America's Secret Aristocracy Page 12

  Never before in Virginia history had such a scandal rocked society as when Richard and his sister-in-law went on trial together. Never before had such highly placed dirty linen been aired before the public or had so many exalted names been linked in the lurid newspaper accounts of the affair—Lees, Marshalls, Harrisons, Randolphs, Jeffersons, all the names of high Virginia society that had Randolph connections, names that stretched into the highest reaches also of American politics and government. Nor did it reduce the magnitude of the sordid public spectacle when not one but two of the greatest lawyers of the day were hired to defend the pair: Patrick Henry and Cousin John Marshall.

  The key defense witness, needless to say, was Richard’s wife, Judith, who took the stand in her sister’s behalf and comported herself, considering her tender years, with remarkable dignity and aplomb. With her chin held proudly high, she looked the prosecutor squarely in the eye and, in the clear and cultivated voice of a southern belle, swore under oath that nothing remarkable had occurred that fateful night except that her sister had had one of her “hysterical attacks.” She had taken some laudanum for this, and then gone straight to bed. John of Roanoke also testified as to the fine character of his brother and young cousin.

  In the end, Richard and Nancy were acquitted, but the ordeal of the trial and the scandal seemed to have broken Richard Randolph of Bizarre. He dropped from sight and died just four years later. His wife, Judith, lived on for many years but as a virtual recluse, dressed in widow’s weeds. As for lively little Nancy, she seemed not to have been bruised by the affair at all. She bounced right back, and in 1812, still in her twenties, she married New York’s Gouverneur Morris of Morrisania, whose family also owned most of New Jersey and who was then sixty. Because it linked the Randolphs and the Morrises, it was considered a brilliant marriage. Gouverneur Morris, among other things, had designed the American coinage system and suggested the terms “dollar” and “cent.” He had served in the U.S. Senate, ran a powerful law firm, and was by then the chairman of the Erie Canal commissioners and was busily drawing up plans for the canal. And, of course, in time the Morrises would be linked in marriage to the Livingstons, who were linked to Schuylers, Jays, Van Rensselaers, Astors, Vanderbilts, Schieffelins, and practically everybody else, as dynasty joined dynasty to create the intimate network of an American aristocracy.

  As for the most famous Randolph of them all, Thomas Jefferson, most American historians have tended to treat the third president’s memory as sacrosanct. On the other hand, Jefferson was in some ways almost as strange a man as his cousin John of Roanoke. Tall and auburn-haired and handsome, Jefferson claimed to speak for the masses—the farmers, apprentices, and pioneers—and he claimed to despise what he called “the aristocracy of wealth.” Yet no man of his day lived in a lordlier manner. He owned some two hundred slaves, a huge plantation, and the grandest house in Virginia. In the White House, his staff of fourteen servants included a French chef, and his dinner parties were frequent and lavish. At the same time, he cut down on the number of pompous, ceremonial occasions that George Washington had so enjoyed, was always willing to listen to all petitioners regardless of their social class, went about town like any other citizen, and often did his own grocery shopping.

  It was his administration, furthermore, that dealt a fatal blow to primogeniture, the system of inheritance based on English law that permitted the owner of a manor or plantation to bequeath his property in its entirety to his eldest male heir, leaving all other male heirs (and all women) to fend for themselves. “The transmission of estates from generation to generation,” Jefferson wrote, “to men who bore the same name, had the effect of raising up a distinct class of families, who, possessing by law the privilege of perpetuating their wealth, formed by these means a sort of patrician order, distinguished by the grandeur and luxury of their establishments.” Yet Jefferson himself seemed to revel in that luxury and grandeur. Almost too much so—for he always managed to live far beyond his means.

