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

by Myron Magnet

  It came in less than three months. On December 12, 1799, he rode round his farms, as usual, but hail began to fall, and then snow. Not wanting to keep his guests waiting when he got back, he came to the dinner table without changing his wet clothes or drying his hair. The next day, with snow still falling and now with a sore throat, he walked down toward the river to mark trees for felling, still sculpting his estate. He woke in the middle of the night, his throat aflame; and though he felt ill enough to wake Martha, he wouldn’t let her go get help for fear she’d catch cold. When morning came, he could hardly “utter a word intelligibly,” wrote Tobias Lear, who sent for a doctor.164

  Two more came in the course of the day, and the trio drained about half the blood from Washington’s body and dosed him twice with a powerful laxative, orthodox but harmful steps. The youngest doctor, judging (probably correctly) that an acutely inflamed epiglottis was closing the patient’s throat and suffocating him, suggested a tracheotomy to bypass the obstruction and allow him to breathe, but as the operation had been performed only some two dozen times since the year 1500, his seniors dismissed the possibly lifesaving idea. Struggling for breath, the sixty-seven-year-old Washington told Lear that he knew “the disorder would prove fatal,” and to one of the physicians he said, “Doctor, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go.” He was afraid, however, of being put in Mount Vernon’s family vault while still alive, so he made Lear promise not to bury him for at least three days after he died. Holding back tears, Lear could say nothing, and Washington asked if he’d understood. The grief-stricken secretary raised his hand in assent. “’Tis well,” Washington said—and took his departure for the land of the spirits.165

  His wife never slept in their bedroom again but moved to the plainest of plain little rooms in Mount Vernon’s attic. For four days before the December 18 funeral, Washington lay in his New Room, under the light of its stately Venetian window, and as news of his death spread, church bells tolled and shops shuttered across the land.166

  In the will he had so meticulously drafted, Washington had lovingly cataloged his landholdings—some 51,000 acres (not counting Mount Vernon), which he conservatively valued at $465,000, which with livestock, securities, and building lots in Alexandria and the federal city brought his total estate to $530,000. To defend those acres, and more, the old soldier left one of his swords to each of his six nephews, with “an injunction not to unsheath them for the purpose of shedding blood, except it be for self-defence, or in the defence of their Country, and its rights; and in the latter case to keep them unsheathed, and prefer falling with them in their hands, to the relinquishment thereof.” And he urged his executors “not to be precipitate in disposing of the landed property, . . . experience having fully evinced, that the price of land” has “been progressively rising, and cannot be long checked in its increasing value.”167

  Such was his faith in the boundless future of the nation he had founded.

  6

  John Jay: America’s Indispensable Diplomat

  FEW COULD FATHOM WHY fifty-five-year-old John Jay turned down President John Adams’s nomination to rejoin the Supreme Court when his two terms as New York’s governor ended in 1801. What would lead him, in the hale prime of life, to retire instead to the plain yellow house he’d just built on a hilltop at the remote northern edge of Westchester County, two-days’ ride from Manhattan, where visitors were few and the mail and newspapers came but once a week? After twenty-seven years at the forge of the new nation’s Founding, why would so lavishly talented a man give up his vital role on the world stage for the quiet life of a gentleman farmer?

  But just that option—to enjoy the peace and domesticity that “gladden ye Heart, & in some Measure gild this iron cage with Streakes of Gold,” as he wrote his father-in-law—is what he had labored more than a quarter century to bring about, and he felt he had achieved it.1 As the first chief justice both of New York and of the United States, as president of Congress and governor of his state, as secretary for foreign affairs, and, most important, as the diplomat who stamped his vision on America’s foreign policy for generations to come, he had striven to ensure for his countrymen the peace, order, and stability that had seemed to him fragile and elusive from the moment he was born.

  Even from before he was born, in fact. When you visit his comfortably solid and serene Federal house, overflowing with the rich treasures and curiosities he and the four prosperous generations of his descendants who lived there accumulated, it comes as a shock to read his family history as he sketched it in old age. It is a record of oppression and violence. His Huguenot great-grandfather, a rich merchant in La Rochelle, had sent his eighteen-year-old son Auguste on a trading voyage to Africa (for slaves, no doubt, though Jay is silent) in 1683, two years before Louis XIV revoked the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which had granted Protestants civil liberty in Catholic France. Like so many Jews in Nazi Germany centuries later, the Huguenots should have seen “the fury of persecution” that was coming in 1685 and fled sooner, Jay remarks. “Such, however, is human nature.”

