America's Secret Aristocracy Read online

  Cases in point were the Alsops, who were on the very first Jay list. It mattered not at all that the heroic and patriotic Jays should be welcoming at their dinner table the unheroic and unpatriotic Alsops. John Alsop, for example, had been an uncompromising Tory and anti-Revolutionist who considered Thomas Jefferson a dangerous radical. For a while John Alsop had been a member of the New York delegation to the Continental Congress, but when the Declaration of Independence was presented to him for his signature, he refused to sign it. As he wrote in his letter of resignation, he felt that the Congress had rashly closed the door to “reconciliation with Great Britain on just and honorable terms.” In the Alsop family, John Alsop would become known as “John, the non-signer.”

  During the war, furthermore, an Alsop relative of the distaff branch named Peter Corne kept a secret life-size portrait of King George III in his cellar. Every night throughout the war, and even after it, Mr. Corne would lead his large family down into the cellar by candlelight, where he would solemnly command them, “Bow down to thy master.”

  John Alsop’s son, Joseph Wright Alsop I—the first of many Joseph Wright Alsops—had refused to be conscripted into George Washington’s army and had paid another man to serve in his place.

  In fact, when researching his family’s history, the writer Stewart Johonnot Oliver Alsop was struck by the fact that no male member of his family had ever fought in a war until his own tour of duty as a World War II paratrooper. Another Joseph, Joseph Alsop III, had followed his ancestor’s example in the Civil War and purchased a substitute to fight for him. During the same war, Theodore Roosevelt’s father, who was Stewart Alsop’s great-grandfather, had gotten himself appointed to something called the Sanitary Commission, “an elegant draft dodge,” according to Stewart Alsop. In his researches, Alsop also noted that no ancestor had ever worked for a salary, and he drew a parallel between these two phenomena. “It was not so much that my ancestors were cowards, though no doubt some of them were,” he wrote. “They just hated the idea of being in a subordinate or dependent position.” Alsops disliked taking orders from anyone, unless it was a king.

  At Sarah Jay’s parties, John Alsop and his wife were still unreconstructed Royalists. The Alsops had only one complaint about the British. During the war, the British had made off with the Alsops’ family silver. “It was done by enlisted men or Hessian mercenaries, of course,” John Alsop would explain. “No British officer or gentleman would have tolerated such a thing.”

  The Alsop family had been early settlers of Middletown, Connecticut, which had become an important colonial river port and where John Alsop had made a considerable fortune in ice—though not, it should be added, as a peddler with a horse and wagon. It had been John Alsop’s canny notion that ice, which was free for the taking and in plentiful supply in the winter lakes and ponds of New England, might have much more value in the tropics, where refrigeration was a luxury. The Alsop ice was therefore loaded in great blocks aboard ships, insulated with thick layers of sawdust (which was also free, at local sawmills), and transported to the West Indies, bringing a fine price. In the West Indies, John Alsop bought sugarcane, which he transported back to sell to refineries and rum makers in New England. Thus there were profits at both ends of his Caribbean journeys, and his growing fleet of merchant ships was always well ballasted in both directions.

  John Alsop maintained a country place in Middletown and, a few years before the war, had built himself a palatial mansion in Manhattan at the corner of William Street and Maiden Lane. It was in the garden behind this house that, when the first Revolutionary shots were fired, John Alsop had unwisely buried all the Alsop silver and jewels before retreating with his family to the relative safety of Middletown. Unfortunately, a number of other New Yorkers had the same idea, and gardens became a favorite spot for invading soldiers to look for buried treasure.

  Six and a half years later, when the family returned to New York, a shock awaited them. Their house had been used as a barracks for British troops, and the place had been completely ransacked. The garden had been spaded up, and all the jewelry and silverware were gone. This included what was then considered the finest Oriental pearl necklace in America at the time and great quantities of solid silver dinnerware—complete table settings for forty-eight, as many silver service plates, silver trays, tureens, compotes, chafing dishes, candlesticks, candelabra, wine goblets, and finger bowls, all of them embossed with the Alsop family crest: a parrot clutching a cherry in its claws. All of it, futhermore, was American coin silver, with a higher silver content than sterling. It was considered an irreplaceable loss.

  George Washington’s inaugural ball, meanwhile, was also the first official debutante party in the United States of America. At the English court, young women of good family were presented to the monarch at Buckingham Palace, and it was deemed appropriate that America should adopt this custom and invite young ladies to be presented to society while making deep curtsies to the president of the United States. It was an indication of the extent to which President Washington had forgiven the Alsops for their lack of Revolutionary zeal that among the first young women invited to participate in this honorary rite was John Alsop’s pretty daughter, Mary, who, like all Alsops, had a pertly independent streak.

