America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  This was John Jay’s grandfather Augustus Jay, a descendant of a once prominent French Huguenot family that traced its lineage in France back to the early sixteenth century. Augustus’s father, Pierre, had been described as “an active and opulent merchant” in the city of La Rochelle, and at the age of twelve Augustus (or Auguste, as he was then named) had been sent to England to be educated. It is said in the family that the original name was J’ai—“I have it.” But by 1685 they no longer had it. The position of Protestants in Catholic France had always been shaky, and when the Edict of Nantes was revoked that year, all the family’s property was confiscated. Augustus, then twenty, decided to seek his fortune elsewhere: first in Holland, then England, and finally in America, where he arrived in 1686. This was, coincidentally, the same year that Livingston Manor was ceded to the first Robert Livingston, with Robert as its first lord.

  In New York, Augustus Jay found a pleasant and well-to-do Huguenot community of French escapees like himself, which worshipped at L’Eglise des Réfugiés, the “French Church.” And soon Augustus Jay was also prospering as an importer and merchant. From England he imported homespuns and woolens and mohair, hats, gloves, and beer. In the West Indies he traded cargos of flour, bread, and pork in return for shipments of sugar and rum. Augustus Jay’s merchant trading ships even journeyed to such remote ports as present-day Suriname, on the northeast coast of South America.

  Like Robert Livingston, Augustus Jay was able to make a socially and financially auspicious marriage. In 1697, he married Anna Maria Bayard, a granddaughter of Govert Loockermans, who, when he died in 1670, was the richest man in the colony. On her mother’s side Anna Bayard counted members of most of the great manorial families of New York—the Van Cortlandts, the Van Rensselaers, the Schuylers, and the Philipses—as her cousins. Anna Bayard’s father, furthermore, was a nephew of Governor Peter Stuyvesant, and the Stuyvesants and Bayards were even more intricately related. Peter Stuyvesant’s wife had been the former Julia Bayard, and Peter Stuyvesant’s sister had married his wife’s brother. Thus there had been a Mrs. Stuyvesant née Bayard and a Mrs. Bayard née Stuyvesant. In one quick marital maneuver, Augustus Jay had succeeded in collecting nearly the entire catalogue of Old Knickerbocker names as his in-laws.

  This would mean that John Jay and his bride, Sarah Livingston, were cousins by marriage in a complicated sort of way through “the Schuyler Connection”; Sarah’s great-grandmother had been a Schuyler.

  Augustus and Anna Jay’s union produced four children, three daughters and one son, Peter, John Jay’s father. Peter Jay had been trained to follow in his father’s international mercantile footsteps from an early age. At eighteen, he had been sent to Europe, where he transacted business in London, Bristol, Paris, and Amsterdam for the family firm. Returning to New York, he continued to follow his father’s example by making a dynastic marriage. Peter Jay’s bride was his mother’s young second cousin, Mary Anna Van Cortlandt of Cortlandt Manor, the daughter of Jacobus and Eve Philipse Van Cortlandt and a granddaughter of the first lord of the manor of Philipsburg, Frederick Philipse (pronounced “Philipsee”). Thus it is possible to see why their son John, by the time he reached King’s College, could consider himself very much to the manner, if not to the manorship, born.

  John Jay cannot have had a particularly happy childhood. Of the ten children born to Peter and Mary Jay, in those days of high infant mortality, only seven lived to adulthood, and four of these suffered from mental or physical handicaps. An older sister, Eve, was emotionally disturbed from the time she was a litte girl, and an older brother, Augustus, was mentally retarded and could never learn to read or write, despite the family’s continued efforts with private tutors. Another older brother, Peter, Jr., and sister, Anna, had been completely blinded by smallpox in the epidemic of 1739. Despite their children’s afflictions, Peter and Mary Jay had tried to raise their family in Manhattan until a few months after John Jay’s birth in December 1745. Then, as Peter Jay wrote, “considering the helpless condition of part of my family,” he decided to move to the country. The Jays settled in a large, rambling house in Rye, New York, overlooking Long Island Sound, where “the little blind ones” would be protected from “the dangers and confusions of the city life.”

