America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Henry and Maria Livingston keep an apartment on Manhattan’s fashionable East Side, and their country place—Oak Hill, on the Hudson River—sits on two hundred acres of the vast demesne that in the seventeenth century became known as Livingston Manor, the largest and the first of the great manorships created in America by the English king. Oak Hill itself was built in 1795 by Henry Livingston’s great-great-great-grandfather John Livingston and has been handed down through the family since then. A cousin, Honoria Livingston McVitty, owns a ninety-acre parcel of the old manorship nearby, and still other cousins own smaller lots of this scenic and historic land.

  Oak Hill was the first house in the region built with large windows, seven feet tall and three feet wide, to command a river view. Built of brick that was baked on the premises, the walls of the house are two feet thick. Large, formal rooms—the smallest twenty-six by twenty-four feet—extend off a wide central hallway, and these are filled with Livingston family heirlooms and artifacts, eighteenth-century dining room chairs, and fine old family portraits.

  “Yes,” Henry Livingston says, “I was brought up always reminded that I was a Livingston, and that I was expected to conduct myself as one. The family was always very proper on manners. And we grew up surrounded by family portraits, and so it was hard not to get the impression that these people, who had died two hundred years ago, were a part of us, part of the family, and that we were a living part of their past. And yes, of course there are upperclass values that show up in people, that are born into people, and that tend to come out in a more affluent class—elements of taste, discretion, and morality which help to create people who know how to handle themselves, and who know how to accept responsibilities. It isn’t something that was taught from my father’s or grandfather’s knee, exactly. It’s something that, in a family like ours, comes through almost by osmosis—the knowledge that, as Livingstons, we were expected to rise to occasions.”

  By rising to occasions, Henry Livingston does not refer just to the grand occasions when numbers of his ancestors gallantly marched off to wars, to be decorated for bravery or to die on the field of honor, though he admits that this is part of it. There were also the small occasions, such as the time Mrs. Peter Van Brugh Livingston caught fire. She had appeared at a New York reception wearing a fashionable headdress of the day, a tall, nodding affair composed of blue ostrich plumes. The party was illuminated by glass lusterware candelabra, and at one point in the evening she became so engrossed in conversation that she stepped under one of these and nodded her plumes directly into the flames. The fire was quickly extinguished by other guests, and Mrs. Livingston was unhurt, although her headdress was ruined. But rather than make a fuss, she apologized to her hostess for the trouble she had caused and later told the story as a joke on herself.

  Henry Livingston has four grown children, two sons and two daughters, but only one of his eight grandchildren so far—little John Henry Livingston—has the family name. “We intend to keep Oak Hill in the family if we possibly can,” he says. “My children have always loved the place. There’s a way you can set up a trusteeship so it’s permanent. Also, since it’s a landmark, there’s a possibility we might get a special tax break if the house were opened to the public at certain times.”

  He can’t help but grow a little wistful thinking about the old days of the colonial manor lords. “The manors were run like early corporations,” he says. “Livingston Manor was run like an early version of IBM, and the point of the manorial system was to encourage the growth potential of the country. The manor lord was given the rights to hold courts, collect taxes, maintain roads, and to maintain his own militia, but the point was to develop the land and make it productive. The first lord sensed that there was lead and iron ore here, and Livingston Manor provided ninety-nine percent of the iron used in the Revolution. Settlers were encouraged to come as tenants, to provide a labor force. A tenant was given tools, food, seed, and the wood to build himself a house within a year. Then it was his to live in for his lifetime, plus one generation. Some manors had disgruntled tenants. Not us. The manor system was very carefully structured, and out of it the lords gained a perception of government, and a perception of what the land and the surrounding environment could yield. For instance, all the trade up and down the Hudson River was developed and managed by the Livingston manor lords. Breaking up the manors resulted in the same sort of mess that’s come from the breakup of AT&T. You can’t just keep dividing up land, and then dividing it again, every time someone dies. I’m not a Royalist, but the manorial system was a system that worked.”

  Needless to say, Henry Livingston is a member in good standing of the Order of Colonial Lords of Manors in America, a patriotic society of proven descendants of manor lords.

  Looking back from a distance of all those generations, Henry Livingston can perhaps be forgiven for looking at the manorial system somewhat romantically. In fact, it was neither as pretty nor as simple as he describes it in the 1980s.

  In the early seventeenth century, when the New York and New Jersey colonies were under Dutch rule, the Dutch West India Company had created a system of patroonships—patroon translates as “patron” or “master”—under which the company’s more important officers were rewarded with large tracts of land to do with as they wished. The first of these was Rensselaerwyck, purchased in 1630 for Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, an Amsterdam-based director of the company, and Rensselaerwyck set the tone of the other land grants that followed. It consisted of more than seven hundred thousand acres on the west bank of the Hudson (including the town of Albany) and was purchased from the Indians for “certain quantities of duffels, axes, knives, and wampum,” making it, along with the purchase of Manhattan Island, one of the better bargains in the history of real estate. Kiliaen Van Rensselaer never bothered to visit his property, but his descendants did, including, eight generations later, Stephen Van Rensselaer, who inherited the estate at the age of five and went on to found America’s first scientific college, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in 1824 at Troy, New York, just across the river from his family’s property.

