Signing Their Rights Away (9 page)

The Livingston family was a financial and social powerhouse in New York and beyond. William was born the fifth child (out of nine) on the family’s mammoth estate, Livingston Manor, along the Hudson River. He was raised by his maternal grandmother and, when he was only twelve years old, spent a year with a missionary
among the Mohawk. His family worked in the mercantile and fur trades, and they believed that experience on the frontier would be good for William, since he might one day take over the business. Later in life he wrote that the experience gave him “a good opportunity to learn the genius, and manners of the natives.”

But Livingston didn’t want to be a businessman. What he longed to do was study painting in Italy. Then, as now, most parents weren’t thrilled with the prospect of sending a child to art school, so they shipped him off to Yale instead. He pursued law and graduated at the top of his class with a command of several languages—and a desire to write. While clerking for lawyers in New York City, he began drafting a series of essays that skewered the legal profession, the Church of England, and, later, the British. He needed a creative outlet, and he had finally found one.

A self-described “ugly-looking fellow”—the man had a ski slope of a schnoz and did himself no favors with his choice of hairstyle—William fell in love with Susanna French, who hailed from a prominent landowning family that had seen some tough financial times. Initially his parents refused to consent to the union, but they came around when William agreed to delay the wedding by three years. These plans unexpectedly went astray, however, when Susanna found herself pregnant; the couple wed in secret and moved in with an aunt. Livingston’s family was not pleased. Later, when his father gave gifts of New York City townhouses to his boys, William was the only son who didn’t receive one.

Throughout his successful legal career, Livingston kept writing, crafting poems, and railing against the Church of England. He decried the church’s attempts to control King’s College (Columbia University), which Livingston thought should be a nonsectarian school; when he was offered a position on the school’s board, he declined. Eventually, his editorials became so incendiary that his printer refused to publish them. He defended his prose, saying, “I do declare that I never wrote a syllable with a view of censuring the
church as such: I have only exposed her unreasonable encroachments … it was my duty, my bounden, my indispensable duty.”

It’s no surprise that a lawyer from a prominent family who had a talent for stirring up the pot would find his way into politics. Along with his older brother Philip, William became a member of New York’s colonial legislature. But over time he soured on New York politics and moved to New Jersey, where he bought an estate near Elizabethtown (Elizabeth) and built a mansion called Liberty Hall. Shortly after moving in, a young lad who had recently arrived from the West Indies showed up at his door and presented him with several letters of introduction. Livingston took in the young boy and arranged for his education. The kid turned out well—his name was Alexander Hamilton.

In 1774, after the British closed the port of Boston in retaliation for the Tea Party, Livingston wrote letters for the rebel cause and then served in the first and second Continental Congresses. Though active, he hoped for resolution without bloodshed. After leaving Congress, he took a post as a commander of New Jersey militia, but the poet was ill suited for military life. He once wrote, “My ancient corporeal fabric is almost tottering under the fatigue I have lately undergone: constantly rising at 2 o’clock in the morning to examine our lines.”

In August 1776, Livingston was elected New Jersey’s first governor, a post he would hold for fourteen years, until his death. He replaced the ousted royal governor and loyalist, William Franklin (Ben Franklin’s illegitimate son). While Franklin sat in jail, Livingston was exhorting New Jerseyans to set their “faces like a flint against that dissoluteness of manners and political corruption which will ever be the reproach to any people.” From that moment on, he was nicknamed “Doctor Flint.”

The war was hard on everyone, rich and poor alike, and Livingston was no exception. His home was ransacked, and a bounty was placed on his head. He lost his son John Lawrence, a midshipman, to the conflict. Currency depreciation and the bankruptcy of numerous debtors depleted his savings. But he did own his home, and he used it to shelter soldiers.

As governor, Doctor Flint saw New Jersey through the war and the wobbly, uncertain years that followed. He joined the New York Anti-Slavery Society and, in 1786, successfully worked to forbid the importation of slaves into New Jersey, even though he owned two of his own. He said slavery was “utterly inconsistent with the principles of Christianity and humanity, and in Americans, who have almost idolized liberty, peculiarly odious and disgraceful.”

Livingston’s feelings about slavery were tested the next year when he attended the Constitutional Convention and served on the committee that reached the Three-Fifths Compromise. A “small-state nationalist,” he supported the New Jersey Plan, which was rejected by the convention, and ended up accepting the Great Compromise, which provided for equal representation in the Senate but population-based representation in the House of Representatives.