  Only after troops had leveled La Rochelle’s Protestant church and occupied great-grandfather Pierre Jay’s house did Pierre send his family to England and then clandestinely intercept one of his returning ships before it reached port, diverting it across the Channel to join them. Once sold, the ship and its cargo kept him in comfort ever after, though the French treasury swallowed up the fortune left behind. With no word of what had happened, young Auguste, Jay’s grandfather, returned from Africa to find his family gone and his world turned upside down. Friends snuck him aboard a ship bound for South Carolina, whose miasmal climate soon drove him to New York.2

  Hired by Frederick Philipse, one of the colony’s richest merchants, Auguste—now Augustus—entered a world with its own brand of violence and instability, since among other ventures Philipse traded with Madagascar pirates for slaves.3 On one voyage Augustus fell into the hands of Saint-Malo’s dread privateers, from whose fortress he daringly escaped, though his shipmate didn’t make it. Of grandfather Augustus’s marriage to Anna Maria Bayard, all Jay reports is that one of her forebears was a Protestant theology professor in Paris, compelled to flee French anti-Protestant oppression for refuge in Holland.4 Their son, Peter—Jay’s father—grew up to marry Mary Van Cortlandt, granddaughter of Frederick Philipse, whose Protestant family had been driven by Catholic persecution from Bohemia to Holland and then to New York. Thus Jay, says his son and biographer William, could claim the distinction of having three “ancestors who chose to abandon their country rather than their religion.”5 Like the Plymouth Pilgrims and so many later immigrants to the New World, Jay and his family never forgot that they’d escaped to a unique refuge from the Old World’s murderous tyranny.

  A sense of life’s fragility hung over Jay’s childhood; at six, he was already grave and reserved, his father said, though “indowed with a very good capacity.”6 Before he was born, smallpox had blinded an elder brother and sister, for whom, Jay later wrote, “this World has not been a Paradize”;7 of his four other siblings, one was retarded and another emotionally disturbed. Shortly after John’s birth on Manhattan’s Pearl Street in 1745, Peter Jay moved his brood to a farm bordering Long Island Sound in Rye, an easier setting for his two blind children. (You can visit it today, rebuilt beyond recognition.) Though Peter had grown rich as a merchant, married an heiress, and counted most of the colony’s Dutch and Huguenot establishment as his relatives, and though he and Mary were loving parents, Jay’s childhood after he went to boarding school at age eight in the French-speaking Huguenot town of Nouvelle Rochelle had its share of privations. His eccentric schoolmaster treated his pupils “with little food and much scolding,” Jay’s son reports. The boy struggled to keep the snow off his bed by blocking up his broken window with scraps of wood.8

  AFTER ENTERING six-year-old King’s College (later Columbia) at fourteen and spending four happy years among his twenty-odd fellow collegians, Jay—six feet tall, stick-thin, rou
nd-shouldered, and fine-boned, with a sensitive mouth and thoughtful, melancholy eyes—began his law studies as a clerk for kindly, whimsical Benjamin Kissam, who perceived at once the young man’s talent. Your “Whirl of Imagination,” he wrote his clerk, “bespeaks the Grandeur . . . of the Intellectual Source from whence the Current flows.”9 Fellow clerk Lindley Murray, whose school grammars and readers later sold in the millions, remembered him as “remarkable for strong reasoning powers, comprehensive views, indefatigable application, and uncommon firmness of mind.”10 Right after Jay joined the bar in 1768, lameness temporarily sidelined the successful Kissam, and he unhesitatingly turned his cases over to Jay.

