The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  * The Hayses, through the mazelike tracery of Malcolm Stern’s book, over the years became related or “connected” with most of the other old families, down to the recent publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

  11

  FIRST LADIES

  It comes as a surprise to many people that there are Jewish Daughters of the American Revolution—just as there are Sons—though of course there are. Some of the Old Guard Sephardic families are a little sheepish about being DAR members, to be sure, since that organization has gained a reputation of making members of minority groups feel less than welcome. At the same time, these people keep their little certificates of membership, and show these to their children and grandchildren as well.

  While men like Haym Salomon were raising and supplying money for Revolutionary coffers, and while Judah Touro was saving his money in New Orleans, a number of Sephardic women were gaining reputations as Revolutionary heroines. There was Mrs. David Hays, for example. Esther Hays and Judah Touro were second cousins by marriage; that is, Esther’s husband, David, was a first cousin of Judah’s mother. By the time of the Revolution, branches of the Hays family were well established in Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond, where they can still be found. Esther Hays was an Etting, of the Philadelphia Ettings—a Sephardic family that had come to that city as early as 1758, and Ettings can still be found there (including the painter Emlen Etting, a seventh-generation Philadelphian). Esther Etting had met David Hays through Philadelphia connections, and theirs was the first Hays-Etting union (there would, of course, be others). It was considered an event of great social importance, creating as it did an even stronger tie among the Jewish communities of Philadelphia, New York, and Newport.

  David Hays took his bride north to an extensive farm he operated in New York’s Westchester County, near what is now the town of Bedford, and here the Revolution found them. The Hayses backed the Revolutionary cause and, one night in the winter of 1779, David Hays received word that a company camped not far from his farm had been surrounded by the British. Food and supplies were running low, and unless help reached them soon, the men would be forced to surrender or starve. With one of his young sons as a helper, Hays volunteered to try to drive a herd of seventy-five of his cattle through the enemy lines to the imperiled troops. He chose a moonless night for his mission. The cows were blindfolded, their jaws tied closed with rope so they could make no noise, and their hoofs wrapped in heavy sacking to muffle the sound of their march through the snow. The greatest risk came from the Hayses’ own neighbors, many of whom were Tory sympathizers, and the exploit had to be carried out in utmost secrecy.

  Nonetheless, somehow word of what David Hays was up to leaked out. He and his son had no sooner left the house than a group of angry and suspicions Tories gathered outside it, shouting for his wife. Esther Hays, still weak from the birth of her sixth child, had been in bed with a fever, but she rose and went to the door. When asked where her husband was, she refused to say. Even when the Tory group threatened to kill her small children, she refused to give the mob any information. She was then forced back inside her house; the windows and doors were barricaded, and the house was set afire. Fortunately, the Hayses’ Negro slaves, who lived nearby, were able to rescue Esther and her children, and carry them to safety in the slave quarters. But when David Hays and his son returned the next morning—after successfully completing their delivery of the cattle—the farmhouse had burned to the ground.

  Esther Hays was a woman not easily daunted. She showed her patriotic zeal on another occasion when she calmly walked through enemy lines in broad daylight. Ostensibly on a routine shopping errand, she was actually purveying a vital commodity to the Revolutionary soldiers. Her plump petticoats were heavily quilted with salt. Before the war was over, both Esther’s husband and her eldest son had fought at the front, as had her brother, Reuben, who died as a prisoner of war of the British. A volunteer the moment he learned of the first shot at Lexington, Reuben Etting had left his bank clerk’s job to join the American forces. After his capture he refused to eat pork, which, of course, was the chief staple supplied. He must have been as strong-willed as his sister, for his death was attributed to starvation.

  A gaudier Revolutionary role, though more social than military, was meanwhile being played by the women of Philadelphia’s Franks family, into which the entry—by marriage—had been such an important step for Haym Salomon. It had, in fact, by the time of the Revolution begun to seem as though Philadelphia’s Sephardim were taking themselves even more seriously than their relatives in New York and Newport, even though the Philadelphia community was newer than—and in many ways an offshoot of—the other two. Philadelphians generally had begun to think of themselves as superior to New Yorkers, as, of course, they still do. New York and Newport were looked down on as “commercial” cities; Philadelphia was a city more devoted to culture, the arts and graces. Sephardim in the more northerly cities had already begun to speak with a certain awe of their Philadelphia kin, and on one occasion Mrs. Aaron Lopez wrote one of her daughters a long letter (or memorandum, since the girl was living at home at the time) on how to behave: “Not to forget yr. curtsies, how d’you dos and thank-yous,” when meeting “our Philadelphia cousins.”

