America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Bill Reese confesses to gaining a quiet pleasure walking about New York and feeling a sense of belonging to a place his ancestors helped build. “I can pass a building and think, That’s the corner where my great-grandfather’s house stood. That old building was where my great-uncles went to school. That little park used to be part of one of my ancestors’ apple orchard, and that statue is of a relative of mine. My ancestors helped build that hospital, that museum. This was where the reservoir used to be until some of my ancestors, the Astors, gave the money to build the public library.…”

  On his father’s side, Bill Reese is descended from Livingstons, who, of course, are by now connected to everybody else, including the Astors, and on his mother’s side the connections are to the Otises of Boston, about whom there are many family legends, many of which may be apocryphal. According to one, Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, whenever she introduced herself, always quickly added, “And we are not in elevators. We were elevated when there were just stairs.”

  To maintain a sense of connection with his family’s long American past, William Reese belongs to at least twenty patriotic, genealogical, and social organizations, including the Union Club, the Knickerbocker Club, the Rockaway Hunting Club, the Racquet & Tennis Club, the Down Town Club, the Church Club, the Badminton Club, the University Club, the Metropolitan Opera Club, the Society of Colonial Wars, the Military Order of Foreign Wars, the New England Society, the Order of Colonial Lords of Manors in America, the Society of the War of 1812, the St. Nicholas Society, the Sons of the Revolution, the Huguenot Society, the Sons of the American Revolution, the Mayflower Descendants, and the American Society of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. As can be deduced, many of Mr. Reese’s ancestors have fought in wars. “One has a special affection,” he says, “for ancestors who have died fighting in wars for their country.”

  William Reese often lunches at the University Club, that marvel of McKim, Mead & White architecture at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan, and the University Club also honors its war dead. On one wall of the club’s entrance lobby, a bronze plaque commemorates club members who fell in World War I. On the opposite wall, a similar plaque memorializes those members who died in World War II. Mr. Reese, who is too young to have fought in either of these wars, often studies these two plaques. “I want you to notice something,” he says. “The World War One plaque lists twenty University Club members who were killed in that war, which America was in only for a very short period of time. The World War Two plaque lists only eight members killed, or less than half, even though we were involved in that war for a much longer time. I like to think it is because World War One was the last war that was fought by gentlemen.”

  Other explanations for this discrepancy come to mind—more modern medical techniques, for example. Or the fact that World War II came at the end of the Great Depression, during which many gentlemen gave up their club memberships as a matter of economic necessity. But Mr. Reese’s explanation is the aristocratic one, the nostalgic one, the romantic one, the proud one from a descendant of proud old families, and it has a certain piquancy and charm. Aristocracy, after all, is also a frame of mind.

  In retrospect, the American Revolution often seems like a gentlemanly sort of war. Henry H. Livingston, for example, notes that “at least eight known members of the family fought in the Battle of Saratoga, and only one of these was an enlisted man. The others were all officers.” Looking back, that war—during much of which John and Sarah Jay were out of the country on one sensitive mission or another—also seems like the last war in the history of the world in which everyone managed to conduct himself gloriously. Nothing about it seemed entirely real. If a man didn’t feel like fighting in it, and could afford to do so, he could hire someone else to fight—and die—for him and still be counted as a patriot. In New York, in particular, which had always been a stronghold of Toryism, it was hard to take the whole thing seriously, at the war’s outset, at least. New Yorkers hadn’t really wanted a revolution anyway, and so when war began, wealthy families simply moved to their country places to be out of the line of fire. The Revolution was simply something to have done with, to get through, a probably unnecessary nuisance. Of course it was all quite different in Boston, where Revolutionary passions burned.

  From a distance, in the beginning, the war seemed as quaintly exciting as a good game of chess, the redcoated British soldiers no more than toys made of tin. There was no question that the patriots would win in the end, and in the meantime—in New York, at least—nobody harbored any really hard feelings against the poor British or poor old George III. But the war had a certain glamour. It was a war fought dashingly on horseback, a war of flintlocks and rapiers and snuffboxes and muskets and whiskey and coonskin caps.

  It was not long, however, before the harsh realities of the war became clear, and the American Revolution became a six-and-a-half-year period of terrible suffering and deprivation, during which thousands of young men would die or be mutilated, and the ordinary staples of life—sugar, salt, corn, and milk—would become so scarce as to be nonexistent, and children would die of starvation. At the war’s end, women and children who had fled the cities to be out of the path of the fighting would return to their city mansions to find their homes looted or gutted by the British and precious family heirlooms stolen or destroyed. Out of the war would come tales of bravery and heroism, of luck against all adversity, as well as tales of brutality and betrayal.

  Mrs. John King Van Rennselaer tells a tale that she admits may be a legend, though it has passed down through her family with specific names attached to the participants and so may be true. William Alexander, the sixth earl of Stirling, who had renounced his estates overseas to serve the Revolutionary cause, had sent his wife and children to his country house, The Sycamores, in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, to wait out the war. And soon, as other women were doing, Lady Stirling (who was Sarah Jay’s aunt) had turned the house into a hospital to care for wounded soldiers and other refugees from New York. At one point, according to the story, the material comforts of life were at such a low point that there was only a single darning needle in the entire community. This precious commodity was passed from neighbor to neighbor, to sew bandages and mend and patch hospital blankets and clothing. One day Lady Stirling needed to borrow the needle and dispatched a little boy, Quincey Morton—the son of the Revolutionary general and signer of the Declaration of Independence John Morton—to fetch it from the last woman who had used it.