  John Jay’s education was somewhat eccentric, though aristocratically Spartan. As a child he had been taught “the rudiments of English, and the Latin grammar” at home by his mother, and by age seven he was deemed ready to enter grammar school. The school chosen was a church-run affair in nearby New Rochelle, which, as the name suggests, had been settled mainly by French refugees, from the provinces of Aunis and Saintonge. The school was run by the curmudgeonly Reverend Peter Stoope, a French Swiss who had been pastor of the French Huguenot Church, which had recently joined New Rochelle’s Episcopal Communion. Dr. Stoope spent most of his days pondering arcane mathematical theorems and seemed unaware that his parsonage, in which his school was kept, was collapsing into near-ruin. John Jay would later recall that, in order to keep the snow off his bed in winter, he would have to stuff the broken windowpanes with chips of wood. Dr. Stoope’s wife was in charge of the school’s domestic arrangements and was “as penurious as he was careless.” If there was anything at all served at a meal beyond a cup of thin soup, it might be a small piece of boiled potato or a bit of stale bread. Jay would also later tell of how, to avoid what to a teenage boy seemed like imminent starvation, he and his classmates would take to the woods in search of nuts and berries, which they would bring back concealed in their stockings, lest they be confiscated by Mme. Stoope. Dr. Stoope’s school offered one advantage—the classes were taught in French, which would stand Jay in good stead later on when he was named a colonial emissary to Paris. John Jay endured three years of Dr. Stoope’s school and its rigors before being brought home to Rye to be prepared for college by a private tutor.

  At the time, the entrance requirements for King’s College were that a boy be able to translate “the first three of Tully’s orations and the six first books of Virgil’s Aeneid into English, and the first ten chapters of St. John’s Gospel into Latin”; to have a mastery of Latin grammar, and to be “expert in Arithmetick as far as Reduction.” All this he was able to master, and when he was admitted to college he was just fourteen.

  Politically, the man who would be hailed as a great Revolutionary patriot was already beginning to emerge, but it would be wrong to see him as a budding socialistic firebrand or militant anti-Royalist. On the contrary, the Jays and their friends were political conservatives. Like other well-to-do New Yorkers of the period, the Jays worried that a revolution would lead to government by the proletariat, a most unsettling thought.

  The Livingstons, by contrast, were outspokenly Whigs. The literary circle of the era regularly met at the home of William Livingston, and at one of these gatherings John Jay’s future father-in-law had rather shocked his guests by reading some ballads he had composed that appeared to mock the king and the monarchy. The Revolutionary movement, of course, was still only a matter of whispered speculation, something that was only vaguely in the air, and since the Livingston ballads might be considered seditious, it was decided that they should be burned, for safety’s sake, by the public hangman.

  The Jays, however, were merchants and resented any sort of outside government interference. John Jay’s father had often spoken of how intolerable the situation had become, that a continent as large and as prosperous as America had grown should be ruled by a tiny island three thousand miles away. Independence was a much more recurrent theme in family conversations than revolution, and if independence from Great Britain could be achieved without the untidiness of war, that was what wealthy colonists like the Jays would have much preferred. Families such as the Jays felt they owed Britain nothing for their success in America. They had succeeded despite the burdens of British taxation. The fact that none of John Jay’s eight great-grandparents had been English was important to him; three had been French, and five had been D
utch. Therefore, he was one of the few men of the Revolution who could say, as he did in 1796, “Not being of British descent, I cannot be influenced by that tendency towards their national character, nor that partiality for it, which might otherwise be supposed to be not unnatural.”

