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

by Myron Magnet

  The British constitution “is a constitution matured by ages,” Livingston wrote, “repeatedly defended against lawless encroachments by oceans of blood, meliorated by the experience of centuries, alike salutary to prince and people, and guarded by the most awful sanctions.”90 How ancient is it? According to an influential tradition of thought, summed up in the eighteenth century by Paul de Rapin, whom Livingston lauded in the Reflector as the best historian of England, it is in fact the Gothic constitution of the Anglo-Saxons, who brought to England the free institutions of their German ancestors that Roman historian Tacitus had so glowingly described in the first century. Their constitution enshrined a privilege that “is one of the greatest a Nation can enjoy,” Rapin noted: that “all Persons accused of any Crime were to be tried by their Peers.” Sadly, William the Conqueror, “surnamed the Bastard,” replaced the Anglo-Saxon constitution with his foreign feudal system, Rapin wrote; but time and again, from Magna Carta onward, Britons have violently thrown off the oppressive Norman yoke and forced the restoration of their ancient rights.91

  Who could dream, the “Sentinel” marveled, that this long-cherished constitution was “now to be altered or abolished, by—the dash of a pen?”—as would happen if Colden really succeeded in depriving New Yorkers “of all the benefits of a trial by their peers,” Livingston warned. “From such a system, the Star Chamber would be a redemption.” For without the protection of a jury as the ultimate arbiter of the facts in any trial, the people would be treated “as so many beasts of burden.”92

  The British ministry’s response was not reassuring. In April 1765, news of the Stamp Act, imposing a tax to which the colonists had not consented, reached America. In October, word came that the Privy Council, while declining to hear Cunningham’s appeal itself, nevertheless had authorized Colden and his council to do so—a decision, one colonist contended, that enraged his countrymen even more than the Stamp Act.93

  HOWEVER, BY 1766, when the London government backpedaled, repealing the Stamp Act and reaffirming that appeals courts could consider only legal errors, not facts, Livingston was a chastened man.94 He had known theoretically about the depravity of human nature, but he had now had some up-close experiences of man’s capacity for violence that shocked him. Demonstrations against the Stamp Act by New York’s Sons of Liberty—artisans, tradesmen, sailors, stevedores, and blacks, led by a couple of sea captains—grew ever more threatening, and on November 1, 1765, they broke out into full-scale urban rioting.

  A drunken mob hanged Colden in effigy, burned his treasured coach, and sacked the richly furnished house of British major Thomas James, despoiling it with the same wild ferocity a Boston mob had shown in tearing to pieces the magnificent house of Massachusetts lieutenant governor Thomas Hutchinson ten weeks earlier. In the spring, tenant uprisings—also sparked, Livingston heard, by the demotic Sons of Liberty—convulsed the huge Hudson Valley estates. In June, two hundred armed tenants on Livingston Manor itself marched on the great house and threatened to kill Judge Robert Livingston, the current lord of the manor, unless he lowered their rents. Some forty loyal tenants fought them off, and British troops arrested the ringleaders. But now William Livingston had seen his own family’s tenants “turn Levellers,” as one observer put it, and he had to wonder if the equality and rights he had so long championed really included “the common run of the species,” who “seldom examine things with attention,” he wrote, but “take all upon Trust” and can turn liberty into an exercise of “lawless power.”95 Were they free and equal too?

  They certainly thought so. Livingston and his followers, our foremost historian of colonial thought Bernard Bailyn notes, set off a “contagion of liberty” that over the next decades and the next century spread far beyond the landless workers seeking rent cuts who so frightened Livingston (though the Livingston Manor tenant farmers were hardly the radical-egalitarian, anti-private-property Levellers of the mid-seventeenth-century English Civil War).96 In time, the contagion’s ever-widening circles touched even those who thought that a democracy with universal suffrage and no property qualifications for voting would not be the horror Livingston had imagined—quite the reverse. Were not all entitled to the principles the Founders extolled? If taxation without representation was tyranny, asked Continental Congressman Richard Henry Lee’s unconventional, strong-minded sister, Hannah Corbin, as early as 1778, were not property-owning, taxpaying widows like herself entitled to vote, regardless of their sex? Perhaps, temporized her brother; but did she not think it “rather out of character for women to press into those tumultuous assemblages of men where the business of choosing representatives is conducted?”97

