America's Secret Aristocracy Read Online Free PDF Page B

complete without its kitchen dog, whose duty was to lick the plates clean before they were washed by the scullery girl.
    The wedding was to be only for family and close friends, but in the hundred years since the first Livingston had come to America, the family had gone forth and multiplied in quite dramatic fashion. The first Jay, who had arrived only a few years later, had done very nearly as well in producing offspring, and so family alone meant nearly three hundred people. Also invited were Verplancks and Brevoorts and Beekmans, Boudinots, Kissams, Alexanders, DeLanceys, and Schuylers, many of whom were already connected to the Livingstons or the Jays through marriage, along with the Van Cortlandts, De Peysters, Morrises, and Philipses—most of the reigning landed gentry of the colony.
    On the day of the wedding, the carpets in the double parlor had been rolled back and tucked against the walls for dancing, the furniture had been sheeted and removed and stored in a barn, and fires burned in every fireplace, because it had been an unseasonably chilly spring. But bulbs had come up in the gardens, and Liberty Hall was filled with vases of jonquils and tulips and daffodils, and tall tallow tapers guttered from heavy silver candelabra. The guests arrived, both the men’s and women’s hair properly powdered, the women under huge hats swagged with tulle and feathers, carrying parasols, because the most disgraceful badge of shame a woman could display in those days was a freckle, which marked her instantly as déclassé . The men wore their pigtails, their cutaways, their ruffled jabots, their long doeskin vests, their tight-fitting knee breeches, calf-length hose, and patent-leather slippers with silver buckles. In terms of fashion, wealthy colonists had abandoned the hausfrau-ish look that had prevailed under Dutch rule and were openly dressing in the modes of the royal courts of London and Paris.
    The bride looked radiant. She wore a cream-colored dress of silk brocade, embroidered with silver-gilt thread and appliquéd with vines and rosebuds of colored silks. Its sleeves were the fashionable elbow-length, adorned with tiered layers of white lace, while more white lace cascaded from her throat and across her bosom. She carried a white prayer book marked with a single white silk rose.
    It was a wonderful day for the Livingstons. It would seem even more wonderful a few months later, when John Jay began to emerge as one of the most important and powerful men in the colonies. It was an even more wonderful day for the Jays, for the family into which they were marrying was the closest thing to American royalty.
    The Livingstons were colonial manor lords.
    Marriage—that was what propelled a dynasty, a family empire, just as it does today, as prominent family joined prominent family at the altar in mergers of both romance and power, weaving a web of privacy and privilege over the years that would be almost impenetrable to outsiders, a network that in time would seem almost incestuous, confounding genealogists.
    Livingstons, for example, either already had married or soon would marry Beekmans, Van Rensselaers, Astors, Jays,Bayards, and other Livingstons. Jays married Bayards, who married Stuyvesants, who also married Bayards, who married Van Cortlandts, Van Rensselaers, Schuylers, and Philipses. Alexander Hamilton would marry a Schuyler, and Hamiltons would marry Fishes and Stuyvesants. Alsops would marry Robinsons and Roosevelts, and Roosevelts would marry Lispenards and Halls and other Roosevelts. Lispenards would marry Schieffelins, and Schieffelins would marry Jays and Trevors and Vanderbilts, while Jays would marry Iselins and Chapmans until nearly everybody was related to everybody else in some way or another, and until everybody could trace a tenuous relationship to either Charlemagne or Mary, Queen of Scots, or both. Royalty.
    Of course this is not to say that all these marriages would be happy ones, that