The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  Chapter One introduces New Jersey governor William Livingston, a passionately intellectual signer of the Constitution, who in the hugely influential magazine he edited and wrote in the early 1750s laid out the Lockean and constitutional rationale that the colonists wielded two decades later to justify their revolt to themselves and to the world. Chapter Two presents two of the Lee brothers who grew up in princely Stratford Hall, Virginia, and played central Revolutionary War roles—one as a Continental Congressman and signer of the Declaration of Independence, the other as a key wartime diplomat and propagandist for the American cause—along with their cousin, a dashing, though tragic, Revolutionary War commander, who also lived in Stratford. The saga of these fourth-generation Americans, who worked as a team for the cause of independence, dramatizes why people whose ancestors had built the country out of wilderness by their own efforts and at their own expense were not likely to take orders from London about how to run it over a century later.

  The commanding figure of Part Two of the book, “The Federalists,” is George Washington, unquestionably the Founding’s key figure, who won the war, presided over the legendarily amicable and successful Constitutional Convention, and invented the office of president of the United States, setting the country on what, based on a lifetime of profound reflection and an unusual wealth of experience, he believed its course should be. The Founding’s visionary in chief, he had a genius for recognizing and managing gifted people and motivating them to use all their considerable ingenuity to fill out the details of his idea. Part Two also paints a portrait of the underappreciated John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States. He was in fact the early republic’s most canny diplomat, who with classic American initiative took the bit between his teeth to win a much more advantageous treaty ending the Revolution than anyone imagined possible (especially America’s French allies), and whose later Jay Treaty gave the new nation the long interval of peace that Washington believed it needed to grow and prosper.

  Completing Part Two is a portrait of the childless Washington’s brilliant young protégé, the fatherless Alexander Hamilton, whose economic system brought into being the opportunity society that Washington wanted. To Treasury secretary Hamilton, who came to America a penniless immigrant, economics was soulcraft: only political liberty and a diversified economy, with a multitude of career possibilities, could allow individuals to develop all the talents that were within them: talents that would otherwise molder away in disappointment and frustration—and that, developed, would increase the prosperity of all. It’s telling that in founding the mint, Hamilton made sure to provide coins of very small denominations, so that the humblest of Americans could participate in his opportunity economy, pursue their happiness, and rise as high as their abilities would permit.

  Part Three, “The Republicans,” depicts the third and fourth presidents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, such close friends and allies that Madison served not just as Jefferson’s secretary of state but in effect as his prime minister or even co-president. “When Madison was asked his opinion by a common friend, he very often replied by putting the question, ‘What says Mr. Jefferson?’” a contemporary recounts of the Jefferson administration. “Ask Jefferson for information, and he would not infrequently answer, ‘Go to Mr. Madison—that was his measure—he knows a good deal more about it than I do.’ On being told this, Madison would smilingly say, ‘It was his measure, not mine. I only helped to carry it into execution.’”23 Chapter Eight tries above all to portray Jefferson’s extraordinary, original, Enlightenment mind—not without its conflicts, though. Chapter Nine, an account of Madison as the Father of the Constitution, examines America’s extraordinary Founding document both in theory and in practice. And Chapter Ten, on Madison’s presidency, shows how so profound a theorist proved a surprisingly weak and irresolute chief executive, the legacy, perhaps, of standing so long first in Washington’s and then in Jefferson’s shadow.

  The Founders at Home had its origin in a relatively recent visit to Monticello, which, though a lifelong architecture buff, I had never seen before. I was electrified—not just by the brilliance of its design, but because the house struck me as a vivid embodiment of Jefferson’s soul, speaking in the most direct and personal way of his ideals and worldview. On the same Virginia trip, I saw, also for the first time, Mount Vernon, the work of art through which Washington, like Jefferson a gentleman-architect, expressed his deepest longings and most cherished values as he enlarged and improved the house, and sculpted and perfected the landscape, for over forty years, until the very last day of his life. I visited Montpelier, then in the midst of an extraordinarily ambitious project to restore it to the house that Madison had built but that a twentieth-century enlargement had swallowed up. The experience was like being at the excavation of Pompeii, breathlessly watching a long-lost past come back to light.