  The Franks family had settled in Philadelphia early in the eighteenth century, along with the Levys, to whom they were distantly related. The family, during its passage from fifteenth-century Spain to eighteenth-century Philadelphia, had been prominent elsewhere. Aaron Franks, grandfather of the first American Franks, had been a banker in Hanover, and, under the aegis of George I, who discovered his talent there, was brought to England as the king’s personal financial adviser. He was known as “the Jew Broker of London.” The Levys, meanwhile, could trace their lineage back to a number of prominent early American Jewish families. The two families became even more tightly entwined with each other when, in what was considered a dynastic union, Abigail Levy married Jacob Franks in 1712, and both families moved with great ease (certainly with more ease than the Jews of New York and Newport, who, socially, still kept to themselves) into the purlieus of Christian Philadelphia society. Both David Franks and his cousin, Samson Levy, were on the original list of the Assembly, Philadelphia’s most exclusive social event and one of the oldest balls in America, when it was composed in 1748.

  By the 1750’s, Philadelphia’s Jewish elite had added the Gratz family, along with the Ettings, and of course the Philadelphia branch of the Hayses. The Gratzes, like the Ettings and the Frankses, had come from Inquisitional Spain by way of Germany. In Spain, the name may have been Gracia, or Garcia. It was Philadelphia’s large German-speaking population that attracted these Sephardim with German-sounding names, who had taken the German route out of Spain, and knew the language. By the mid-eighteenth century, no good Philadelphia club was without its Gratz, Etting, Franks, Levy, or Hays. They were members of the Philadelphia and the Rittenhouse clubs, the Union League, the Racquet, the Rabbit, and the City Troop, and their names decorated the membership lists—and the lists of officers and directors and sponsors—of such august institutions as the Historical Society, the Philosophical Society, the Academy of Art, the Academy of Science, and the Atheneum.

  The Frankses and Hayses and Gratzes and Ettings not only married “within the group” but, by the time of the Revolution, had begun making brilliantly social marriages to members of Philadelphia’s non-Jewish elite. In the cities to the north, where the Sephardim remained more straitlaced and orthodox, the Philadelphia Jews’ behavior was looked on with something close to horror. “The German influence” was blamed for this sort of laxity—the same Christianizing influence that would lead to the Reform movement in Judaism, in both Germany and in the United States. But these intermarriages of Philadelphia’s Christian and Jewish families have meant that “Jewish blood,” as they say, flows in the veins of many an old American family, from Philadelphia Morrises and Newbolds and Ingersolls to the New York Verplancks. />
  Abigail Levy Franks, meanwhile—she was one half of the first Franks-Levy marriage—was not at all sure she approved of these developments, as she watched them unfold in Philadelphia. Abigail regarded herself as an eighteenth-century aristocratic lady. But in many ways she was also a prototype Jewish mother, so familiar in fiction of modern times. She was forever wrapping up and sending off to her sons packages of preserved relishes and “smoakt fish,” urging them not to forget to bathe regularly and eat three good meals daily. In correspondence to her son Naphtali Franks, covering the years 1733–1748, she repeatedly scolds him for his failure to write, or for spending too much money on gifts and “entertainments.” Addressing him always as “Heartsey” (not only a term of endearment, but also a play on her son’s middle name, which was Hart), she was fond of delivering Polonius-like pronouncements and advice. “You are now launched out amongst strangers,” she told him upon his arrival in England on a business trip. “You must be exceeding circumspect in your conduct, be affable to all men but not credulous, nor too soon be led away by fair speeches. Be likewise a very just observer of your word in all respects, even in ye most trivial matters.” She was a woman from whom it was not difficult to obtain an opinion, whether it was on the quality of a certain medicinal water or which was the “best Scotch snuff.” She deplored the split between the Sephardic and the Ashkenazic Jewish communities (in New York, she had heard, Sephardic Jews were all in the East Ward, and Ashkenazic Jews were in the less fashionable Dock Ward). She disliked the noise of eighteenth-century horse-drawn traffic in the city, and complained of the gaming and drinking that went on “from Sunday night to Saturday morning.” She called the ladies of her synagogue a “stupid set of people.” She was literate, and fond of quoting, often inaccurately and in the erratic spelling that was typical of the age, advice from the contemporary novels of Fielding and Smollett, and from the essays of Dryden, Addison, and her favorite, Pope. She directed “Heartsey” that “Two mornings a week should be entirely untill dinner time dedicated to some useful book besides an hour every week to that purpose.”