Livingston signed the Constitution at age sixty-three—the third oldest man to do so—and went back to New Jersey to work on securing a speedy ratification before serious opposition could be organized. (New Jersey was one of only three states to ratify before the end of 1787.) Still governor, Livingston received an honorary law degree from Yale not long before his death. He lost his wife, Susanna, in 1789, and shortly thereafter became sick as well. He died in 1790.

Then his next journey began, for one of the worst things you could do for the fate of your earthly remains was to sign the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. Livingston was buried first in a New Jersey Presbyterian churchyard, but a year later his body was moved to a family vault at Trinity Churchyard in Manhattan. In 1844, his body was moved yet again to
—gasp
!—the outer boroughs. Today you can visit his grave at Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. Liberty Hall was never moved and is now a lovely museum on the grounds of Kean University. It is open to the public and is a popular site for weddings, which surely would have made the poet in Livingston smile.

The Signer Who Proposed Erasing State Boundaries and Starting Over

BORN
: June 11, 1745

DIED
: August 16, 1790

AGE AT SIGNING
: 42

PROFESSION
: Lawyer

BURIED
: St. Michael’s Episcopal Church Graveyard, Trenton, New Jersey

Pennsylvania half its size? Little Rhode Island three times bigger?

Was this the key to equitable representation among the first thirteen states? We’ll never know—but it’s certainly one of the strangest ideas floated at the Constitutional Convention, and it comes courtesy of David Brearley.

Brearley was born in Spring Grove, New Jersey. He was one of five children in a family that owned land but wasn’t particularly wealthy. Nevertheless, he received a good education and attended the College of New Jersey, a little school that was later known as
Princeton, although he left before graduation to pursue law. Things moved along rather nicely for young Brearley. By the age of twenty-two, he had been admitted to the New Jersey bar, moved to Allentown to start his own practice, and married Elizabeth Mullen, with whom he would have four children.

Then came the Revolutionary War and all the skirmishes proceeding from that first shot heard ’round the world. Brearley was always a stalwart patriot in a state that had its fair share of loyalists, and his outspoken manner didn’t win him any popularity contests with then-royal governor William Franklin (the illegitimate son of Electric Ben). His dedication to the patriot cause resulted in his arrest for treason, but his capture was short-lived. Before he could be hanged, a group of like-minded revolutionaries sprung him loose from the clutches of the British.

Brearley continued to fight and took up arms in the New Jersey militia, where he rose from the rank of captain and eventually become a colonel. It was a time of hardship and hard work. He lost his wife, Elizabeth, in 1777; he fought in various battles throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania; and he helped draft the New Jersey Constitution, which would govern the state after the royal governor, Franklin, was ousted.

In 1779, Brearley became chief justice of New Jersey and soon found himself involved in the groundbreaking trial of
Holmes v. Walton
, a case involving a smuggler, John Holmes, who was tried and convicted of dealing contraband. During the war it was tempting to sell goods to the British—they paid with real hard cash, not depreciating paper money and promissory notes that were the oh-so-weak currency of the colonies. But there was a problem with Holmes’s trial: he had been convicted by a jury of six men, rather than the usual twelve, as dictated by British Common Law. The appeal to the state’s supreme court landed in Brearley’s lap, and he dismissed all charges—a hugely unpopular decision but a necessary one, in Brearley’s opinion, because the conviction violated the state’s
constitutional right guaranteeing trial by jury. Because Holmes hadn’t been granted a full jury, the trial was null and void. This decision would be cited in years to come and referenced as one of the first to establish the power of a supreme court to determine whether a law is constitutional, known as the principle of judicial review.

The year after this famed decision, Brearley was given an honorary master’s degree from Princeton, despite never having officially finished his studies. He was plenty popular around New Jersey but not quite popular enough to become governor, a post he sought three times (and lost, each time, to William Livingston).

With a new wife, Elizabeth Higbee, whom he married in 1783, three more children, and an admirable legal career, Brearley was a natural delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He was, in fact, the very first delegate elected from any of the colonies. He didn’t speak much during the proceedings in Philadelphia that summer—but if there was any topic that got his knickers in a wad, it was bigger states attempting to control Congress at the expense of smaller states. According to James Madison, Brearley felt that “the substitution of a ratio … carried fairness on the face of it; but on a deeper examination was unfair and unjust.” He noted that proportional representation in both the House and the Senate would give a more populous state such as Virginia sixteen votes, while sparsely populated Georgia would cast a measly one.

“What remedy then?” Brearley asked. “One only: that a map of the United States be spread out, and that all the existing boundaries be erased, and that a new partition of the whole be made into thirteen equal parts.” Some reports say that Brearley was serious, but others claim he was merely taking his beliefs to an extreme to make a point. In the end, he put his support behind William Paterson’s New Jersey Plan, which gave each state one vote, no matter its size.