The Livingston Legacy
Three Centuries of American History
from the Symposium, June 6-7, 1986

Keynote

Robert Livingston and Moral Judgment

by Sung Bok Kim

Of the landlords, the colonial New York landlords, the Livingstons, the Van Rensselaers, and the Philipses were resented and maligned by both colonial settlers and historians. There were some good historical reasons for this malignment. First, the landlords seemed to represent the socioeconomic system from which the colonial settlers had tried to escape by coming to the New World, a system which was known to be "feudal." They were perceived as trying to prevent their fellow colonists from realizing their dreams of establishing themselves as free and yeoman freeholders unencumbered by rents and corvee. In that sense they were the antithesis of everything this continent promised to be.

For the Western men and women, owning a sufficient amount of land was the best way to overcome the historic human albatross, the circle of poverty. But the ownership of free land had more than economic implications. It was also the basis upon which one built character, virtue, and morality. Tenancy, an institution and lifestyle that embodied the dependence of one upon the other for livelihood, meant servility and subordination, attributes that were contrary to what was necessary for the development of republicanism and self-government. A corollary to all this was the slow growth of the colonies where the evils of landlordism were conspicuous, since many colonists did not care to live under them. When some did, the society that emerged was very stratified and polarized, with class tension and conflict between a few rich landowning people and many poor.

Here, we must pause and ask: Were these landlords, the Livingstons and their fellows, without any redeeming qualities? Were they really evil, as some colonists and historians made them out to be: ruthless, greedy, shameless in their business pursuits. and oppressive and exploitative in dealing with their tenants?

In discussing these questions, we must guard against the sin of moralizing, especially the sin of applying our own value system, in particular our democratic populist ideology, or treating the colonists in terms of moral absolutes. We must be sensible of the seventeenth and eighteenth century milieu, spirit, cast of mind, and context. We also need to take account of regional variations in these matters: New Yorkers and their frame of reference were very different from New Englanders during the period under consideration. All in all, we must try to go inside the historical actors and try to see the world from their perspective, to look at them on their own terms. This way, we shall then be, in John Higham’s words, sensitive to "what they ought to have done," what course they could and might have chosen, and what they achieved and failed to achieve. Our job is not to chastise these historical actors, but to understand and to reflect in a disciplined way on the meaning and implications of their deeds.

Let us ask from what kind of world did our colonial New York landlords come. Let me qualify my coverage. It is impossible to cover all the great landlords of New York, so I shall focus on Robert Livingston, who should occupy our major attention--not that he was typical of New York landlords, but because he was most criticized for his business practice and his attitude toward his tenants. He was from the English world of rising capitalism.

At the core of English capitalist belief was the concept of "every man alone," the atomic individual operating freely in time and space. Tradition, medieval hierarchy, and inherited social order were no longer held sacred, and social restraints on one’s pursuit of happiness, liberty, profit, and acquisition of property were condemned. It was the world of self-love and self-interest which put a premium of "everyone for himself" and which contemporaries thought would eventually result in the well-being of his community. It was the world of Bernard de Mandeville’s "Grumling Hive" before knaves turned honest, of John Locke’s liberalism, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. To the bourgeois mind, self-love was not only a virtue but also the fundamental motivating force of men and society. As Defoe aptly put it, "self, in a word, governs the whole world, the present race of Men all come into it. It is the foundation of every prospect in life. The beginning and end of our actions."

Let me hasten to add that the belief system have observed was not the one every American colonist espoused. In fact, Puritans and Pilgrims in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were distressed over the chaos and disintegration of traditional and corporate morality that the individualistic and liberal ideology brought to England. New England leaders, notably, John Winthrop, tried to create a city on a hill in the New World, free of the modernistic trends. But the New Englanders were not typical of seventeenth-century Americans and hardly a model for New York landlords.

There was another world to which the landlord belonged. That was the world of New York, especially Albany, inhabited by the people of Dutch and German extraction. When Robert Livingston first arrived in Albany in 1674, at the age of twenty, the town was still a stockaded trading outpost exhibiting some rudimentary societal features, such as two churches and forty or so artisans co-existing with fur traders. The fur trade was declining, but it was still the main pillar of the town economy.

Unlike Bostonians of the 1630s and 1640s, and Pilgrims of the seventeenth century, Albany citizens were more interested in making money than in building a society. Nothing animated them more than their passion for money and mundane reward. Albany had a court to regulate trade and vices, dispense justice and maintain peace, and above all, to prevent the community from being ripped apart by dissension and litigation, but it had no school for children. It had neither a societal vision nor evangelical zeal for the native Indians.

Albany was nonetheless prosperous and never dull. It was a community of traders that really lived up to the official mandate of the Dutch West India Company given in 1621 by the State General of the United Netherlands: to foster the nation’s prosperity by trade and navigation. I think the behavior of the people in Albany in the seventeenth century was strictly in accord with the capitalistic ethos and virtues that Locke, Defoe, and de Mandeville extolled.

Robert Livingston, who had lived in Rotterdam for eight years and had experience working in a shipping business before he moved to North America, was thoroughly imbued with the bourgeois way of life. The fact that he found Puritan Boston unappealing and left it for Albany was a measure of his preference for the opportunity of Albany’s individual and liberal capitalistic system. He rejected the Puritans’ beliefs in "just price," and their elaborate economic regulations in favor of public over individual interest. Once he arrived in Albany, he did what others in Albany did and played the game much better than almost everyone else. I think that was his major problem with his contemporaries and historians.

