America's Secret Aristocracy (9 page)

Europe, meanwhile, was caught up in something that was far more exciting than politics or what was going on across
the ocean in America. Two Frenchmen, Joseph Montgolfier and his brother Étienne, had sent up a balloon filled with hot air into the sky. Next it would be a manned flight, in a great balloon decorated with crimson scallops, signs of the zodiac, wreaths, gargoyles and griffons, portraits of Apollo, and golden fleurs-de-lis. It ascended, then bobbed and tossed over the rooftops of Paris. Sarah Jay wrote excitedly home to her family after witnessing her first balloon flight that “Mr. Jay and I might think of taking our passage back home to America next spring on the wings of the wind.” More seriously, she added that balloons “certainly might be used for carrying mail.”

Ballooning captured Europe's imagination far more than the American Revolution. Balloon motifs were suddenly being used to decorate crockery, fabrics, wallpapers. Women's hairdos went up in balloon shapes, and the balloon-shaped dress, with balloon-shaped sleeves, became the fashion.

Marie Antoinette had introduced Sarah to the French court's dressmakers and milliners, and Sarah immediately began ordering dresses, hats, gloves, and accessories in these fanciful new styles. When the packages containing her Paris purchases were shipped home, her relatives—who had been reduced by wartime shortages to dresses of homespun cloth and even of potato sacks pieced together—gasped in astonishment. Never had they seen such finery. One ball gown was of Chinese silk into which real peacock feathers had been woven. Another contained so many layers of handmade Alençon lace that it weighed nearly twenty pounds.

Indeed, so gloriously bedecked and regal in her bearing had Sarah Jay become, so successful in employing those traits of Marie Antoinette which she had found “worthy of imitation,” that one evening, entering a theatre in Paris with the marquis and marquise de Lafayette, the entire audience rose to its feet at the sight of her. They had mistaken the twenty-six-year-old Sarah for their twenty-eight-year-old queen.

When John and Sarah Jay returned to New York in 1784, they were given a hero's welcome. Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, the war was over, and Jay had negotiated a marvelous peace treaty. Sarah, in her Paris finery, was an international celebrity. The Jays had become the absolute leaders of New York society. The Jays' big new house at 8 Broadway became the scene of glittering entertainments, and Sarah's “Dinner and Supper List” was probably the first list
of who was who in New York society in American history. When her list was published in 1787, it was read avidly. It contained, among others, an Alsop, Aaron Burr, a Cadwalader, a De Peyster, a Gerry, a Huger, a Pinckney, a Van Rensselaer, two Lees, five Van Hornes, and seven Livingstons.

Sarah's list also included Alexander Hamilton and his wife, Betsey, who was the daughter of General Philip Schuyler, making Hamilton another Livingston cousin by marriage. But with Alexander and Betsey Hamilton one had to exercise a certain amount of care. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had never liked each other, and now their animosity was quite open. Burr had also made an auspicious marriage, to Theodosia Prevost, the widow of a British officer, and the Burrs entertained grandly at Richmond Hill, their mansion outside the city. But it was Burr who kept the rumors circulating that Hamilton was “not a gentleman” and had secrets in his past too scurrilous to mention in polite company. Hamilton, meanwhile, had things that were just as nasty to say about Burr. It had become impossible to entertain both men under the same roof.

Of course everyone had heard the rumors that Hamilton had an eye for the ladies and that he supported mistresses of a decidedly lower-class sort. But if his wife was aware of the gossip, as she must have been, she chose the patrician mode and ignored it. And Hamilton remained as suave and charming as ever, so it was impossible not to like him. It was also at this point not very prudent to dislike him. In 1784, the year of the Jays' return, he had organized the new nation's first bank, the Bank of New York, and was working on a national currency system based on the U.S. dollar. Aaron Burr announced that he would rather put his money in a mattress than in Hamilton's bank. Others were not so sure.

Sarah Jay skirted the issue by inviting the Hamiltons and the Burrs to alternate parties.