  Of course Thomas Jefferson was an extremely complex man. He was a musician, an architect, an inventor, philosopher, statesman, a brilliant lawyer, and a graceful writer. He was, by turns, a revolutionist, an idealist, and a professed believer in human rights. He was also, by many accounts, an ardent womanizer. That so many black American families have the name of Jefferson has long been a cause for comment. It was obvious that such a many-faceted personality would be seen by different people in different lights. To some, he was nearly a god. To others, such as his political foe Alexander Hamilton, he was “a concealed voluptuary … in the plain garb of Quaker simplicity.”

  But one thing is clear about the Great Democrat: He was an aristocrat to his fingertips. Consider this letter he wrote to his daughter Martha, when she was eleven and attending boarding school in Philadelphia, in which he outlined the aristocratic values of discipline, work, and the cultivation of high-minded things:

  With respect to the distribution of your time, the following is what I should approve: From 8 to 10, practise music. From 10 to 1, dance one day and draw another. From 1 to 2, draw on the day you dance and write a letter next day. From 3 to 4, read French. From 4 to 5, exercise yourself in music. From 5 till bedtime read English, write, &c.… Inform me what books you read, what tunes you learn, and inclose me your best copy of every lesson in drawing.… Take care that you never spell a word wrong.… It produces great praise to a lady to spell well.

  The poor child was not even allowed time off for meals. This was the same daughter who would marry her cousin, become first lady of Virginia, and produce ten children, all of whom would engage in aristocratic endeavors. These ranged from the eldest, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who tried without success to straighten out his famous grandfather’s financial affairs when they became hopelessly entangled, to the youngest, George Wythe Randolph, who served as Jefferson Davis’s secretary of war in the Confederacy.

  All the great Randolph estates and plantations are gone now or have passed out of the family’s hands. When Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, the years of lavish living as a grand seigneur had taken their toll, and he was virtually penniless. His dream house, Monticello, which he had designed and built himself, had to be sold off with all its furnishings and much of its land to pay his debts. For years it sat unoccupied and fell into near-ruin. Monticello probably would not be standing today if it had not been for an aristocratic Sephardic Jewish gentleman from Philadelphia named Uriah Phillips Levy—a great Jefferson admirer—who bought the place and carefully restored it to its former glory.

  What, then, is the explanation for the decline of the Randolphs? How could a family that was able to rise so spectacularly in the eighteenth century manage to subside so ignominiously by the end of the nineteenth? Weak blood, of course, is one way to account for this. But it is also possible that William Randolph made his first mistake when he decided to create a huge plantation for each of his seven sons. Each son became an instant landed gentleman, and all were peers. The first Robert Livingston had a different philosophy, encouraging his sons to become rivals and competitors. It may not have made for a happy family, but it did make the boys work harder. In the South, the elegant Randolphs, cosseted and spoiled by slaves, could spend their days riding to the hounds, sipping whiskey, going to parties and balls, and doing really not much else at all. By the third and fourth Randolph generations, the whole idea of work seems to have become quite alien to them. When the Livingstons married their cousins and other close relatives, each new family became a kind of warring tribal unit, battling with each other for more money and more power. But when the Randolphs did the same thing, they simply settled more deeply into a life of affluence, indolence, and ease.

  Unequal inheritances have always created bad blood within families. But perhaps equal inheritances can do even more damage to a family in the long run, and Robert Livingston seems to have had the notion that a blood feud or two was a good thing for the circulation and might make good blood pump harder.

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  Morrises and More Morrises

  At least the Livingstons today have retained bits and pieces of what were once their great manorial lands. Considering the family feuds, and considering the ways the land might have been divided up among the many heirs, lost through folly, or sold off to pay debts, it is remarkable—even though a million and more acres have shrunk to only a few hundred acres scattered about the Hudson River valley—that there is still Livingston acreage more than three hundred years later. As a family, the Livingstons have shown a certain sagacity and shrewdness when it comes to real estate and hanging on to it, and real estate, after all, is what a landed gentry is all about.

  The Morrises of Morrisania have been less fortunate than either the Livingstons or the Randolphs. Perhaps this is because the earliest American Morrises were not men of the land, like the Livingstons, but were men of the sea.

