America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In this marital escapade, the couple had been enthusiastically encouraged and abetted by Hannah’s best friend, Miss Buela Murray (Lavinia in Hannah’s diary), the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Murray, after whom New York’s Murray Hill is named. The Murrays, also a wealthy Quaker merchant family, seem to have thrived on conspiracy and intrigue. The Murray mansion was situated on the Middle Road, approximately where East Thirty-seventh Street intersects Park Avenue today, and the Murray cornfields occupied the acreage where Grand Central Station stands today.

  In the Revolution, the Middle Road offered an important shortcut between the lower Post Road to the south and the King’s Bridge section of Manhattan to the north. After the battle of Long Island, Mrs. Murray watched General Israel Putnam’s disheveled troops pass by her house in full retreat from the British. Later, she noticed a far superior British force approaching her house from the same direction and saw a chance to have a bit of fun. Recognizing Lord Richard Howe in command, she suggested to His Lordship that he and his officers might enjoy pausing at her house for a bit of refreshment. It had been a long, hot march, and so Howe gladly accepted. He and his men were so charmingly entertained by the Murrays that, by the time his northward march was resumed, General Putnam and his men were safely entrenched at Harlem Heights, where he would regather his forces to face the enemy. Thus Mrs. Robert Murray entered American history, as a not insignificant footnote, apparently unconcerned that while she herself was aiding the Revolutionaries, her daughter was promoting the amorous intentions of a British officer.

  Soon after Hannah and Jacob were married, Schieffelin was posted to Quebec to deliver dispatches to General Sir Fredrick Haldeman, and his bride gamely offered to accompany him. Part of the journey was by ship, but once the party entered the St. Lawrence River, they transferred to smaller boats and then to canoes, which had to be portaged around rapids while the party continued on foot. Overnight accommodations were at primitive forts, when they could find them, or, when they could not, in makeshift tents or beneath overturned canoes. At one point, seeing a fire burning in the wilderness, the Schieffelins approached it to find a band of Indian warriors with their wives and children.

  “I was a little surprised,” Hannah wrote home to her parents in New York. But the Indians

  made room for me between them with the greatest civility and perceiving I was a little frightened, by the haste with which I seated myself, and knocked my head in the flurry, they desired me in their language to take courage. Their heads were shaved and painted, and their appearance altogether savage, but their manners not at all so—I was shocked to see a scalp dangling by the side of one of their ears—it was the size of a dollar, and fixed in a wooden ring, while a lock of beautiful hair hung on his shoulder. On my observing it, he pointed to his head and pronounced the word “Yankee.”

  Nonetheless, Hannah added, “We slept sound till morning in our own tent and then pursued our course.”

  At another juncture, Hannah was introduced to the famous Molly, the favorite Indian concubine (Hannah tastefully used the word “Sultana”) of Sir William Johnson, whose services in bringing the Iroquois nation under British sway had been rewarded by a baronetcy, a gift of a huge tract of land in the Mohawk Valley, and a pension of four thousand pounds a year for Molly. “I had the honor to sup with her in Captain Butler’s tent, on a haunch of venison,” Hannah wrote. “She has a sensible countenance, and much whiter than the generality of Indians, but her father was white. She understands English, but speaks only the Mohawk. Which has something extremely soft and musical in it when spoken by a woman.…” This half-Indian lady, Hannah Schieffelin noted, occupied a fine house on the banks of the St. Lawrence, where she lived with several of her daughters and was attended by “a great number” of servants. In her letter home, Hannah could not help commenting on Molly’s attire at their venison haunch dinner: “She was … in a traveling dress, a calico beaded gown, fastened with silver brooches and a worsted mantel.”

  In 1781, the American Revolution officially came to an end, even though the British would not evacuate Savannah until July of the following year and would not remove the last of their troops from New York until November of 1783. With his commission as a British officer now meaningless, Jacob Schieffelin returned with his wife to Detroit to resume his Indian trading business that the war had interrupted; here the fact that he had fought on the British side stood him in good stead with his Indian customers. Presently, the chief of the Ottawa tribe made Jacob a grant of seven square miles fronting on the Detroit River, and soon he had expanded his trading activities to Montreal, to the Northwest Territories, and even to London, where he spent a year in 1789–1790 acquiring goods for trade.