Her house at 8 Broadway was certainly designed for opulent entertaining. There were two dining rooms—a large one for formal gatherings, and a smaller one for more intimate affairs. There was of course a ballroom, and there were also other rooms that had no particular purpose other than to impress the guests. There was a room hung with red and gold leather, there was a blue and gold room, and there was a large parlor at the back of the house and “the small parlor” in front. At the head of the stairs was a tapestry room; beyond
lay yellow rooms and red rooms and chintz rooms and damask rooms. Everywhere tall mirrors caught the candlelight, and beneath them lay tables and sideboards and buffets set out with massive silver serving pieces. Damask window hangings and costly carpets and cut-velvet upholstery in wine and golden hues completed Sarah's plush-era decor.

In Europe, she had made herself knowledgeable about French cookery and had even brought back with her from Paris her own French chef—a theretofore unheard-of luxury. Soon her menus were the talk of the town, and she had also learned the rule that every successful American hostess who came after her would have to master: In order to please the gentlemen guests, the food should not only be good, but there should be a lot of it. After the long years of wartime shortages, Sarah Jay's meals were downright sumptuous. A typical menu contained not only fresh lobster and beef but also shrimp and mutton and lamb and veal, fowl with truffles, pies, puddings, custards, ice creams, jellies, and fresh fruits in season—melons, wild strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries. She even introduced such rarities as oranges, pineapples, and bananas. From the fashionable
bonbonneries
—Joseph Corre on Wall Street and Adam Pryor on Broadway—came pastries, éclairs, petits fours, pound cakes, crullers, and cinnamon comfits, as well as candies of all varieties.

The crusty and eccentric French minister, Count de Moustier, had such a low opinion of American cooking that whenever he was invited out, he sent his personal chef as an advance party to prepare his meals for him. But in the case of the Jays' parties, he paid them the signal honor of leaving his chef at home.

Naturally, a couple who lived and entertained as grandly and conspicuously as John and Sarah Jay became the object of a certain amount of envy, particularly among Sarah Jay's less well-off female contemporaries. John and Abigail Adamses' daughter, Nabby, who was married to Colonel W. S. Smith, could barely suppress a certain waspish tone when she wrote home to her Massachusetts-based mother about the Jays' New York entertainments. “Mrs. Jay gives a dinner almost every week,” she wrote to her mother in 1788, “besides one to the
corps diplomatique
on Tuesday evening.” A few weeks later she wrote,

Yesterday we dined at Mrs. Jay's, in company with the whole
corps diplomatique
. Mr. Jay is a most pleasing
man, plain in his manners, but kind, affectionate and attentive; benevolence is stamped on every feature. Mrs. Jay dresses
showily
, but is very pleasing on a first acquaintance. The dinner was
à la Française
, and exhibited more European taste than I expected to find.

Still, despite all the glamour, one is tempted to wonder: Was the Jays' a
happy
marriage? The answer is that it was probably as happy as that of any ambitious and successful couple who find themselves in the public spotlight and enjoying it. The only rule of marriage in the American eighteenth century was that a wife was to be absolutely obedient to her husband. To a young woman of the period who was about to be married, Dr. Benjamin Rush had laid out the terms of marriage without mincing any words:

From the day you marry you must have no will of your own. The subordination of your sex to ours is enforced by nature, by reason, and by revelation. Of course it must produce the most happiness to both parties. Mr. B. [the intended husband], if he is like others of his sex, will often require unreasonable sacrifices of your will to his. If this should be the case, still honor and obey him.… The happiest marriages I have known have been those when the subordination I have recommended has been most complete.

Sarah Jay, being a woman of both independent nature and independent means, may well have resented these harsh strictures. If she did, she was clever enough not to let her resentment show.

It was an era, furthermore, when public demonstrations of affection between the sexes were frowned upon, particularly among members of the upper, or “respectable,” middle class. Earlier in the century, European visitors had been startled by the open way young American men and women “sparked,” and the marquis de Chastellux, observing a courting couple holding hands in a park, had commented on “the extreme liberty that prevails in this country between the two sexes, as long as they are not married. It is no crime for a girl to kiss a young man.” What the marquis did not realize was that the couple he had witnessed could not have been members of the
upper class. Among country folk and others of the lower classes, the courting ritual of “bundling”—in which a young man and woman climbed into bed together, with all their clothes on, and kissed and cuddled—was still considered a proper way for young people to learn about each other's anatomies. But it is safe to say that John and Sarah Jay had never bundled.