  But Jay’s placid interval was short-lived. In the first year of his four-year apprenticeship, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, and six months later the American Revolution had its prologue a few blocks from Kissam’s John Street office at New York’s old city hall on Wall Street, where Federal Hall now stands. There the Stamp Act Congress convened in October 1765, only the second time that representatives of the American colonies had ever met together and the first time they themselves, rather than royal authorities, had convened such a conclave—a measure that shocked the Lords of Trade in London.11 More important, it was the first time that the colonies unitedly drafted a Declaration of Rights, in which they claimed “the Freedom of a People, and the Undoubted Right of Englishmen, that no Taxes be imposed on them, but with their own Consent.”12 Such big doings down the street—especially since one of New York’s five delegates to the Congress was a Bayard cousin of Jay’s, and another was Judge Robert R. Livingston, father of Jay’s best friend—made so strong an impression on the nineteen-year-old that eleven years later, at the First Continental Congress, he effortlessly recalled in debate the rules that the Stamp Act Congress had followed.13

  Historians speak of the 1765 Congress, with its fulsome pledges of loyalty to the king, as conservative. It was a funny kind of conservatism, though; for when Judge Livingston, probable author of the group’s Address to the King, wrote New York’s London agent that no one should view the meeting as factious, since it aimed to divert Parliament from a course that sooner or later “will naturally render the colonies independent,”14 he was veiling a threat under an assurance. The New-York Gazette had already made that threat explicit four months earlier, writing that with Britain and her colonies at such cross-purposes, “the Connection between them ought to cease—and sooner or later it must inevitably cease.”15

  Unambiguously unconservative was the response of a New York mob a week after the Congress broke up. At dusk on November 1, the day the Stamp Act was to take effect, a mob of sailors, youths, farmers, and blacks, along with some more properous folk, began to form, armed with clubs and torches, and threatening to bury Royal Artillery major Thomas James, who reportedly had vowed to cram the stamps down New Yorkers’ throats with the point of his sword. Outside Fort George at Manhattan’s southern tip, where the first shipment of stamps lay under Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden’s protection, the crowd hanged effigies of Colden and ex–Prime Minister Lord Bute, before burning them in a bonfire, along with the outraged Colden’s cherished carriage of state. Then the rioters surged to Major James’s newly furnished house and wrecked it, frenziedly smashing rich furniture, mirrors, paintings, and even windows and doors, slitting and shredding the mattresses and silk curtains, stealing the silver, trampling the garden, guzzling the wine, and smearing butter over what remained. At four in the morning they straggled off.16 Peter Jay witnessed part of the riot and rushed his family “to our more peaceable habitation in the country.”17 Rumors of mobs coming to plunder the town swirled for the next week, and British commander in chief Thomas Gage warned Colden that if such a mob materialized and his redcoats opened fire on it, the result would be insurrection and civil war.18

  IN THIS TURBULENT ATMOSPHERE—and rioting went on sporadically in the city of 18,000 for the next decade—John Jay came of age and worked out his view of the world and of himself.19 A week after the Stamp Act passed (but before the news reached America), he was still an adolescent, writing one of his few letters of this period, a passionate, unguarded avowal of friendship to Judge Livingston’s son, also named Robert R. Livingston, with an eager pleasure in young Robert’s having “opened wide those Doors of Friendship, into which I had long desired to enter” and looking forward to “our voyage to Eternity.”20 But after New York’s November riots, the city’s thirty or so lawyers suspended business because they refused to use the hated stamps required for legal documents (with unerring stupidity, young George III and his ministers had passed a radicalizing measure that fell hardest on America’s opinion-forming lawyers and journalists). Hence law clerk Jay had ample time to meditate upon the ferment seething around him. By the last year of his legal apprenticeship, 1768, everyone at the lawyer-dominated Debating Society that Jay belonged to knew what one of the debaters meant (in a match that Jay’s side won) when he spoke feelingly of “the Blessings of order and Tranquility and of the pernicious Consequences of Faction and Riot.”21

  Looking back on this period a decade later in a letter to young Livingston—who had been his law partner from 1768 to 1770 and would go on to become chancellor of New York, secretary for foreign affairs, one of the negotiators of the Louisiana Purchase, and the backer of Robert Fulton’s steamboat enterprise—Jay mused on the changes he saw in himself. Back in 1765, he wrote, “Bashfulness and Pride, rendered me . . . sensible of Indignities . . . [and] prone to sudden Resentment.”22 How right he was about the stiff-necked pride, a mixture of ambition, stubborn principle, and hair-trigger defensiveness against an ever-present sense of threat. A few weeks before his college graduation, he got briefly suspended for refusing to snitch on a classmate and brandishing the college bylaws to show that no rule required him to do so. As a novice lawyer he had all but challenged the colonial attorney general to a duel for conduct he thought “represents me in an insignificant Point of View,” and he even expressed willingness to duel with an aggrieved young man he’d turned down for membership in the fashionable dancing assembly he cochaired.23 But though in those days he seemed more suited for life as a professor in some ivory-tower village than as “a citizen of the World,” he told Livingston, he had since developed the requisite urbanity, flexibility, and self-mastery.24