  By 1794, Jay’s Treaty settled any outstanding disputes that remained between the United States and Britain. President Washington had sent Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay again to London, and the British had agreed to evacuate their posts between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River, which would lead to a wave of new settlement in the area. From a business standpoint, an important modification of Jay’s Treaty was the one that permitted U.S. ships to carry cocoa, coffee, cotton, molasses, sugar, rum, and spices from the British West Indies to any port in the world. Shrewdly, Jacob Schieffelin decided that this was the moment to enter the lucrative West Indies trade, and in 1794 he returned to the port city of New York, which would become the center of it, bringing his wife with him.

  Two of Hannah Schieffelin’s brothers, Effingham Lawrence and John B. Lawrence, had founded a drug business on New York’s Pearl Street as early as 1781, and with his brothers-in-law, Jacob Schieffelin proceeded to put together Schieffelin & Company, an import-export firm that would concentrate on herbs and spices and pharmaceuticals from the West Indies. Schieffelin & Company, the “Oldest Drug House in America,” is still in business to this day, two hundred years later, dealing primarily in imported wines and spirits.

  The partnership was fruitful almost from the beginning. On a single shipping voyage, Jacob Schieffelin made a profit of twenty-five thousand dollars, a considerable fortune in those days, and he was still not yet forty. With this money he purchased a large tract of rural farmland in upper Manhattan and there created Rooka Hall. The grounds of Rooka Hall were bounded on the south by Harlem Cove, an inlet of the Hudson River that is now covered by West 125th Street; on the west by the Hudson, with a splendid view of the New Jersey Palisades; and on the north by Hamilton Grange, the home of Alexander Hamilton, to whom Jacob Schieffelin sold several acres of land. After Hamilton’s death, the Schieffelins erected a monument to their famous neighbor and friend.

  By the late 1790s, the Schieffelins had entered an era of affluence and ease that would last for generations to come. For their winter residence, Jacob and Hannah Schieffelin acquired the Beekman mansion on Pearl Street, a spacious town house fifty feet wide, with stables in the rear. And every summer they made the trek by stagecoach, from one end of Manhattan to the other, to Rooka Hall.

  And it would not be long before the Schieffelins would ally themselves, through marriage, to other early and prominent New York families—including the Jays.

  Rooka Hall is gone now, but Hamilton Grange still stands, restored, a national monument at 287 Convent Avenue in Manhattan. And members of the Schieffelin family still make an annual pilgrimage to the neighborhood in which their ancestor’s house once stood, even though it is now a rather shabby part of West Harlem.

  “Every Thanksgiving, we try to go up there to attend services at St. Mary’s Church,” says Mrs. Margaret Trevor Pardee, who is Jacob and Hannah Schieffelin’s great-great-granddaughter. “You see, my great-great-grandfather built that church—the First Episcopal Church of America, it’s called—think of that! You see, in those days, Harlem was a wilderness. There was no church remotely near Rooka Hall, and at first the family was visited by a Sunday circuit rider during the summer, and services were conducted in the Jacob Schieffelins’ parlor—my great-great-grandmother had converted
from Quakerism by then, to accommodate her husband. Jacob Schieffelin also did the very drastic thing, once he’d given the land and built St. Mary’s, of abolishing pew rentals—so St. Mary’s was the first free-pew church in New York City! Think of that! The incorporation of the first congregation was held on Thanksgiving Day, so that’s why Thanksgiving is a special anniversary for us.”

  Mrs. Pardee today is a diminutive and animated widow and great-grandmother herself, in her nineties, living in the apartment she has kept on Manhattan’s East Side for the past forty years. “I had to give up my lovely old house on Long Island last year,” she says. “My children made me. The house had ten bedrooms, and six baths. My children said it was just too much for me to keep up all alone, and I suppose they were right. Still, giving it up was a wrench.” The house on Long Island was in Lawrence, a town named for her pre-Revolutionary ancestors. Watching Mrs. Pardee move about her apartment and listening to her random memories fleshed out by family genealogies and old scrapbooks filled with fragile and fading newspaper cuttings, it is easy to see why, in her debutante year—1912—New York society editors christened her “that petite pocket Venus, Margaret Trevor.”