  Quincey Morton obtained the needle, but somewhere along the route back to The Sycamores he stopped to play with some children his age, and when he reached Lady Stirling’s house the needle was nowhere to be found. The loss of the darning needle galvanized the entire town. Young Quincey was grilled until he broke down in tears, but he had no idea where or how he had lost the needle. Then the whole town turned out to search for the needle, not in a proverbial haystack but across a considerable stretch of rural countryside. The search went on for hours, and every possible route Quincey might have taken was traced and retraced. Finally, a sharp-eyed member of the search party spotted a tiny silvery object speared in the trunk of a tree. It was the needle. When Quincey had stopped to play, it seemed, he had absentmindedly stuck the needle there and forgotten all about it.

  Other Revolutionary tales have come down from more than word of mouth and have less happy endings. Helping Lady Stirling at her impromptu hospital was a young woman named Nannie Brown, an orphaned niece of the Brockholst family, who traced their lineage back to the first English lieutenant governor of New York and who, it may be redundant to report, were also related by marriage to the Livingstons (Sarah Livingston Jay’s brother was named Brockholst Livingston). And during the Battle of Trenton a young lieutenant from the Virginia infantry named James Monroe was carried, wounded, to The Sycamores. While Nannie Brown helped to nurse him back to health, the two fell in love. When he recovered, he asked her to marry him, and she ac
cepted his proposal.

  Her Brockholst relatives disapproved, and so did Lady Stirling. Monroe, they insisted, was not good enough for Nannie Brown. His background was obscure; he was from a tiny settlement called Monroe Creek. His lineage was undistinguished. He was tall, stoop-shouldered, not particularly handsome or particularly bright, a dropout from the College of William and Mary. He only wanted to marry Nannie Brown, Lady Stirling warned, because of her family connections.

  And here it is important to state a rule of the American aristocracy that applied then and continues to apply today. An aristocratic wife can make an aristocrat of her husband, but it does not work the other way around. We shall see it happen again and again as men of lower social standing, or of no social standing whatever, manage to elevate themselves through the proper choice of a wife. But when men marry beneath them, they inevitably sink to the lower social status of their wives. A contemporary example of this rule at work occurred when King Edward VIII of England decided he must marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson.

  And so, when Nannie Brown and James Monroe protested that their love was true, Major General Lord Stirling promoted his wife’s friend’s fiancé and made him his aide-decamp, demonstrating that even an engagement to a young woman of good family could advance a man in the world. Plans for the wedding proceeded, and it was to be as grand an affair as wartime shortages and austerity would allow. The Van Horne family had offered their elegant family homestead on the banks of the Raritan River near New Brunswick for the wedding and reception, and Monroe had presented his bride-to-be with a gold engagement band inscribed with the words “Your consent gives content” inside the circle. He had also given her a necklace with a pendant upon which his profile was embossed. Working together, Lady Stirling and Nannie Brown pieced together a wedding gown out of whatever scraps of old silk they could lay their hands upon. The day of the wedding arrived, the bride was dressed, and the guests had assembled on the Van Hornes’ sweeping lawn. Military musicians, recruited by General Stirling, were poised to play the Wedding March. At that point a messenger arrived on horseback with a brief note from the bridegroom. He had changed his mind.

  Nannie Brown did not die of a broken heart but lived on in dignified spinsterhood for many years. James Monroe married a stately lady named Elizabeth Kortright who was of a “good,” if not distinguished, family, though she had more money than Nannie Brown. But New York society would never forgive Monroe for his caddish act.

  Thirty years later, when Monroe had become the fifth president of the United States, he encountered Mrs. Alexander Hamilton at a reception in Washington and approached her, holding out his hand. “I believe you know me, Mrs. Hamilton,” he said. “I’m President James Monroe.”

  Mrs. Hamilton refused his hand and turned her back on him. “I do not wish to know a James Monroe,” she said. “I do not wish to know a president of the United States who jilted my friend Nannie Brown.”

  James Monroe might have fought and been wounded in a gentleman’s war, but he would never be a gentleman.

  And this might be a corollary rule of the American aristocracy: One seldom gets an invitation to join its ranks more than once.

  6

  Coronation in New York

  When the American Livingstons became rich, they began the usual title search into their Scots past and came up with the fact that the powerful earls of Callendar and Linlithgow were also Livingstons. This was sufficient for the American line to claim these earls and countesses as cousins. The cousinship, however, is so remote as to be almost undetectable. Nonetheless, through this connection the Livingstons are able to claim not just one but two family mottos. The first is Si je puis—“if I can.” The second is Spero meliora—“I hope for better things,” and indeed, after marrying John Jay, Sarah Livingston had found better things than she could ever have wished or hoped for growing up on a farm in New Jersey.