  The first Lewis Morris, of the venerable New York and New Jersey Morris clan, was, in essence, a pirate, though there was a more polite name for it at the time. He was called a freebooter. He had been given a “letter of marque” from the British monarch, giving him the right to prey on any ships not flying the British flag. In return, of course, he was expected to split his booty with the Crown, and there is every evidence that he kept up his end of the bargain.

  His nephew, another Lewis Morris, was in a somewhat more suitable trade. He acquired sugar plantations in Barbados and made a tidy fortune in rum. For this he was rewarded by being made first lord of the manor of Morrisania and was granted large tracts of lands on the mainland northeast of Manhattan and also along the coastal plains of New Jersey, where he became the colony’s first governor under English rule. The Morris presence in New Jersey is today memorialized in the names of Morris County, as well as the towns of Morristown and Morris Plains, and in the Morrisania section of the East Bronx. Though the Morrises had been loyal Tories, they supported the Revolution, and Lewis Morris’s grandson—yet another Lewis Morris, the third and last lord of Morrisania—was one of two Morrises to sign the Declaration of Independence, albeit somewhat reluctantly, knowing that it would lead to the eventual breakup of the manorial system and the end of the great manor house where he had been born. This Lewis Morris, known in the family as Morris the Signer, would also go on a special mission to the western frontier to win the Indians over from the British to the American side, and served in the Revolutionary Army as a brigadier general of militia. Later, he served two terms in the New York State Senate.

  Yet none of the Morrises considered himself a man of the people, and most were outspokenly aristocratic in their views. “As New England, excepting some Families,” the first lord once wrote, “was ye scum of ye old, so the greatest part of the English in the Province [New York] was ye scum of ye New.” Even more aristocratic in outlook, if possible, was another of his grandsons, Gouverneur Morris, half brother of Morris the Signer.* Initially, Gouverneur Morris distrusted the whole idea of the Revolution, fearing that it represented an uprising of the proletariat and would result in the “domination of a riotous mob.” But he greatly admired George Washington, whom he saw as a gentleman like himself, and served in the Continental Congress. In 1792, President Washington rewarded him by appointing him U.S. minister to France, and Gouverneur Morris became the only representative of a foreign country who would remain steadfastly at his post throughout the Reign of Terror. But Morris’s distaste for the French Revolution was so ill concealed that he was not always a popular figure in Paris. At one point, during a revolutionary riot, his carriage was attacked by a howling mob with cries of “Aristocrat!” Morris, who was missing a leg, then thrust the stump of his leg out the carriage window and shouted back, “An aristocrat! Yes—who lost his limb in the cause of American liberty!” Thereupon, so it is said, he was roundly cheered by the crowd and allowed to drive on unharmed. He did not add that he had not lost his leg as a result of a battle injury but in a civilian carriage accident.

  Finally, however, the hostility toward Morris in revolutionary France was so great that when Washington asked for the recall of the French Ambassador Edmond Genêt, Paris retaliated by asking for the recall of Morris. But, being a man of independent nature as well as independent means, Gouverneur Morris didn’t just turn tail and go home. Instead, he spent the next four years touring the capitals of Europe and generally enjoying himself. He finally returned to New York in 1798, where he resumed his law practice and took up other matters. Among these were helping to design the Erie Canal system and marrying Nancy Randolph, the accused murderess and popular star of the Great Randolph Scandal.

  Today, Mr. Benjamin P. Morris, Jr., a retired banker from Long Branch, New Jersey (whose father was mayor of that city for a number of years), recalls tales his grandfather Jacob Wolcott Morris used to tell about his elderly cousin Gouverneur in his later years. He enjoyed taking friends and family members on jaunts to Washington, where, mispronouncing his first name slightly, he would present himself as “Governor Morris.” This provided instant entrée for the group to the highest levels of Washington society. Everybody assumed he was governor of some state or other and saved him from having to say he was a Morris of Morrisania and from explaining what that meant and what Morrisania had once been.