  So I was hooked. As I thought of retelling the story of the Founding through biographies, so as to convey the immediacy and concreteness of the experience of the men who created it, it occurred to me that not only the words the Founders wrote but also the houses they built would bring their living reality home all the more vividly. Because they were trying to create a new nation where Americans would be truly at home, the houses they themselves inhabited (and in most cases designed and built) offer a vivid glimpse, in the most up close and personal way, into the ideal of life they imagined for themselves and for their countrymen. So each biography includes a description of the subject’s house—all of them open to the public and richly worth visiting. It’s an overstatement to say that they are haunted by the spirits of the great men who conceived and lived in them; but when you visit, you will know that you are in their presence.

  1

  Conceived in Liberty: William Livingston and the Case for Revolution

  WHEN DID THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION begin? John Adams thought it started long before the shots rang out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775—even before Bostonians stained their harbor dark with tea in December 1773 or British redcoats shot down Americans in cold blood in the Boston Massacre of March 1770.

  “But what do we mean by the American Revolution?” Adams asked in a revisionist 1818 essay. “Do we mean the American War? The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations. . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.” Anyone who wants to trace that cultural revolution and understand how it fused the American colonists into an independent nation, Adams advised, need only read the pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills that flooded America between 1760 and 1775.1 However spectacular, the war, Adams wrote Jefferson in 1815, “was only an effect and consequence” of that revolutionized worldview.2

  In fact, though, the cultural transformation Adams described had started even earlier than the 1755 Harvard graduate remembered. It began in New York, with a shy but intellectually fiery lawyer named William Livingston, the editor and chief writer of a pathbreaking weekly magazine that from November 1752 to November 1753 disseminated throughout the colonies the world-shaking Lockean ideas of government by consent and the right of the people to depose a tyrannical king. Livingston’s pugnacious Independent Reflector won fervent subscribers not only in New York but also in Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, and colonial newspapers reprinted the magazine’s essays for years afterward. Benjamin Franklin was an enthusiastic reader, and James Madison recalled that his fellow Princeton students read the Reflector’s essays avidly two decades later and strove to emulate what he called their “energy and eloquence” in their public-speaking assignments.3 Livingston thundered out impassioned polemics for the next quarter century; but although he also served in the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, and as New Jersey’s governor for fourteen years, no mark he made on the fate of the continent proved as fateful as th
e one he imprinted on the American mind in those twelve pivotal months in the mid-eighteenth century.

  SHY THOUGH HE WAS, Livingston was to the manor born—to Livingston Manor, a 160,000-acre principality his grandfather Robert had wrested from the Hudson Valley forest in the late seventeenth century. Robert’s clergyman-father had fled Scotland for Holland with his family when his Presbyterian scruples barred him from swearing allegiance to Charles II after the Restoration, so Robert had grown up fluent in Dutch as well as English, a skill that greased his way to riches when he reached the New World in 1673. A Boston fur merchant hired the nineteen-year-old newcomer as his agent in Dutch-speaking Albany, gateway to the lush, beaver-thronged woodlands of the New York colony that England had seized from Holland only nine years earlier. The enterprising youth won the Albany fur traders’ confidence and soon set up in the lucrative trade for himself. Mastering the Iroquois language, he became secretary of the Board of Indian Commissioners, with privileged access to the pelt supply. As another step in his single-minded self-advancement, in 1679 he married Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer, widow of the recently deceased head of the vast Van Rensselaer patroonship surrounding Albany, and entered “ye Ranke of honest men,” as one merchant put it, in welcoming Robert into the Dutch establishment and the Dutch Reformed Church.4