  And if liberty was so precious and slavery so heinous, what about the “Grate Number of Blackes . . . held in a state of Slavery within the bowels of a free and christian Country?” asked a group of Massachusetts slaves in a 1774 petition. Do we not “have in common with all other men a naturel right to our freedoms?” What about the “grat number of us sencear . . . members of the Church of Christ how can the master and the slave be said to fulfil that command Live in love let Brotherly Love contuner and abound Beare yea onenothers Bordenes How can the master be said to Beare my Borden when he Beares me down whith the Have chanes [heavy chains] of slavery and operson [oppression] against my will?”98 However little the Founders intended to make a social revolution, they sowed the seeds of a future, ever-broader one.

  Livingston lost focus. Still sore over the King’s College battle, he flushed with anger in 1768 when its second president, Myles Cooper, nursed dreams of setting up an Anglican bishop in America and turning the Anglican college into an “American University” that would “Prevent the Growth of Republican Principles, which already too much prevail in the Colonies.”99 In a new newspaper column, named the American Whig after the Independent Whig, another Trenchard and Gordon journal, he denounced the idea of a bishop as “more terrible” than the “so greatly and deservedly obnoxious stamp act.”100 In 1720, when Trenchard and Gordon wrote that “priestcraft and tyranny are ever inseparable, and go hand-in-hand,” such a fear made sense; in New York, after the clear and present danger of the Stamp Act, it didn’t.101

  By 1772, Livingston craved peace and quiet. Since 1760, he’d been buying land on the edge of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, an easy sail down the harbor from New York and up the Elizabeth River. By 1768, he had 115 acres and had begun planting a garden, which blossomed into a passion for horticulture and ended with sixty-two kinds of pear trees and twenty-seven of plums, many imported from abroad. In 1771, he began building Liberty Hall, an elegantly restrained wooden house that he moved into in 1773, just as he was turning fifty. Retired from his law practice, with a comfortable income from a fortune of £6,000 to £8,500 and the 15,000 to 20,000 acres he’d inherited from his parents, he looked forward to the life of a country squire that he’d imagined poetically in Philosophic Solitude some three decades earlier.102

  Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

  WITH FAMOUSLY pretty daughters, he didn’t have much solitude, however, as Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Gouverneur Morris frequently came courting across the bay—and Jay married Livingston’s daughter Sarah in Liberty Hall’s long parlor in April 1774. Nor could philosophy displace politics. Before he had moved into his new house, Livingston had joined the town corporation and the county Committee of Correspondence, one of many formed across the colonies to synchronize resistance to George III’s tightening squeeze of American liberty. As a delegate to the First Continental Congress in the fall of 1774, he hoped to patch up the colonists’ differences with England, much to the disgust of John Adams, who later recalled the Congress’s various efforts at conciliation as “children’s play at marbles or push-pin,” instigated by the conservative “privileged order” led by John Dickinson, “Billy, alias Governor Livingston, and his son-in-law, Mr. Jay.” For his part, Livingston
felt shock at the “designing Junto” of implacable New Englanders, hell-bent on independence, which the delegates “all professed to deprecate,” though “the hearts of many of us gave our Invocation the lie.”103

  Even when he saw that independence was inevitable, he fussed about the timing, worried that the army was too green and that the French hadn’t yet vowed support. Less than two weeks before the Declaration of Independence, his constituents recalled him, naming delegates keen to break with England. The rebuke stung, but on August 31, New Jersey elected him its governor, and, as British invaders drove him and his legislature across the state for years as they stalked Washington’s army there, and as Patriots and Loyalists vied for the hearts of New Jerseyites as the American insurgency raged, he did much to keep the spirit of liberty alive, never doubting America’s right “to renounce our Allegiance to a King, who in my Opinion had forfeited it, by his manifest Design to deprive us of our Liberty.” He was proud that the British had put a price on his head and had sent freelance gangs of thugs to try to kill him.104

