Robert R. Livingston

Robert Livingston was born into two of the wealthiest families on the Hudson River at once, his father a judge, his mother a Beekman, and he inherited the manners that came with it: a degree from King's College by nineteen, admission to the bar at twenty-six, and a courtroom style contemporaries called icy. New York made him recorder of its city in October 1773. He held the job four months before his Whig sympathies got him replaced. He married Mary Stevens in 1770 and built a house south of the family seat at Clermont, which British troops under John Burgoyne burned to the ground in 1777, along with the manor itself.

He spent nearly twenty-four years as chancellor of New York, the state's highest judicial post, opposing Alexander Hamilton's Federalists and still losing the governorship to John Jay in 1798. The oath he gave Washington, the Louisiana Purchase he opened, and the steamboat he financed with Robert Fulton are BriefHistory's story, told there in full. What follows here is the household, the enslaved people he kept, and the will he finally wrote.

Livingston enslaved people at Clermont for most of his adult life, fifteen of them by the 1790 census, five still in 1810, while sitting on the state council that could have ended slavery in New York outright. He vetoed the bill. His stated objection was that it stripped free Black New Yorkers of the vote, and he wrote that men could not be denied their rights "without shocking the principle of equal liberty." He kept the people he owned in bondage rather than accept a law that freed them without full citizenship attached. Not until his will, drawn up in September 1796, did he set a date: anyone he held past thirty would be freed outright, and everyone younger on a schedule he chose himself.

He died at sixty-six on February 26, 1813, of natural causes, and was buried in the Clermont family vault at St. Paul's Church in Tivoli. New York and Kentucky both named counties for him. A statue by Erastus Dow Palmer stands for New York in the Capitol's Statuary Hall, and his face is carved into the Jefferson Memorial pediment alongside the rest of the Committee of Five he never got to sign for. The Freemasons kept the more durable honor: the library at Manhattan's Masonic Hall still carries his name, chancellor outlasting founder in the title everyone actually used.

Robert R. Livingston's life against the full span of the corpus.

• New York State Constitution of 1777 law
  Served on the committee that drafted the state's first constitution 1777
• Committee of Five draft of the Declaration of Independence other
  Contributed revisions though recalled to New York before the signing 1776
• Louisiana Purchase treaty law
  Opened the negotiations as minister to France that produced the treaty 1803
• North River Steamboat invention
  Financed with Robert Fulton — the first commercially successful steamboat service 1807
• Erie Canal Commission mission
  Early advocacy for the canal as a founding commissioner 1811

• November 27, 1746 aged 0 Born in New York City
• September 9, 1770 aged 23 Marries Mary Stevens
• June 11, 1776 aged 29 Named to the Committee of Five to draft the Declaration of Independence Recalled to New York on state business before the signing.
• July 30, 1777 aged 30 Becomes the first chancellor of New York Held the post for nearly twenty-four years.
• April 30, 1789 aged 42 Administers the presidential oath to George Washington at Federal Hall
• 1801 aged ~55 Appointed U.S. minister to France by Thomas Jefferson
• 1803 aged ~57 Opens the negotiations that become the Louisiana Purchase
• 1807 aged ~61 The North River Steamboat completes its maiden voyage to Albany with Fulton aboard
• February 26, 1813 aged 66 Dies at Clermont, New York, at 66

• John Jay 1745–1829
  Founding Father, diplomat, Federalist Papers co-author, and first chief justice who helped construct the early republic. defeated by
• Alexander Hamilton 1755–1804
  Founding Father who established the nation's financial system and co-authored the Federalist Papers. opposed
• Aaron Burr 1756–1836
  Third vice president who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was later tried for treason. allied with
• Robert Fulton 1765–1815
  Engineer and inventor whose steamboat Clermont revolutionized American river transportation. financed
• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. appointed by