  She was preoccupied with finding a suitable mate for each of her seven children, and marital matters take up much of the space in her letters to her son. She quotes Heartsey the little verse, the source of which is unknown:

  Man the first happy favourite above,

  When heaven endowed him with a power to love.

  His God ne’er thought him in a blessed state

  Till Woman made his happyness compleat.

  And one of her great disappointments seems to have been the failure of her daughter Richa to complete a marriage alliance with David Gomez, and thereby with the illustrious Gomez family, even though David, Daniel’s brother, was almost forty years Richa’s senior. She adopts a sour-grapes attitude, speaking of David as “such a stupid wretch,” and adds to Heartsey that even if David had proposed, she and Richa would not have accepted him anyway, probably, not even “if his fortune were much more and I a beggar.” Better no marriage at all than marriage to that scoundrel, she seems to say, and Richa did indeed remain unmarried all her life, a heavy burden to her mother. Heartsey himself married his first cousin, Phila Franks, in a most satisfactory intramural manner.

  Another marital calamity involved the marriage of Abigail’s eldest daughter, also named Phila, to General Oliver De Lancey—who not only eloped with Phila but had her baptized. “Good God what a shock it was,” she wrote Heartsey, “when they acquainted me she had left the house and had bin married six months, I can hardly hold my pen whilst I am writting.…” She wrote that “Oliver has sent many times to beg leave to see me, but I never would.… Now he sent word that he will come here.… I dread seeing him and how to avoid I know no way.” It would be difficult, since the Frankses and the De Lanceys lived next door to each other. Abigail announced that she had instructed her errant daughter never to darken her door again and said: “I am determined I never will see nor let none of ye family go near her,” but she added in almost the next sentence that “Nature is very strong, and it would give me a great concern if she should live unhappy, though it’s a concern she does not merit.”

  Abigail Franks’s distress appears to have been entirely over the fact that Oliver De Lancey was a Christian, and to have had nothing to do with what might seem to have been certain deficiencies in the young man’s character. Present-day members of the De Lancey family take their pre-Revolutionary ancestry very seriously but, from contemporary reports, Oliver De Lancey emerges as a scapegrace, a bounder, a drunk, and—if we are to believe the source—a murderer. It was said, at the time, that he married Phila Franks for her money—a considerable inheritance left to her by her uncle Isaac. Shortly after the marriage, on November 3, 1742, Oliver was indicted for assaulting one of his wife’s relatives, Judah Mears, who was the brother of Abigail Franks’s stepmother. He and his friends were accused of attacking “a poor Dutch Jew and his wife,” of breaking their windows, and “swearing that they would lie with the woman.” Using foul language, they warned the couple not to bring charges since De Lancey and his friends were members of prominent New York families. Later the same year, according to a report from Governor George Clinton, Oliver stabbed and killed a Dr. Colchoun in a drunken brawl. This, however, may be an exaggeration or even an untruth. The De Lanceys and the Clintons were bitterest enemies, the Montagues and Capulets of early New York. It is known that Oliver De Lancey was something of a dandy and spent much of his time, and money, at the barber and at the wigmaker’s.