  Though he didn’t mention it, he’d gained one other quality he’d confessed to having lacked in 1765—an understanding of women. For in 1774 he married his friend Robert’s second cousin, Sarah Van Brugh Livingston, who shines out from her vivid letters like all of Jane Austen’s winsome heroines rolled into one, with sense and sensibility to spare. Then seventeen while her husband was twenty-eight, Sally was one of the witty, spunky, and beautiful daughters of New Jersey governor William Livingston, of Independent Reflector fame. Of Sally, the courtly Gouverneur Morris bantered the year before her marriage, “Never was a Little Creature so admired (I speak seriously). . . . As to her Heart when in the Midst of her Admirers it singeth with Joy. . . . The rosy Fingers of Pleasure paint her Cheeks with double Crimson. . . . And so it will continue if the Whim does not take her to get in Love.”25 But the whim did take her, and as her sister Kitty wrote a few years later, “Mr. & Mrs. Jay can be unhappy no where. They love each other too well.”26

  WHEN THE COUPLE returned from their wedding trip in late May, though, Jay, like grandfather Augustus before him, found the world turned upside down. While he was gone, news had reached New York of the first of Parliament’s Intolerable Acts, closing Boston’s port in retaliation for the December 1773 Boston Tea Party—of which New Yorkers had held their own version the week before the Jays’ wedding, dumping overboard the first cargo of East India tea to reach town.27 Jay, by now a leading lawyer earning £1,000 a year, found himself already named to a committee to correspond with the other colonies and decide what to do, a committee whose numbers, form, and name shifted over the next two years as the currents of New York politics—Livingstonite and De Lanceyi
te, merchant and mechanic—ebbed and flowed, but that ended up running New York City and the entire colony. The committee joined the call for a continental congress, to which Jay won election in July 1774.28

  Jay’s townsmen pegged this youngest of all the congressional delegates as a conservative, as did Benjamin Franklin from his perch in London; and certainly when an overwrought Patrick Henry exclaimed at the Congress’s start that “Government is at an End. All distinctions are thrown out. . . . We are in a State of Nature,” Jay mildly retorted, “I cant yet think all Government is at an End. The Measure of Arbitrary power is not full, and I think it must run over, before We undertake to frame a new Constitution.” Delegates shouldn’t get carried away and think “We came to frame an American constitution, instead of indeavouring to correct the faults in an old one.”29 A reasonable remonstrance to Britain, Jay hoped, coupled with a determined trade boycott, ought to bring the ministry to its senses. Jay’s conservatism consisted chiefly in this: that he would omit no effort—consistent with the rights of man and of Englishmen—to avoid an irreparable breach.

  Assigned to write Congress’s Address to the People of Great Britain, Jay explained what those rights were. There’s no reason, he declared, “why English subjects, who live three thousand miles from the royal palace, should enjoy less liberty than those who are three hundred miles distant from it.” As English subjects, “no power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent” or our “inestimable right of trial by jury”—the last shield of ordinary citizens against arbitrary state power—as Britain has done in setting up vice-admiralty courts, in which “a single man, a creature of the crown,” sits in judgment in tax-evasion cases on defendants presumed guilty until they prove their innocence. If Britons allow such injustices to befall their American cousins, they should keep two things in mind, Jay cautioned. First, “We will never submit to be hewers of wood or drawers of water for any ministry or nation in the world.” Second, “take care that you do not fall into the pit that is preparing for us.”30 Still, even after the king ignored Congress’s first petition, even after Concord and Lexington, Jay pressed for one last-ditch try in the Second Continental Congress, John Dickinson’s fruitless July 1775 Olive Branch Petition, some of whose language Jay supplied. But he remained realistic: in expressing his hope for an enduring American union with Great Britain, he conceded, “God knows how the Contest will end.”31