  “As a little girl,” she says, “I’d go to visit my grandfather Schieffelin, and sit on his knee, and he’d show me his grandfather’s red British military coat and sword that were displayed in a glass case. They’re now at the Revolutionary Museum at Fort Ticonderoga. But the best Schieffelin family stuff is at St. Mary’s, which is at 421 West 126th Street. The old bronze bell hanging in the chancel came from one of Jacob Schieffelin’s ships, and was used to toll the changing of the watches. The original Schieffelin stained-glass window is still there, and there are several other windows that were given by later Schieffelins. On the Schieffelin window, there’s the Lamb of God, our family crest, and the same crest is on the St. Mary’s Church flag on the south side of the altar.

  “We Schieffelins have always been given a kind of droit du seigneur at St. Mary’s. The first pew on the right is always reserved for Schieffelins. The pew opposite has always been for the Hamiltons—and all sorts of Hamiltons have worshipped there. On our Thanksgiving visits, we always make it a point to visit the rectory, a lovely old white building next to the church, where there’s a portrait of Jacob Schieffelin in his uniform as a British redcoat. And we always like to pause for a minute or two beside the paving stone at the entrance to the church. It’s inscribed with the names of Jacob Schieffelin and Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin, who are buried in the crypt below. Outside, in West 126th Street, we also like to remind ourselves that the street was originally named Lawrence Street, after Hannah’s family.”

  Continuity—a sense of history encapsulated in a place, of generations flourishing from one to the next, of old loyalties respected, of love and marriage and children and family feelings carried on—matters to old families like the Schieffelin-Lawrence-Trevor clan. One of the Livingstons calls it a sense of “Aristofamily,” since the suffix “crat” implies rule and rulers. These families did not rule, though some might have liked to. But they had standards that they lived by, and they had loyalty and pride.

  Alexander Hamilton’s bank, for instance, was not only New York’s first bank. In 1789, the Bank of New York also made the very first loan to the U.S. government. The Schieffelin family’s accounts have been handled by “Mr. Hamilton’s bank” from its founding to the present day. It is still considered one of the most personal and attentive of banks. Years ago, when lady customers complained that there were few places in the city where they could refresh themselves between rounds of shopping, the bank installed its famous ladies’ lounge—much more than a restroom, it was an antique-filled drawing room, staffed by a secretary-attendant, with adjoining powder rooms and dressing rooms. This ladies’ lounge is reproduced in every detail in the bank’s present Fifth Avenue office. And, so long ago that nobody at the bank really remembers when, a woman customer explained that she didn’t like to handle “used money.” Ever since, it has been the bank’s policy in cashing checks to hand out only crisp and freshly printed bills.

  “I wouldn’t dream of letting any other bank than Mr. Hamilton’s handle my financial affairs,” says Margaret Trevor Pardee. “Of course Mr. Hamilton was much maligned in some quarters in his day. But he was our family friend, and was a man of great integrity and breeding.”

  Breeding! What is it? How does one define it? Is it character? Is it soul? Is it the glue of generations, the olive branch of peace? Is it what lies at the very heart and core of civilization—even of immortality, perhaps?

