America's Secret Aristocracy Read Online Free PDF

broad forehead. But his deep-set eyes, his long, hooked nose, andfirm jawline gave him a decidedly patrician look—the look of a young Caesar. His friend and sometime rival Hamilton was a fashion plate. Jay, by contrast, nearly always dressed in black. The commonest contemporary adjective used to describe his appearance was “sedate.”
    He seems also to have suffered from something of an inferiority complex. In writing to his friend Robert Livingston of what he saw as their personality differences—and to explain why they might work to balance each other as law partners—Jay said,
    It appeared to me that you have more vivacity. Bashfulness and pride rendered me more staid. Both equally ambitious but pursuing it in different roads. You flexible, I pertinaceous. Both equally sensible of indignities, you less prone to sudden resentments. Both possessed of warm passions, but you of more self-possession. You formed for a citizen of the world, I for a College or a Village. You fond of large acquaintance, I careless of all but a few. You could forbid your countenance to tell tales, mine was a babbler. You understood men and women early, I knew them not. You had talents and inclination for intrigue, I had neither. Your mind (and body) received pleasure from a variety of objects, mine from few. You were naturally easy of access, and in advances, I in neither.…
    There is irony here. For it would be John Jay who would go on to become “a citizen of the world,” while Robert R. Livingston, Jr., would go on to live a life at home in comparative obscurity.
    The Gazette had been right, however, in describing Jay’s bride as beautiful. Contemporary portraits show a young woman with gently curling, golden-brown hair, wide blue eyes beneath arched brows, full, humorous lips and a perfectly shaped nose, and the skin of a Dresden porcelain figurine. John Jay and Alexander Hamilton were not the only men of the period who were taken with Sarah Van Brugh Livingston. Both Aaron Burr and John Adams were smitten by her. And even the famously unsentimental George Washington snipped off and mailed to her a lock of his hair.
    In the weeks before her wedding, Sarah and her mother worked at collecting the clothing and linens, the silver andpewter and china and glassware that she would need for her new house in New York. While her mother gave the bride-to-be lessons in running a household, dressmakers worked on Sarah’s wedding dress and traveling costume, and servants prepared Liberty Hall for a wedding.
    The main house, approached at the end of a gravel drive lined with maples, was a sprawling two-story Georgian affair built of brick and local stone. At one side of the entrance was a large double parlor, with a fireplace at either end. Across the hall was the dining room, and behind this was a cozy library. Upstairs were seven principal bedrooms, including a huge master bedroom, and there were fireplaces in every room, plus one tall enough to stand in, in the kitchen, where all the cooking was done. In a gabled attic at the top of the house were unheated cells—the servants’ rooms.
    But Liberty Hall was really a working farm and was very nearly self-sufficient. Outside were barns for the cattle, a dairy, stables for the horses, coops for the chickens, and folds for the sheep. There were vegetable gardens and cornfields, an herb garden, and an orchard of apple, cherry, and pear trees. Two ponds were stocked with trout and perch, and all around were pasturelands where the livestock could graze. Across one hillside stood several acres of original climax forest, which provided lumber for the farm and firewood for the house. A small regiment of barnyard cats kept the rodent population under control, and a troop of family collies—with names like Hannibal, Old Brutus, and Xerxes (to be memorialized as they entered the pet cemetery)—protected the sheep from predators. And of course no household was