  When the war ended seven years later, he and his family, dispersed to safer havens while hostilities raged, reunited in a much-vandalized Liberty Hall. The mahogany bannister still bears angry slashes from an enemy sword, and a later occupation by Continental troops did much more damage. “It is as in the time of Pharoah,” wrote Livingston’s daughter Kitty; “what the Canker worm dont eat the Locusts destroy.”105 Slowly the governor put the estate right and nursed his ruined gardens back to luxuriance, though his daughter Sarah imagined him “with his pruning-knife in his hand . . . almost at a loss where to begin his operations,” given the shock of seeing “all the effects of his former care effaced by the wilderness that had sprung up in his absence.”106 He rejoiced in Sarah’s weekend visits with her husband, John Jay, and his greatest pleasure was taking their son Peter to fish in the trout pond or the river. Still serving as governor, he died at sixty-six on July 25, 1790, having lived long enough to sign the Constitution and see the government he helped frame get under way with George Washington’s inauguration a year before, on the balcony of the same building in which the Zenger trial’s drama had unfolded more than half a century earlier.107

  THE FATE OF Liberty Hall would have bemused him. He built what his imagination had conjured up in Philosophic Solitude:

  On banks array’d with ever blooming flowers,

  Near beauteous landscapes, or by roseate bowers;

  My neat, but simple mansion I would raise,

  Unlike the sumptuous domes of modern days;

  Devoid of pomp, with rural plainness form’d. . . .

  Unpretentious but stylish, Liberty Hall had a two-story center section, three windows wide, above a raised basement for a kitchen, and two one-story wings on each side. It sported quoins carved to look like masonry at the corners of the central block, inspired by British colonel Roger Morris’s fine house in Harlem (now the Morris-Jumel house-museum). A long parlor with two fireplaces, flanked by a library and a dining room, filled most of the ground floor, while five bedrooms crowded into the second story. In 1789, Livingston added a bedroom atop one wing for Martha Washington to stay in on her way to her husband’s inauguration. It was an elegantly simple Georgian villa, filled with light streaming in through its generous windows and nestled in Livingston’s lovingly tended gardens. Official visitors often found the governor in his gardening clothes.108

  When he died, a year after his wife’s death, his children, all with houses of their own by then, sold Liberty Hall out of the family and drew lots for the furniture, not a stick of which remains in place. But in 1811, Livingston’s niece, Susan, bought the house. She had married a Continental Congressman from South Carolina, John Kean (pronounced cane), the first cashier of Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States, and their children and descendants lived in Liberty Hall until 1995. A dozen years later, the family sold it to Kean University, part of the state college system.

  By then the house had swollen to fifty rooms, added between 1847 and the mid-1890s and overflowing with the rich furnishings of six generations of prosperous and powerful New Jerseyites who raised families there, including two U.S. senators, a ten-term congressman, another New Jersey governor, and a major political donor, whom many Republican candidates, including presidents, wooed in Liberty Hall. The house had originally looked over the Elizabeth River, where visitors moored their boats, but its front door migrated to the landward side after a dam shrank the once-navigable river to a little stream in the 1850s. Brightening that new front of the house, some of William Livingston’s plantings still flourish, along with a horse chestnut his daughter planted and the remains of his niece’s garden and lawns. On the other side, glass-and-metal college and office-park buildings loom out of the tarmac like stranded flying saucers, bordered by rows of cookie-cutter New Jersey condos. Inside the house, even Livingston’s plain wooden parlor chimneypieces have given way to opulent English eighteenth-century marble ones, bought by an antique-collecting Kean in the 1920s and more in keeping with the “sumptuous domes” Livingston shunned than his “neat, but simple mansion.”

  Making a virtue of necessity, the enthusiastic young staff of the Liberty Hall Museum lead thousands of fourth- and fifth-graders through the house every year, making the tour a time-travel through American history, from 1780 until 1940. Each guide, dressed in the clothes of the era of a given room’s furnishings, explains the evolution of lighting, of transportation, of education to rapt schoolchildren, using such historical objects as an oil lamp or a schoolroom slate or one guide’s cumbrous Victorian hoopskirt to bring home the concrete reality of the past. The children ask where the bathrooms were and what games the Livingston and Kean kids played, and they are fascinated to learn of chamber pots, metal bathtubs filled by servants with pitchers, and pre-video-game childhoods. The girls, in particular, find the transformation in the role of American women flabbergasting, which brings home to them all the more vividly that the world wasn’t always the way it is today—the beginning of historical understanding, especially worth cultivating in a country where only 12 percent of high school seniors score at the proficient level in the most trusted national American history test.109