  “Oh, my, I wouldn’t know how to define it,” Margaret Pardee says. “It’s not just refinement, good manners, and all that, though that’s supposed to go along with it. Oh, and it’s also poise, I suppose. Poise, and an ability to talk comfortably with people on all levels, in all walks of life. That’s what poise is, isn’t it—an ability to communicate with people in any situation? I also think of it in terms of bigger things—courage, honesty, responsibility, loyalty, love—greatness of spirit and generosity of heart, truth. I mean … put it this way. I’m proud to know that my great-great-grandmother Schieffelin was raised in a New York mansion, and yet could go off on foot with her husband into the Canadian wilderness, and spend the night in an Indian campground with braves in war paint with scalps hanging from their ears. They sensed that she meant no harm to them, and she knew that they meant no harm to her. How did she know? Breeding. And I’m proud that she could sit down to dinner with an Indian squaw, and find her language ‘musical.’ What taught her to hear the music in it? Breeding. It’s all a part of it. It’s not snobbish—it’s the opposite. Oh, I’ve known people in my time who would say that so-and-so was ‘common,’ or ‘vulgar.’ But I was never brought up to think I was better than anyone else, much less say so, and that’s a part. And then I remember when I was younger, going to pay a call on a friend of Mother’s, Adeline Gracie, who was eighty years old and ill. The Gracies are another old New York family, you know. Their house is now the mayor’s mansion. But I remember calling on old Mrs. Gracie, and she was sitting in bed, reading Homer’s Odyssey in the original Greek—which she was teaching herself! I thought to myself, When I’m old I want to be just like her! It’s breeding. It’s the kind of example that you set for someone else.”

  9

  Livingston Versus Livingston

  It had taken the Livingstons three American-born generations of breeding to achieve the kind of social kingship and queenship of society that John and Sarah Livingston Jay represented. The Jays needed only two, but John and his father had both reaped the considerable benefits that come with marrying up.

  But there is evidence that even Sarah Jay’s great-grandfather, the first Robert Livingston, yearned for the kind of respectability that later generations of his family would achieve. In the beginning, of course, his reputation as first lord of Livingston Manor was of being not only an opportunist but also of being something of a roughneck. The original “manor” was hardly that. It was merely a collection of crude log huts in the wilderness, and a far cry from the array of stately Livingston homes that now lines the Hudson Valley, though in marrying Nicholas Van Rensselaer’s widow in 1679 Robert did become the proprietor of a comfortable house in the Albany settlement. To make the properties of his manorship produce and pay, Robert needed tenant farmers, and it was not long before Robert Livingston became known as a harsh and despotic landlord; early accounts of his proprietorship do not make it sound at all like an early prototype of the IBM Corporation.

  When his tenants became delinquent in their rents, Robert, with his own armed constabulary, descended upon them to extract the money forcibly, often at gunpoint. If he failed to obtain the rents, Robert would burn the settlers out and drive off their cattle and other livestock. From contemporary accounts, bloodshed and death were common in these encounters, and the little township of Ancram, New York, is still said to be haunted as a result by wailing ghosts of murdered settlers. They h
owl on winter nights and are called the Ancram Screechers.

  To complicate things, the perimeters of Livingston Manor were somewhat loose and imprecise. Because of the size of the estate, it was not always exactly clear where Robert Livingston’s proprietorship left off. Furthermore, it was not at all clear how much of Livingston Manor lay in the New York colony and how much belonged to Massachusetts. By then, Connecticut and Massachusetts—both of which had derived from the Massachusetts Bay Colony—had more or less agreed on where their boundary lay. But Puritan Massachusetts and Dutch New York still disputed theirs. In the seventeenth century, New York claimed territory far to the east of the present state line, as far as the Connecticut River. Massachusetts, meanwhile, claimed territory lying as far west as the Pacific Ocean. For years, border disputes continued between the colonies, often violently, and it was not until as recently as 1853 that the boundaries dividing the three states were permanently assigned and fixed. Until then, chaos reigned. And Robert Livingston thought nothing of trying to collect rents from tenants on land that might or might not have belonged to him. There may not have been seriously aggrieved Livingston tenants in the Albany area, but a little to the east, on and around the Taconic Range in the disputed territory, there was nothing but trouble.

  Until the border disputes were settled, the region around the little hamlet of Boston Corners, now in New York (and so named because it was once the corner of Massachusetts, or the Boston state), became a kind of no-man’s-land, which made it an attractive headquarters for all sorts of outlaws and lowlifes—murderers, counterfeiters, poachers, and cattle thieves, who played a game called “dodging the line,” free from the jurisdiction of either Massachusetts or New York. In this impossible-to-police place, illegal gambling, prostitution, and bare-knuckle fighting matches also flourished. Robert Livingston claimed the territory belonged to him. Massachusetts did not agree. But Robert Livingston did not care what Massachusetts thought.