  The Jays and other early New York families like them were also, in a genteel way, opposed to slavery, and John Jay himself would later help organize the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves. Though New York families such as the Jays kept slaves themselves, most had adopted the practice of paying their slaves small wages that were designed, in time, to permit slaves to purchase their freedom. On the other hand, these New Yorkers were willing to admit that theirs was a somewhat special situation. In New York, slaves were used primarily as household servants. In the South, slaves ran the vast factory-plantations and were considered indispensable to the southern economy. An antislavery stance was easy in the North. As one of John Jay’s relatives once commented, “Freedom … greatly helps their morale and from a selfish point of view it makes a staff much easier to deal with.”

  John Jay’s attitude would be a cautious one of wait and see. “Even if we could free all slaves now,” he once said, “I do not think it would be wise. But we should prepare now for eventual abolition of slavery by educating our Negroes and giving them opportunities to learn a trade and earn their independence.” As an independent merchant’s son, he tended to equate freedom with free enterprise.

  At college, John Jay had decided upon a career in law. An older brother, James, had already joined the family import-export business and was more or less running it while Peter Jay, now semiretired, busied himself managing his big farm and country estate in Rye.

  John Jay’s decision to become a lawyer had made his father a little nervous. The law had become the most snobbish of professions in New York and, through such institutions as The Moot club, had become an elite fraternity that welcomed no outsiders. A few years earlier, an association of New York lawyers had adopted a resolution designed to keep the profession, and the business, to themselves. It was a perfect catch-22 rule: No one could become a lawyer who had not apprenticed as a clerk, while, on the other hand, no clerk “who proposed to enter the profession” could be hired. But this stricture had proven to be impossible to enforce, and it had been loosened a bit. Clerks, the legal profession had conceded, could in fact train to be lawyers and even be licensed as such, but “under such restrictions as will greatly impede the lower class of the people from creeping in.” Would his son be deemed a gentleman enough to be a lawyer, or would he be labeled a lowerclass creeper? This worried Peter Jay.

  Then, in the spring of 1763, when John Jay was in his last year at King’s College, an incident occurred that could have ruined his career forever.

  It seemed that, as a lark, a group of high-spirited young students had decided to set upon and smash a certain table that sat in a corner of College Hall. The sounds of splintering furniture attracted several professors to the scene, who proceeded to summon Dr. Myles Cooper, the college president, who was not amused. He lined the errant students up in military fashion and asked each young man, in turn, two questions: “Did you break the table?” and “Do you know who did?” To both questions, the young men answered “No” as Dr. Cooper moved down the line. Near the end of the line, the president approached Jay. “Mr. Jay, did you break the table?” Dr. Cooper asked. “No,” was the reply. “Do you know who did?” “Yes,” replied John Jay.

  Dr. Cooper then demanded to know the names of those responsible for the nefarious deed, to which John Jay responded with a lawyerly argument in which he pointed out that nowhere in the college’s regulations was there a rule that required a man to inform on his fellow students. Dr. Cooper was unimpressed, and John Jay was given a one-year suspension from King’s College over the affair. Returning the following year, however, Jay completed his studies with honors and, in front of His Majesty’s Council, General Thomas Gage, and other colonial worthies, he delivered an impressive dissertation on the blessings of peace and was given his bachelor’s degree in 1764.

  Two weeks later, in return for the sum of two hundred dollars, he was admitted as a clerk-apprentice in the offices of Mr. Benjamin Kissam, a barrister “eminent in the profession,” to serve for five years. He completed his training in four years, was admitted to the New York bar in 1768, and was ready for the next step upward—the dynastic marriage.

  John Jay may have seen himself as a man more suited to the contemplative life of “a College or a Village,” but his lively and ambitious young wife saw herself as someone cut out for far more than that. Sarah Livingston Jay was a woman who seemed to be designed for grand entrances, for great, theatrical descents down marble staircases, for red carpets and gilded ballroom chairs, for royal courts and courtiers and thrones where turbaned Nubians waved peacock-feathered fans. She seems to have been born with presence, with an ability, wherever she went, to take the center of the stage and hold the spotlight, and whatever her new marriage consisted of, she was determined that she and her husband were going to be in the thick of things—important things, national things, international things. She had brought into the marriage her Livingston dowry and her Livingston name, which could only help further her ambitions. For herself and her husband, she set her sights on the top. A favorite gesture was to touch her adoring husband’s dark coat sleeve and whisper gently but urgently, “Come, John!”