Robert Livingston quickly proved that he was a superb entrepreneur. Five of his attributes stood him in good stead in this frontier trade community. First was his Calvinist work ethic he acquired from his father, John, a Presbyterian minister. Second was the "creative" anxiety and fortitude so common to a young immigrant to succeed by all means. As an immigrant myself, I know and feel what must have driven the young Robert Livingston. Third was his venturesome and aggressive spirit to try anything and everything. He had an extraordinary knack for anticipating changes in the economic orientation of Albany in particular and the province in general, and an ability to adjust to such change. I am referring here to his refusal to compartmentalize his business and his willingness to diversify and rationalize it so that his trade, agriculture, and politics would augment one another. Finally, he was bilingual, proficient in both Dutch and English. In a Dutch-speaking town under English control, this was an enviable asset. Due partly to this linguistic ability, he was hired by Nicholas Van Rensselaer to be his manor secretary, by the Albany town and county to be their clerk, and by governors to be secretary to the Board of Indian Commissioners. A year after his arrival, he was given Albany’s remunerative town excise collectorship as well.

Needless to say, these governmental offices and the Rensselaerswyck job gave him tremendous political leverage for his business. To cap his networking, he courted and married Alida Schuyler, widow of Nicholas Van Rensselaer and daughter of Peter Schuyler, in 1679. This marriage linked him with the powerful Schuyler clan of Albany and the Van Cortlandt family of New York City. His social status, now raised sky-high, he would of course utilize to his political and economic advantage. As for his business, he engaged in the fur trade, in general merchandizing through his store in Albany, and also doing military contracting for English troops. Later he accumulated enough capital to branch out into overseas trade, exporting furs to England and sending food products to the West Indies.

Did he do anything morally wrong in all this? The answer is "No." Was he venal and greedy? Yes. But was he any more venal and greedy than his fellow New Yorkers? The answer again is "No." In the age when self-love and self-interest were regarded as the natural motives of men and considered as virtuous qualities, to criticize Livingston for being venal and greedy is surely absurd. To criticize him for acting just like everyone else and for probably doing a bit better than they would be like criticizing Benjamin Franklin for being enterprising.

There is another angle from which to look at the question. Could Albany have been settled by people without greed, ambition, venturesome spirit, and determination to improve their lot? In other words, was it possible for Albany, a frontier town of Western civilization and a stockaded outpost threatened by Indians and French, to be developed by people who were ordinary, easy-going, complacent, and weak in spirit? My answer is "No." They would not have left their ancestral towns and exchanged present comforts for unpredictable future rewards. Albany, as a trading center, not only attracted but also needed rough, alert, adventuresome, ingenious, and aggressive characters like Robert Livingston. The town owed its survival, prosperity, and excitement to him and to people like him.

As I suggested before, Livingston was a restless person. He was always on the lookout for a new economic venture and possibility, and he took risks. These personal traits were manifest in his frantic efforts to acquire land. To most people, land was a means to agriculture and to social stature, and was even an emotional safety valve. For some merchants, land acquisition was the road to a gentlemanly, tranquil country life after their retirement from commerce. According to Henri Pirenne, this was the common behavior pattern of the pre-modern Mediterranean traders.

But for Livingston, land and especially the acquisition of land in the early 1680s, was more urgent and special than all these goals. It was something that would enable him to meet a dramatic shift in the economic orientation of the New York colony from the declining fur trade to grain production and food export in the 1670s and 1680s. So important had the new food industry become by 1686 that New York added the flour barrel to the official seal of the province. Livingston saw the tremendous potential of land which had long escaped the attention of most of the Dutch settlers. He had in mind the prospect of soaring land prices and grain production for his growing overseas trade.

Soon after the marriage with Alida, Livingston hatched a stupendous scheme to break up the huge Rensselaerswyck and acquire her former husband Nicholas Van Rensselaer’s share (10.4 percent) of the estate. This scheme soon encountered unsurmountable obstacles. Simultaneously, he sought and acquired two pieces of land, located south of the Van Rensselaer domain, in 1684 and 1685. on July 22, 1686, Livingston received the Lordship and Manor of Livingston, comprehending about 160,000 acres of land including the two above pieces. This manorial estate was perhaps the main foundation for his own as well as his several descendants’ wealth and influence.

Livingston was often criticized for having obtained his manor by fraudulent means. Historians and his eighteenth-century critics argued that he was entitled to only 2,600 acres of the manor, 2,000 acres on the Hudson River, and 600 acres (or 300 acres) in the Taconic area, which he had bought legally before the issuance of the manor patent, and that the vast middle section should never have been included in the patent. Historians cite this as another evidence of Livingston’s villainy. This criticism too is unfair. It is unfair because every patent, including Albany, Rensselaerswyck, Kinderhook, Philipses Highland Patent, Van Cortlandt Manor, and Beekman’s Patent in the Rhinebeck area had similar defects. One would be hard pressed to find a single large New York patent free of irregularities, legal or otherwise.

If one adopts a strict overview of the American colonies’ territorial boundaries, one must concede that almost every colonial patent was defective because none of the colony charters, with the possible exception of Rhode Island, was based on original Indian purchases. Besides, it was a general vice of the colonists and of every township to extend their land beyond the supposedly granted acreage by adopting the most liberal interpretation possible of their patent. They had no moral compunctions about "taking in a little" of the Indians’ and Crown’s ground, wherever they could find some. No wonder innumerable boundary and claim disputes thus flooded colonial equity courts. Two wrongs do not make a right, but it is still important to place Livingston’s behavior in the context of his contemporaries’ deeds.

Livingston’s feat was indeed dazzling. In just twelve years of sojourn in Albany, beginning with no friend and almost propertyless, he managed to become a person of great substance and stature. His achievement would have provided the seventeenth century bourgeois ideologues with an excellent model for others to emulate.