  During the British colonial period, the British monarch continued the Dutch policy, granting manorships to important colonists who had proven useful, in one way or another, to the British cause or to British trade with the colonies. Among these manors were Pelham Manor, granted to Thomas Pell; Philipsborough, to Frederick Philipse; Morrisania, to Lewis Morris; and Cortlandt Manor, to Stephanus Van Cortlandt; these properties were always in choice locations, either in the Hudson River valley or along the Atlantic coast or Long Island Sound. But the very first of these British manorships, along with the title of lord of the manor that went with it, had been ceded to Robert Livingston in 1686 by James II. Thus, just as in the British House of Lords a premier peer is one bearing the oldest title of his degree, the Livingstons could consider themselves the premier American family.

  On the other hand, if the Livingstons today tend to create the impression that they were granted their great manorial lands as the result of some noble and meritorious service to the king, this is incorrect. They earned their original land in quite a different way. They married it.

  The first American Livingston—known as Robert the First or the first lord by his descendants, and who was Sarah Van Brugh Livingston Jay’s great-grandfather—was born in Scotland of poor but genteel parents. His father, John Livingston, was a Presbyterian clergyman, a man of stern and uncompromising principles. When Charles II (who, it was rumored, had Papist sympathies) ascended to the throne of England in 1660, John Livingston refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the new king. As punishment, he and his family were ordered into permanent exile. The Livingstons fled to Rotterdam, where Robert Livingston spent his boyhood years.

  Perhaps because he had seen what refusal to compromise or bow to the wishes of higher-ups had done for his father, young Robert Livingston appears to have decided two things as a youth: He would adapt to situations with chameleonlike ease, and he w
ould cultivate friends in high places. As a young teenager, Robert had gone to work in the Dutch shipping trade, and by the time his father died, when Robert was eighteen, he had put aside sufficient savings for his next big step: America and the booming—and very lucrative—fur trade.

  Tall, muscular, and rugged of countenance, as are many of his male descendants today, Robert Livingston was, essentially, an adventurer. In today’s parlance, Robert would probably be called a hustler, a high roller, a social and entrepreneurial Alpinist, a seventeenth-century Donald Trump. In Europe, American beaver was in great demand and commanded high prices. Beaver muffs and tippets adorned the most fashionable European ladies, and beaver trimmed or lined the coats and headgear of kings and courtiers. In America, beaver pelts could be bought from the Indians for wampum, and wampum was easily counterfeited. Indeed, the manufacture of counterfeit wampum had become something of a cottage industry in Holland. A number of New England fortunes had already been made from the hides of the little dam-building mammal, but by the mid-1670s the New England fur trade was in trouble. In fact, when Robert Livingston arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1674, the odds against his achieving success in the fur trade seemed formidable, even for an ambitious young man of twenty.

  For one thing, the ponds and streams and swamps of New England had been hunted nearly clean of beaver, and the animal was close to extinction in the region. The only fresh supply of beaver lay west of the Hudson River, beyond the small trading settlement of Albany, New York. But, although New York had become a British colony ten years earlier, Albany remained a staunchly Dutch settlement, firmly under the sway of the Dutch Reform Church, and anything English was anathema. New Englanders in particular were distrusted. Furthermore, the beaver-rich lands west of the Hudson were controlled by the Five Iroquois Nations, and the Iroquois refused to trade with either the English or New Englanders, dealing only with the Dutch. This stood to give the Dutch traders of Albany something of a monopoly on the fur business. If the New England traders were to stay in business, Albany somehow had to be penetrated. Robert Livingston saw himself as the man uniquely suited to do this. He might be a Scots Presbyterian, but he spoke Dutch fluently. He could go to Albany and pass himself off as a Dutchman.

  In Massachusetts, Robert had some tenuous but important connections: the powerful Winthrop family, a member of which had been an acquaintance of Robert’s father. In Massachusetts, the Winthrops were very much the right people to know, and once the personable young man had presented himself to them, he waited for them to introduce him to the person he was looking for—ideally, someone in the fur trade who was interested in hiring a bright young man to be his agent in Albany, thus advancing Robert Livingston up to the next rung of his ascent. It wasn’t long before just such a person appeared. His name was John Hull, and he had been frustrated in his attempts to deal with either the Iroquois or the New York Dutch. To Hull, Livingston pointed out that he was already bilingual and foresaw no difficulty in learning the Iroquois language. He had also foresightedly brought with him a freshly minted supply of Dutch wampum. Hull, who had nothing to lose, agreed to let the young man give the venture a try, and Robert Livingston promptly set off across the Berkshire and Taconic mountains.

  Fortuitously, another very important person had just arrived in Albany. Or perhaps it was not so fortuitous, and Robert, who kept an ear to the ground in the shipping business, may have been well aware that Nicholas Van Rensselaer was heading for the Dutch settlement and would be arriving just a few weeks before Robert did; the timing seems too close to have been pure coincidence. Nicholas Van Rensselaer, son of Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, had been dispatched by his family in Holland to assume command of Rensselaerwyck, if “command” is not too strong a word, considering Nicholas’s limited abilities.

  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.