  In Madrid, where the American Revolutionary cause was very popular, the Jays were the toasts of society, and Sarah Jay had danced with the widowed Carlos III, who had even—or so she would later claim—attempted a “flirtation” with her. John Jay’s mission with the Spanish government met with mixed success. He failed to get official recognition of the United States from Spain, but he succeeded in getting a grant for about $150,000. And Spain’s reaction to Great Britain’s protests over this Spanish aid to America had been an attack on the British stronghold of Gibraltar.

  The Jays’ next diplomatic posting was to London and Paris, where Jay was to aid Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson at a conference to negotiate a peace treaty with Britain. In London, John Jay took time off to commission a portrait of himself by Gilbert Stuart, whom he would later introduce to George Washington. It was the first of a collection of portraits that Jay would assemble and that would include portraits of Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, James Madison, Stephen Van Rensselaer, and Egbert Benson, a New York State official and longtime friend of Jay’s. It was as though John Jay had decided to gather, in his collection, a pantheon of American national heroes, among whom his own likeness now seemed to him to belong.

  On his treaty mission, Jay had been under specific instructions to come to no agreement that did not also satisfy the French government, whose support had been invaluable in the war. But, acting on his own, Jay had decided to deal directly with the British ministers, had persuaded the French government to let him do this, and as a result won terms more favorable to America than anyone had dared hope for.

  Looking back from a perspective of more than two hundred years, the Jays’ four-and-a-half-year stay in Europe seems almost astonishing. Today, American corporations routinely send executives for two-or three-year tours of duty in foreign cities where these employees—and their wives and children—complain of culture shock, of boredom and anomie, of loneliness and homesickness, and of an inability to get to know their foreign neighbors. And yet in the case of the Jays, when Europe was much farther away than it is today (an average crossing took nine weeks), we have two young and relatively provincial people who had never left the American continent before and who came from a comparatively new and still very rawboned town (herds of wild pigs still ran in the streets of New York, and the long skirts of fashionable ladies dragged in the mud of unpaved sidewalks) sweeping into the ancient capitals of Madrid, Paris, and London, having a wonderful time and managing to meet practically everybody there was to know. Not even obstetric interludes seemed to daunt Sarah Jay. One of her five children was born in Madrid, and another in Passy, outside Paris.

  They met the celebrated and the notorious alike. They met the social reformer François de La Rochefoucauld. They met the controversial metaphysicist Franz Anton Mesmer and discussed with him his mysterious theories of planetary influence, animal magnetism, and hypnotism. They met Lavoisier the chemist, Adrien Legendre the mathematician, and the sinister Alessandro di Cagliostro, who performed magical acts and curses through the use of amulets, philters, and talismans. What was the Jays’ secret? Was it her beauty and charm and wonderful manners? Was it his untrained but intuitive diplomatic brilliance? All of these things of course had something to do with it. But, more than anything, it was that both spoke perfect French, which was then the official language of the major European courts. No wonder the French government gave John Jay carte blanche to deal directly with the British in drawing up his treaty. One only has to recall the success of another French-speaking American emissary, Jacqueline Kennedy, who actually caused the great stone face of Charles de Gaulle to break into an unprecedented smile, to realize how quickly the French surrender themselves to foreigners who can speak their beautiful language properly.

  In Paris, the Jays were enthusiastically taken up by the French nobility, even though they had come as official representatives of a system in which nobility would be no more. At Versailles, Sarah was presented for the second time to a reigning monarch, and to his queen, Marie Antoinette, who was delighted to hear from Sarah that a little American town was bei
ng named in her honor: Marietta, Ohio. Sarah was particularly impressed by the queen, even though she felt a bit uneasy about admitting it. In a letter home to her friend Mrs. Robert Morris in New York, she gave her impressions of the queen and also of the kind of giddy social life Sarah herself was leading:

  She is so handsome, and her manners are so engaging, that, almost forgetful of Republican principles, I was ready, in her presence, to declare her born to be a queen. There are, however, many traits in her character worthy of imitation, even by Republicans; and I cannot but admire her resolution to superintend the education of Madame Royale, her daughter, to whom she has allotted chambers adjoining her own, and persists in refusing to name a governess for her. The Duchess of Polignac is named for that office to the Dauphin. I have just been interrupted by a visit from the Princess Mazarin, who informed me that the Count d’Artois was expected here in eight days hence, and the Prince, her husband, soon after; so that I conjecture the siege of Gibraltar is to be abandoned.…

  Europe, meanwhile, was caught up in something that was far more exciting than politics or what was going on across the ocean in America. Two Frenchmen, Joseph Montgolfier and his brother Étienne, had sent up a balloon filled with hot air into the sky. Next it would be a manned flight, in a great balloon decorated with crimson scallops, signs of the zodiac, wreaths, gargoyles and griffons, portraits of Apollo, and golden fleurs-de-lis. It ascended, then bobbed and tossed over the rooftops of Paris. Sarah Jay wrote excitedly home to her family after witnessing her first balloon flight that “Mr. Jay and I might think of taking our passage back home to America next spring on the wings of the wind.” More seriously, she added that balloons “certainly might be used for carrying mail.”