  The guides stage a mock debate, pitting the Patriot governor William Livingston against the last royal governor of New Jersey, Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son, William, and also against a spokesman for eighteenth-century New Jersey’s many antiwar, anti-oath Quakers, who insisted on neutrality as the Revolution ravaged their hotly contested state. At the end, the guides ask the children to sign, in quill pen and ink, their choice among two loyalty oaths and a declaration of neutrality. Recently, most school groups have split equally among the three choices. Those opting for neutrality explain that it’s “just easier” and that “people have no reason to hate you.” But the Patriot child who declared, “I want to fight for freedom!” would have warmed William Livingston’s ardent (if briefly cautious), liberty-loving heart.110

  2

  Conservative Revolutionaries: The Lees of Stratford Hall

  HALFWAY ALONG THE FLAT, damp Northern Neck of Virginia, which stretches down to Chesapeake Bay between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, stands one of America’s most extraordinary houses, Stratford Hall. With its two rooftop triumphal arches piercing the sky, Stratford would be remarkable for its architecture alone, unique in the nation—and uniquely handsome. But its chief distinction lies in its having been home to four brothers who became revolutionary leaders—two Continental Congressmen who signed the Declaration of Independence and two diplomats—as well as to their cousin, one of the Revolution’s most dashing war heroes. John Adams described these five Lees of Stratford as “that band of brothers, intrepid and unchangeable, who, like the Greeks at Thermopylae, stood in the gap, in the defense of their country, from the first glimmering of the Revolution in the horizon, through all its rising light, to its perfect day.”1

  From the sharp-tongued Adams, that’s high praise
indeed, in prose unusually florid for him. All five Lees merit it, but three of them deserve our special attention: Adams’s close ally, Richard Henry Lee, one of the earliest revolutionary firebrands, whose motion in the Continental Congress that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States” led to the Declaration of Independence; his brother, diplomat Arthur Lee, who negotiated the first secret loans from France and Spain to support the Continental Army and made the first big deals for foreign arms to supply it; and their intrepid cousin, General “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, who, long after his revolutionary exploits, marked the end of the Founding by giving Congress’s eulogy for George Washington, with its famous praise of his revered commander as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”2

  This trio—and their remarkable Virginia forebears—provide a luminous vantage point onto the workings of the British Empire in the New World, how it rose and why it exploded. They became, paradoxically, conservative revolutionaries, indignantly fighting to preserve long-cherished British values and British liberties from British despoilment. Moreover, Light-Horse Harry’s saga jumps the story forward, with unexpected twists, into the administration of his Princeton classmate James Madison—and it even points beyond the confines of this book: for Harry’s son, born at Stratford, became General Robert E. Lee.

  FROM THEIR ARRIVAL in America through the Revolution, the Lees operated as a multinational family firm, like proto-Rothschilds. In 1639, when their widowed mother died in the English Midlands, three young Lee boys became wards of their uncle, a prosperous Worcester cloth merchant. Dreaming big transatlantic dreams, he sent two of the youths to open a mercantile house in London and dispatched his middle nephew, Richard, to represent the firm in Virginia, raw Indian country, alive with wolves and cougars, and with hardly more than five thousand British settlers.3 An enterprising genius, as a great-grandson rightly called him, the twenty-one-year-old immigrant started out as secretary to two successive royal governors, a grand-sounding title for the chiefs of a pioneer band, but he soon set up a thriving trading post on Virginia’s most backwoods frontier, swapping British manufactures with the Indians for valuable furs and hides to send to his London brothers.4 By midcentury, now owner of three plantations and part of a ship—and having narrowly escaped an Indian massacre that killed three hundred settlers—Richard Lee exported mainly tobacco and ran a flourishing salesroom for the European goods his brothers sent him. In his ship, he also transported Britons seeking work as indentured servants in the New World, for which he received grants of land called “headrights,” Britain’s incentive for getting the wilderness peopled and cultivated by Englishmen.5 He traded in African slaves as well, three hundred of whom were in Virginia by 1649.6