  Only a few months after the Jays’ wedding, in 1774, Sarah’s father, the steadfast Whig, was appointed to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia and, at Sarah’s urging, her husband was also invited to join this gathering of colonial notables who were convening to explore ways and means to settle their disputes with the Crown. It was a classic case of the ancient maxim that the son-in-law also rises.

  Jay had remained reluctant to support the growing tide of opinion that advocated America’s separation from the British Empire even if it meant violence. But Sarah Jay urged him that it was his patriotic duty, his historic calling, his God-given obligation to serve the country of his birth in its time of need.

  At twenty-eight, he was one of the Congress’s youngest members, and even to have joined this anti-Royalist body called for no small amount of courage. In the Congress, his father-in-law saw to it that he was given the important task of drawing up an address to the people of Great Britain listing the colonies’ grievances against George III. At that delicate stage of British-American negotiations, any expression of opposition to the king could have meant an invitation to the gallows, but Jay brought it off and returned from Philadelphia to find himself a colonial hero.

  At the Second Continental Congress, a year later, Jay addressed similar statements of grievances to the governments of Canada, Jamaica, and Ireland. In preparing these documents, it was clear that Jay had become a master of a kind of eloquent, drumrolling political rhetoric that was designed to stir men’s souls. “Though vilified as wanting spirit,” he wrote, “we are determined to behave like men; though insulted and abused, we wish for reconciliation; though defamed as seditious, we are ready to obey the laws, and though charged with rebellion, will cheerfully bleed in defense of our sovereign in a righteous cause.”

  Jay was in Philadelphia when the news of the events in Lexington and Concord swept through the colonies. The great war had begun. In the summer of 1776, Jay was attending the provincial congress of New York and therefore missed the opportunity to affix his signature to the Declaration of Independence. But he was chairman of the committee that drafted the New York State Constitution and shortly afterward was named the first chief justice of the state. In 1778, he returned to the Continental Congress and, in December of that year, was elected its president. Sarah was delighted.

  Seventeen seventy-nine was a year of ferocious fighting, and Spain had entered the fray, loaning the colonists 219 bronze cannon, 200 gun carriages, 30,000 muskets, 55,000 rounds of ammunition, 12,000 bombs, 4,000 tents, and 30,000 uniforms, and
would supply the revolutionaries with more than five million dollars in aid before the war was over. Britain had reacted angrily, and George III had offered the Spanish king the territories of Florida and Gibraltar, as well as cod-fishing rights off Newfoundland, if Spain would withdraw her support of the Americans. With Spanish sympathies hanging in the balance, it was decided that an emissary must immediately be sent to Spain to secure Carlos III’s continued help in the Revolutionary cause. The man chosen for this high diplomatic mission was John Jay.

  Sarah Jay, who had never crossed the Atlantic or set foot outside the American continent, was ecstatic. She would be curtsying before the Spanish monarch, and he would be kissing her hand. Was there any wealth more ancient than that of the Bourbon kings? There was never any doubt about whether Sarah Jay wanted to accompany her husband on his mission to Madrid. The only question was whether anyone could stop her.

  5

  A Gentleman’s War

  William W. Reese is a New York banker in his middle forties who is a member of the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company. He and his beautiful artist wife live in an attractive apartment on Park Avenue and keep a winter condominium in Palm Beach; all very ordinary upper-crust New York stuff, you might say. And yet William Reese is one of a number of quietly successful young Americans who take their descendancy from the early aristocratic families very seriously and who consider themselves aristocratically superior to what passes for New York “society” today—though they would never say so except in the company of close friends and others whom they recognize as their own sort. An aristocrat, by definition, never boasts of being one.