  After a while, Oliver seems to have settled down. He brought his wife to the De Lancey “country seat,” which was located on what is now West Twelfth Street, west of Hudson Street, in Greenwich Village.* Oliver and Phila had seven children, all of whom made socially important marriages, three of them to titled Englishmen. Susannah married Sir William Draper, Phila married the Honorable Stephen Payne-Gallwey, and Charlotte married Sir David Dundas. Stephen De Lancey married Cornelia Barclay, of another old New York family, and their son became Sir William Howe De Lancey. In the next De Lancey generation there appeared, in addition to a flock of Episcopal clergymen, Count Alexander Balmain.†

  Meanwhile, intermarriage—the thing which, despite her certain sophistication and attitude of tolerance, Abigail Levy Franks dreaded the most—occurred to the good Jewish mother a second time, when her son David, barely six months after his sister’s marriage to De Lancey, married Margaret Evans of Philadelphia. His mother died convinced that she had been a failure as a parent.

  It was the Franks-Evans union that produced the beautiful Franks sisters, Rebecca and Abigail, named after her grandmother. We see them in their portraits—Rebecca’s by Thomas Sully, who later became Philadelphia’s most popular society portraitist—pale, dark-haired, with high cheekbones, long thin noses, and arresting eyes, white and swanlike necks, white bosoms swelling over low-cut dresses. They were unquestionably belles. Rebecca, the younger and probably the more beautiful of the two, was one of the stars, along with Peggy Shippen (who married Benedict Arnold), of one of the most extraordinary affairs in the annals of American entertaining, Philadelphia’s “notorious Meschianza.”

  The Meschianza was an altogether curious event. Just why, in the middle of a great war, British-occupied Philadelphia should have decided to treat itself to a lavish party has never been entirely clear. Perhaps everyone was tired of battles and torn loyalties, and a fancy-dress ball seemed the answer. In any case, appropriate or not, a group of British officers decided in the spring of 1779 to put on the most extravagant social entertainment the new world had ever seen. The party was to honor the British General Sir William Howe, who was returning home to England.

  Within the family, to say nothing of within the Jewish community, the situation must have seemed grotesque. Cousins David and Esther Hays in Westchester were risking their lives and losing their home in order to smuggle provisions through to Revolutionary soldiers. Here, right in Philadelphia, Haym Salomon, whose wife was the
Franks sisters’ first cousin, was working to fill the Revolution’s coffers—and all the while the two giddy girls were planning a party to toast an enemy general. Feelings must have run strong, to say the least.

  The men in charge of arrangements for the party were Major John André and Captain Oliver De Lancey, Jr. Both were close friends of the Franks girls. De Lancey, of course, was another first cousin, and Major André had been a suitor, of sorts, of Rebecca’s. After being captured at Saint John’s in 1775, André had been paroled in Philadelphia. He had been a frequent guest at the Franks mansion, where he spent a long summer of infatuation with Rebecca, then a girl in her middle teens. Dreamily, he passed the warm afternoons reading love poetry to her, and painting a delicate miniature of her face. Rebecca, like her De Lancey cousins, had already become decidedly Tory in her politics. Perhaps her affinity for kings had something to do with her ancestor whom George I had made “the Jew Broker of London.” Certainly Major André’s attentions can only have bolstered her sentiments.

  For weeks before the Meschianza was to take place, Philadelphia was caught up in a flurry of preparations. One London firm reported that it had sold more than £12,000 worth of costly silks and laces for the Philadelphia ladies’ dresses. For the British officers, Savile Row shipped red-coated dress uniforms, powdered wigs, cutlasses in bejeweled scabbards.

  The party was held at Walnut Grove, the country home of Joseph Wharton, a sedate Quaker, but the party was un-Quakerish in every detail. It turned out that what Major André and Captain De Lancey had in mind was a sort of medieval tournament-festival, along the lines of the one held at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The Philadelphia replica may well have outdone the original. There were jousts, duels, contests, and feats of strength among the young officers. There was a water festival, a regatta of brightly decorated sailboats on the river. There were parades and processions under triumphal arches. Blackamoor slaves in Oriental garb served nearly a thousand guests with fifteen varieties of champagnes and other wines, and buffet tables set up throughout the house and gardens offered an “indescribable assortment” of exotic foods, according to one report of the affair. No expense was spared, obviously, for what had been billed as “a medley of extravagance”—which it most certainly was.