America's Secret Aristocracy Read Online Free PDF Page A

cooked over open fires. There were games of quoits and roque , an aristocratic form of croquet played on a hard-surfaced field. There were hunting parties and horseback outings and hayrides. Indoors, there were whist parties and backgammon games and games of crokinole , and piano and harpsichord recitals. In winter, there were sleigh rides and skating and tobogganing parties. More serious matters were left to the Debating Club, which met every Thursday evening at six.
    Still, one would never have known that a great war was coming, and when news reached New York in 1773 that a group of prominent Bostonians, dressed up as Mohawk Indians, had boarded East India Company ships at Griffin’s Wharf and thrown 342 chests of tea from the London firm of Davison & Newman valued at £10,000 into Boston Harbor, it was treated by New Yorkers as a great joke. It was labeled, derisively, the Boston Tea Party. After all, who cared about tea? New Yorkers were not tea drinkers and much preferred hot chocolate or spiced cider, or a tot of Madeira.
    Of much more importance were the more conventional variety of parties. Even the Lord’s Day, which was such a sober occasion in Puritan New England, was a festive event in the New York colony, when everyone dressed in their grandest finery and trooped off to church, with services followed by the most elaborate and dressiest dinner of the week. In his courtship of Sarah Livingston, John Jay regularly accompanied her family on its Sunday trips to the Presbyterian Church in Elizabethtown.
    Almost equally important as a social rite was “visiting.” Because the mails were slow, it was customary for most visitors—who of course were always either family members or closest friends—to arrive both uninvited and unannounced, catching their hosts and hostesses by complete surprise. But this was part of the fun of visiting and having visitors. Since travel was by horse and carriage, over mainly unpaved roads, most visitors didn’t just drop by for the afternoon. They came to stay for days or even weeks, bringing their servants with them, prepared to be entertained at parties and picnics and parlor games. Needless to say, one of the most frequent visitors at the William Livingstons’ Liberty Hall that courting winter of 1773–1774 was John Jay.
    Meanwhile, very much at the center of all this entertaining and socializing was a dashing and extraordinarily handsome young man named Alexander Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton was the era’s most popular host and most sought-after guest. His appeal had to do with his looks and charm and obvious intelligence and not his family connections, because there were some people who muttered that Alexander Hamilton was actually a little common. And there were others who said that “common” was not the word for him, because he was something even worse than that. Where, for instance, had he learned those exotic—and even a little erotic—West Indian dances that he performed so well? Though still in his teens, he was mature and sophisticated well beyond his years and was included at every skating party and turtle roast that winter when John Jay was courting Sarah Livingston. Indeed, there were those who had supposed Sarah would eventually marry Hamilton, since he was also an admirer and was closer to her in age.
    Alexander Hamilton was an eighteenth-century reminder that, if one is attractive and amusing enough, one doesn’t need to be rich or of exalted family lineage to rise rapidly in high society. Has anything changed that much, more than two hundred years later?
    John Jay was not handsome or amusing. He was slightly built and pencil-thin, with a Frenchman’s figure, which was not surprising, since part of his ancestry was French. At twenty-eight, his thin hair—which, in the fashion of the times, he kept powdered and tied at the back of his neck in a ponytail—had already begun to recede from across his