her Livingston name, which could only help further her ambitions. For herself and her husband, she set her sights on the top. A favorite gesture was to touch her adoring husband's dark coat sleeve and whisper gently but urgently,
“Come, John!”

Only a few months after the Jays' wedding, in 1774, Sarah's father, the steadfast Whig, was appointed to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia and, at Sarah's urging, her husband was also invited to join this gathering of colonial notables who were convening to explore ways and means to settle their disputes with the Crown. It was a classic case of the ancient maxim that the son-in-law also rises.

Jay had remained reluctant to support the growing tide of opinion that advocated America's separation from the British Empire even if it meant violence. But Sarah Jay urged him that it was his patriotic duty, his historic calling, his God-given obligation to serve the country of his birth in its time of need.

At twenty-eight, he was one of the Congress's youngest members, and even to have joined this anti-Royalist body called for no small amount of courage. In the Congress, his father-in-law saw to it that he was given the important task of drawing up an address to the people of Great Britain listing
the colonies' grievances against George III. At that delicate stage of British-American negotiations, any expression of opposition to the king could have meant an invitation to the gallows, but Jay brought it off and returned from Philadelphia to find himself a colonial hero.

At the Second Continental Congress, a year later, Jay addressed similar statements of grievances to the governments of Canada, Jamaica, and Ireland. In preparing these documents, it was clear that Jay had become a master of a kind of eloquent, drumrolling political rhetoric that was designed to stir men's souls. “Though vilified as wanting spirit,” he wrote, “we are determined to behave like men; though insulted and abused, we wish for reconciliation; though defamed as seditious, we are ready to obey the laws, and though charged with rebellion, will cheerfully bleed in defense of our sovereign in a righteous cause.”

Jay was in Philadelphia when the news of the events in Lexington and Concord swept through the colonies. The great war had begun. In the summer of 1776, Jay was attending the provincial congress of New York and therefore missed the opportunity to affix his signature to the Declaration of Independence. But he was chairman of the committee that drafted the New York State Constitution and shortly afterward was named the first chief justice of the state. In 1778, he returned to the Continental Congress and, in December of that year, was elected its president. Sarah was delighted.

Seventeen seventy-nine was a year of ferocious fighting, and Spain had entered the fray, loaning the colonists 219 bronze cannon, 200 gun carriages, 30,000 muskets, 55,000 rounds of ammunition, 12,000 bombs, 4,000 tents, and 30,000 uniforms, and would supply the revolutionaries with more than five million dollars in aid before the war was over. Britain had reacted angrily, and George III had offered the Spanish king the territories of Florida and Gibraltar, as well as cod-fishing rights off Newfoundland, if Spain would withdraw her support of the Americans. With Spanish sympathies hanging in the balance, it was decided that an emissary must immediately be sent to Spain to secure Carlos III's continued help in the Revolutionary cause. The man chosen for this high diplomatic mission was John Jay.

Sarah Jay, who had never crossed the Atlantic or set foot outside the American continent, was ecstatic. She would be curtsying before the Spanish monarch, and he would be kissing
her hand. Was there any wealth more ancient than that of the Bourbon kings? There was never any doubt about whether Sarah Jay wanted to accompany her husband on his mission to Madrid. The only question was whether anyone could stop her.

5

A Gentleman's War

William W. Reese is a New York banker in his middle forties who is a member of the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company. He and his beautiful artist wife live in an attractive apartment on Park Avenue and keep a winter condominium in Palm Beach; all very ordinary upper-crust New York stuff, you might say. And yet William Reese is one of a number of quietly successful young Americans who take their descendancy from the early aristocratic families very seriously and who consider themselves aristocratically superior to what passes for New York “society” today—though they would never say so except in the company of close friends and others whom they recognize as their own sort. An aristocrat, by definition, never boasts of being one.

Bill Reese confesses to gaining a quiet pleasure walking about New York and feeling a sense of belonging to a place his ancestors helped build. “I can pass a building and think, That's the corner where my great-grandfather's house stood. That old building was where my great-uncles went to school. That little park used to be part of one of my ancestors' apple orchard, and that statue is of a relative of mine. My ancestors helped build that hospital, that museum. This was where the reservoir used to be until some of my ancestors, the Astors, gave the money to build the public library.…”

On his father's side, Bill Reese is descended from Livingstons, who, of course, are by now connected to everybody else, including the Astors, and on his mother's side the connections are to the Otises of Boston, about whom there are
many family legends, many of which may be apocryphal. According to one, Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, whenever she introduced herself, always quickly added, “And we are not in elevators. We were elevated when there were just stairs.”

To maintain a sense of connection with his family's long American past, William Reese belongs to at least twenty patriotic, genealogical, and social organizations, including the Union Club, the Knickerbocker Club, the Rockaway Hunting Club, the Racquet & Tennis Club, the Down Town Club, the Church Club, the Badminton Club, the University Club, the Metropolitan Opera Club, the Society of Colonial Wars, the Military Order of Foreign Wars, the New England Society, the Order of Colonial Lords of Manors in America, the Society of the War of 1812, the St. Nicholas Society, the Sons of the Revolution, the Huguenot Society, the Sons of the American Revolution, the Mayflower Descendants, and the American Society of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. As can be deduced, many of Mr. Reese's ancestors have fought in wars. “One has a special affection,” he says, “for ancestors who have died fighting in wars for their country.”

William Reese often lunches at the University Club, that marvel of McKim, Mead & White architecture at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan, and the University Club also honors its war dead. On one wall of the club's entrance lobby, a bronze plaque commemorates club members who fell in World War I. On the opposite wall, a similar plaque memorializes those members who died in World War II. Mr. Reese, who is too young to have fought in either of these wars, often studies these two plaques. “I want you to notice something,” he says. “The World War One plaque lists twenty University Club members who were killed in that war, which America was in only for a very short period of time. The World War Two plaque lists only eight members killed, or less than half, even though we were involved in that war for a much longer time. I like to think it is because World War One was the last war that was fought by gentlemen.”

Other explanations for this discrepancy come to mind—more modern medical techniques, for example. Or the fact that World War II came at the end of the Great Depression, during which many gentlemen gave up their club memberships as a matter of economic necessity. But Mr. Reese's explanation is the aristocratic one, the nostalgic one, the
romantic one, the proud one from a descendant of proud old families, and it has a certain piquancy and charm. Aristocracy, after all, is also a frame of mind.