  Only so honest, however. Though not himself a pirate, Robert did later act as lead financier of his friend Captain William Kidd’s fabled 1696–99 piratical rampage, and many thought his own business methods verged on piracy, starting with his acquisition of Livingston Manor.5 In 1684, he got a royal patent confirming his title to 2,000 virgin acres on the Hudson River’s east bank below Albany, which he had bought from the Mohicans for 300 guilders’ worth of cloth, guns, and kettles. The next year he bought 300 more acres 20-odd miles to the east. But in 1686, he somehow finagled a patent of ownership declaring the two widely separated parcels to be “adjacent,” thereby giving him title to the land in between and magically transmuting 2,300 acres into 250 square miles, while also making him lord of the manor (a term of ownership, not a title of nobility). A new royal patent in 1715 gave the manor a seat in the colonial Assembly, cloaking generations of Livingstons with the political might of their own pocket borough.6

  In 1691, New York’s royal governor appointed Robert victualer to the Albany and New York City garrisons, to feed the soldiers at a set fee, regardless of the real cost of the provisions. The soldiers fared so ill that the next governor complained that Robert “has made a considerable fortune by his employments in the Government, never disbursing six pence but with the expectation of twelve pence[;] his beginning being a little Book keeper, he has screwed himself into one of the most considerable estates in the province. . . . [H]e had rather be called knave Livingston than poor Livingston.”7 In 1710, a new governor settled some of the 3,000 Palatine German refugees from war and famine, who had come to America under Queen Anne’s protection, on Livingston Manor to produce tar for the Royal Navy, while Robert was to provision them. A winter of spoiled meat and not much of it sparked armed revolt, which redcoats quashed. Most of the Germans fled to more hospitable spots, and the disgusted governor branded Robert “ye most selfish man alive.”8

  When Robert died, rich and powerful, in 1728, his shrewd son, Philip, added thousands more acres to the Livingston domain and supplemented its industrial-scale saw-mill with New York’s first ironworks in 1741. By 1765, it smelted ore from Livingston land into 1,500 tons of America’s best iron each year. The manor produced beef, flour, hides, dried peas, and timber, too, shipped down the Hudson in Livingston vessels, along with the bales of furs for costly hats, to New York, the West Indies, and Europe.9

  WILLIAM LIVINGSTON, the youngest of the six sons (and three daughters) of Philip and his wife, Catherine Van Brugh, came into the world on November 30, 1723, in the family home in Albany. With the step-gabled ends of its houses facing the street, Dutch style, and their stoops scrubbed clean daily, the little frontier town looked like a stage set of Vermeer’s Holland improbably dropped down into the north woods. Its thrifty, burgherly manners echoed Dutch culture, too, and William probably went to school at the Dutch church where he’d been baptized—though, as the son of a rich merchant and a relative of all the colony’s patroon grandees, he later spoke nostalgically of “the ease and affluence in which we were bred.”10 Each summer, the Indians came to Albany to sell their furs, and a camp of wigwams sprouted around the town. Livingston got to know them and their language well when his new tutor, a Yale-trained minister, went to serve as a missionary to the Mohawks and took his eleven-year-old pupil to live with them in the woods for all of 1735—good fur-business training, Livingston’s father thought.11 That year, a world away in London, Alexander Pope published his Epistle to Arbuthnot, and Handel’s Ariodante premiered at Covent Garden.

  At thirteen, rather than the more usual seventeen, Livingston went to Yale, and he emerged after graduation in 1741 transformed, not by the Presbyterian orthodoxy of the college’s teaching but by the riches of its library, which electrified him. Above all, he devoured Locke, especially the Letter on Toleration, whose urbanely reasonable case for freedom of thought and religion—with its mild observation that you’d no sooner swallow a monarch’s prescription for your bodily than for your spiritual health, neither of which concerns the state—resonated with Livingston’s deepest intuitions. Given Yale’s reputation in those early days for fierce republicanism, the budding intellectual probably studied Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, along with the other classics of seventeenth-century English republicanism that he later cherished in his own large library—James Harrington’s Oceana, for instance, which like Locke’s Second Treatise argued for a government based on consent, protecting the natural rights of life, liberty, and religious freedom through a system of checks and balances; or Algernon Sidney’s Discourses, which maintained that men have “the liberty of setting up such governments as best please themselves”; that they have not just the right but indeed the duty to rebel against, and even kill, tyrants who threaten their liberties; and that justified rebellion only makes a nation stronger.12