As the eighteenth century drew to a close, American upper-class attitudes toward courtship and marriage became even more prudish and inhibited. All that was permitted was
flirting
. If a young woman found a young man attractive, she could cast her eyes downward and flutter her eyelashes. But if he reached out to her arm, she would tap his wrist prettily with the corner of her fan. It was a mating dance of little invitations, and little rejections, that went on and on.

Sarah and John Jay's marriage was also very much a business partnership. His assignments called for him to be away from her side for long periods of time, and during his travels she often retreated to her parents' estate, Liberty Hall. Their only communication during these periods could be through letters, and Sarah's letters kept him up to date on the political gossip of the day: “Poor Jacob Morris looks quite disconsolate. King says he thinks Clinton as lawfully governor of Connecticut as of New York, but he knows of no redress.” And Jay's letters to Sarah were usually little more than lists of instructions concerning duties he wished her to perform: “On the road I met Mr. Sodersheim.… He told me Mr. McComb was in gaol, and that certain others had ceased to be rich.… Mrs. McComb must be greatly distressed. Your friendly attention to her would be grateful and proper.”

Only now and then did John Jay let down his patrician side enough to let a little glimmer of affection show through, such as when he wrote, “Tell me,” referring to her eyes, which he had not looked into for months, “tell me, are they as bright as ever?” And in her letters to him she was fond of calling her communications “little messengers of love.”

In 1788, the gossip in New York centered on other things besides Sarah Jay's parties. There was important social news from London to the effect that fashionable people were now serving dinner at five or even six o'clock, though the author Horace Walpole had written, “I am so antiquated as still to dine at four.” New Yorkers would likewise advance the dinner hour, even though this would mean that society people
who dined out would have the novel experience of driving home in their carriages after dark. From Paris, where revolutionary talk was reported among the masses, came the news that a doctor named Joseph Ignace Guillotin had endorsed a new beheading machine. “My victim,” announced the good doctor, “will feel nothing but a slight sense of refreshing coolness on the neck.” In a very short time Sarah Jay's mentor, Marie Antoinette, would be treated to this refreshing coolness.

New York, meanwhile, buzzed with talk about an extraordinary newcomer in town. He was a thoroughly unprepossessing and even loutish little man named John Jacob Astor, but he was becoming a force in the financial community. He had arrived from Germany just a few years before, had atrocious manners, and spoke with an all but unintelligible German accent. It was said that his wife was the daughter of his boardinghouse landlady (this was true). He had started out as a musical instrument salesman but had gone into the fur trade and made a fortune. Now he seemed in the process of making a second fortune in Manhattan real estate—“Buy by the acre, sell by the lot” was his motto. Certainly he seemed socially unfit for Sarah Jay's “Dinner and Supper List.” But how was he to be treated? Just as the Livingstons had made themselves the principal landlords in the Hudson River valley, Mr. Astor seemed bent on becoming the principal landlord in New York City.

In any society, a man who is suddenly very rich cannot be ignored. Some sort of accommodation to new money has to be made. Even in a supposedly fixed and hereditary aristocracy such as England's, it is always possible for the wealthy upstart to purchase himself a peerage. Was this Mr. Astor's plan?

It was beginning to look that way.

But by 1789, all this talk and speculation gave way to pure American chauvinism as New York prepared to inaugurate George Washington as the new nation's first president. In advance of this April event, the city flung itself into such a celebratory orgy of party giving as it had never seen before and would rarely see again. The new president set off from Mount Vernon through great triumphal arches, with wreaths of roses scattered in his path. In Trenton, New Jersey, he passed through thirteen rose-draped arches—one for each colony—supported by rose-bedecked columns, at the bases of
which stood thirteen maidens in long white robes, bearing a banner that read, “T
HE
H
ERO
W
HO
D
EFENDED
T
HE
M
OTHERS
W
ILL
P
ROTECT
T
HE
D
AUGHTERS
.” When he reached Elizabeth, New Jersey, the president boarded an enormous canopied barge manned by thirteen sailing captains to carry him across the Hudson River and deposit him at the foot of Wall Street, where he mounted red-carpeted steps to what looked like a maharajah's howdah slung with more banners and bunting. White rose petals were scattered in front of his feet as he made his grand, processional entrance to the city.