  Actually, there have been three Morris families that have played important roles in American history, and as far as is known, none of these Morrises is remotely related to either of the other two. The second Morris family would include the descendants of Robert Morris, the other Morris who signed the Declaration of Independence, and who might be known as the Mystery Morris. Absolutely nothing is known about Robert Morris’s background or parentage. He got his start when he was taken into the Philadelphia countinghouse owned by Thomas Willing, of the eminent Philadelphia Willing family, and was made a junior partner in 1757. Soon the firm was renamed Willing & Morris, and their bank has been called the economic father of the Revolution. Certainly Willing & Morris were the leading financiers of the Revolution, and Thomas Willing was rewarded for his patriotic efforts by being placed in charge of the nation’s first financial system as president of the Bank of North America and later of the Bank of the United States. From 1781 to 1784, Robert Morris served as U.S. superintendent of finance, and none other than Gouverneur Morris served as his able assistant. During this same period, Robert Morris was also “agent of marine,” meaning that he headed the Navy Department. He was offered, and declined, the position of secretary of the treasury in George Washington’s cabinet.

  Robert Morris lived grandly in two stately houses, one in Philadelphia and one in the country. He entertained lavishly, and among his most frequent guests were President Washington and the first lady. But by the late 1790s, Robert Morris seemed to have begun to believe in his myth as the man who footed the bill for the Revolution and in his reputation as a financial genius. He began to divest himself of his banking interests and to spend more and more time and money in western land speculations of the sort that would not begin to pay off for anyone until years later, after the Civil War. Presently, he was bankrupt, and for more than three of the last ten years of his life he was behind bars in debtors’ prison. By the time he emerged in 1801, nearly everybody in Philadelphia had forgotten who he was, and those who remembered—to whom he still owed money—didn’t want to be reminded. He died in Philadelphia in 1806. By then, two of his five sons had predeceased him, and the chance to found a great American family was past.

  The third Morris family is also from Philadelphia, and these Morrises occasionally refer to themselves as “the real Philadelphia Morrises,” leaving the impression that any descendants of Robert Morris are unreal, if not nonexistent. The real Philadelphia Morrises descend from Anthony Morris, who was born in London in 1654. Before coming to America in 1682, he had already converted to Quakerism, married, and fathered four children. Landing in Burlington, New Jersey, Anthony Morris purchased two hundred acres of land there, but within a few years he and his family moved on to Philadelphia, perhaps b
ecause another Morris family was already entrenched in New Jersey and Anthony Morris wanted to establish his dynasty elsewhere. This he certainly did. Anthony Morris had seven children by his first wife, who died in 1688. He then had three children by his second wife, who had had three previous husbands, and five more children by his third wife, who was the widow of Governor William Coddington of Rhode Island. Subsequent generations have been almost as prolific.

  Though the New York–New Jersey Morrises’ fortune was based on sugar and rum, the Anthony Morris fortune was based on a more plebeian beverage—beer. On the other hand, when he established one of the city’s first breweries, Morris may have been making a shrewd move, considering the number of German immigrants who would eventually settle in the city. These Philadelphia Morrises produced no Declaration of Independence signers, nor did they ever have a manor granted to them (manorships existed only in New York and Maryland), but they accounted for themselves very well. For nearly three hundred years, the descendants of Anthony Morris have produced business, civic, and social leaders in Philadelphia, active in the arts, professions, sciences, and education. “On the whole, I’d say our family has held up better than the New York Morrises, over the long haul,” one of these Morrises commented not long ago. In a social sense, this is probably true. For generations, the Morris name has decorated the rosters of the most fashionable clubs and social institutions, and no board membership of a museum, symphony, opera, or charity ball is considered quite complete without a Morris on it. Morris men have been traditionally philanthropic, and Morris women have been some of the city’s most energetic and popular hostesses. Among other things, the real Philadelphia Morrises are noted for that ineffable quality—charm.