  From Sidney, Livingston also learned the importance of a culture of virtue: “Liberty,” Sidney had written, “cannot be preserved if the Manners of the People are corrupted”—“manners” meaning in that age a combination of customs and values.13 Like Livingston, many of the Founding generation avidly read these republican writers, and many joined him in poring over Joseph Addison’s Cato, a now stilted-seeming 1712 verse drama about a heroic champion of Roman republicanism against Julius Caesar’s military dictatorship, who served the colonists as a model of all that they meant by republican virtue. At Yale, Livingston also read the wildly popular magazines that Addison wrote with Sir Richard Steele—the Tatler and the Spectator—which in their breezy, conversational way sought to cultivate in their readers the skeptical good sense and educated taste that, almost by reflex, judge everything freely, politics included. He also read (and later imitated) the era’s greatest writer, Alexander Pope, whose poetic satires proved the power of public ridicule to curb abuses.

  The skeptical rationalism Livingston learned from these English writers only strengthened when the evangelical revival movement known as the Great Awakening convulsed Yale in his last years there and swept his fellow students, most of them studying for the Presbyterian ministry, into its enthusiasm, which many found an emotional liberation from the sifting of theological minutiae key to Yale’s teaching. Keenly curious, Livingston went to hear the Awakening’s celebrity preachers, George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent, in 1740, but he remained unawakened, choosing to steer with cool Enlightenment reason between the dogmatism of his teachers and the hysteria of his fellow students. “I can never persuade myself,” he told a classmate, “that such Convulsions, . . . trances, groanings, . . . Shakings, . . . Ecstasies . . . are any Sign that Christianity prevails amongst a people.”14

  LIVINGSTON’S FATHER planned to split the chores
of his empire among his six sons, sending several as merchants to New York City and the West Indies, and anointing William the family lawyer. That William had a talent for drawing and wanted to study painting was of no interest to his ruthlessly determined father, who apprenticed him in 1742 to New York City’s leading attorney, James Alexander, a rich, intelligent Scottish immigrant with no flair for teaching. The young clerk began copying wills, deeds, and so on, in that pre-photocopier, pre-computer age, and reading, often from dawn until midnight, the then-standard text, Volume One of Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes, a property-law treatise that seemed to get longer the more he read, he lamented, “so that ’twas impossible to attain the conclusion thro’ all the ages of Eternity.”15 In 1745 the frustrated clerk complained in a pseudonymous newspaper column that “To make a young Fellow trifle away the Bloom of his Age, when his Invention is Readiest, his Imagination Warmest, and all his Faculties in their full Vigour and Maturity” was “Drudgery . . . fit only for a Slave.”16

  His next pseudonymous article, a year later, unluckily failed to conceal his identity, and it got him instantly fired, for it lampooned his boss’s wife. When Mrs. Alexander, an heiress at the top of New York’s pecking order, wouldn’t let her daughter accept a valentine from Trinity Church’s young organist as beneath her status, Livingston—who hated pretension as only someone born to rank and wealth but not to social ease and charm can—exploded with contempt in a piece in the New-York Weekly Post-Boy entitled Of Pride, arising from Riches and Prosperity. Asserting what would become an insistent American sense that “Real Dignity and Worth are personal and intrinsic” rather than external qualities (as he later wrote in the Reflector), Livingston rebuked his boss’s wife, not by name but recognizable as New York’s “haughtiest and most insolent Woman,” for forcing her daughter to a crude breach of good breeding, properly understood. After all, he said, with more radical egalitarianism than he perhaps intended, God himself “makes no Difference between the Monarch and the Beggar; but considers the universal Race of Men as his Children and Family.” When Livingston couldn’t deny Alexander’s outraged accusation that he was the author, the ex-clerk found himself back in Albany four months before his four-year apprenticeship would have ended.17