  At the ball, furthermore, the new president personally introduced Mary Alsop to a young lawyer friend of his, the Harvard-graduated Rufus King, who fell in love with her. When Mary Alsop and Rufus King were married a few months later, President and Mrs. Washington attended the wedding and sent a gift of a Georgian tea service with a note saying they hoped that this would at least in part replace the family’s loss of its heirloom silver.

  In 1796, Washington further honored the Kings by naming Rufus King the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, a sensitive and important position in this post-Revolutionary period and one that would set King on a long course of distinguished public service, culminating in an unsuccessful campaign for the presidency against James Monroe. Possibly Washington dispatched the Kings to London to give the Royalist Alsops a firsthand taste of what the British ruling class was really like. More likely, he considered sending Americans with known Royalist sympathies to be a suave and mollifying diplomatic move. In any case, he cannot have expected one of the outcomes of the appointment.

  In London the Kings were politely, if somewhat frostily, entertained by members of the nobility, who still had not quite gotten used to the idea that Britain had lost a war. And one evening, dining at a noble house in Mayfair, Mary Alsop King suddenly became transfixed by the silverware she was using. Looking about at the heavy pieces that adorned the table, she realized they were all familiar. All of them were emblazoned with a crest depicting a parrot holding a cherry in its claws.

  “Are you interested in silver, Mrs. King?” her hostess asked.

  “I am interested in this,” she replied. “Has it been in your family long?”

  “My husband brought it from America,” the hostess said. “We are very fond of it.”

  “I don’t blame you,” the wife of the American ambassador said bluntly. “I used to be myself.” She then told of the cache of family silver that had been buried in her father’s garden.

  There was a little silence, and the subject of the conversation changed. But the next morning a large crate of silver was delivered to the American embassy. No note accompanied it.

  For years until her death in the summer of 1971, one of the reigning grandes dames of Hartford, Connecticut, was Mrs. Corinne Douglas Robinson Alsop Cole, the mother of the journalist Alsop brothers, Stewart and Joseph. Mrs. Cole—Francis W. Cole was her second husband—was one of the last women of her era who was never seen without a hat. She wore a hat even in her own house and carried a reticule slung across her arm as she moved from room to room. Because of her cousinship to Roosevelts, Mrs. Cole was an Alsop by inheritance as well as by marriage, and one genealogist had actually managed to demonstrate that Mrs. Cole was her own cousin, a finding that
amused her.

  “I think that what my ancestor did in London was absolutely right,” she said not long before her death. “It was Alsop silver, it had been stolen, and Mary King was quite right to speak up and get it back. I still have some very nice pieces from that service. If you ask me, that’s one of the differences between the British aristocracy and American ladies and gentlemen. The British are too stiff and pompous, and hate having to admit they’re ever wrong. Americans are more open, forthright, honest and forgiving. Americans are more—accommodating to the whims and shortcomings of other people. They’re more gracious.

  “For example, when my cousin Eleanor came through Hartford she would usually stay with me. But Eleanor was always rushing about the countryside on some mission or other for Franklin, and there were times when she’d say to me, ‘I have to catch a five o’clock train in the morning for Cleveland, and so I’m afraid I’m going to need my breakfast around three-thirty A.M. But don’t you get up. I’ll fix myself something in the kitchen.’ But I would say to myself, ‘Well, if the first lady of the land is going to be up for breakfast at three-thirty in the morning, I shall be up to join her.’ And I would be. Would that happen in England—even for the queen? Not likely, I say. They’d send a servant up with a tray and spend the rest of the night in the land of Nod.

  “The British are always so superior. My husband and I would notice it when we traveled in England—even in the finest houses. A certain sense of condescension, as though we Americans had never quite learned to do things right. I think what Mary King did about the silver was not just a spunky thing. It was the sensible thing, the right thing. Goodness me, if a relative of mine had stolen someone else’s silver, and I’d been caught with the goods, I’d have immediately apologized, and sent the stuff back, of course—but with a note. To me, not even writing so much as a note to Mary was the most inexcusable part of it. But so British. Not even to apologize. Not very classy, if you ask me.”

  8

  From Camping Out with Indians … to Dinner at the Jays’

  If the inclusion of the Royalist Alsops seemed a little odd on Sarah Jay’s dinner list of guests, the inclusion of Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Schieffelin III seemed even odder. Jacob Schieffelin had fought for the British during the war. But as New York society closed ranks under President and Lady Washington, it had to be admitted that the young Schieffelins had much in their favor. Both were attractive and obviously well bred. The Schieffelin family pedigree, in pre-Revolutionary America and in Germany even before that, was excellent. Jacob Schieffelin had been an officer in the British army, not an ordinary soldier, and this stamped him automatically as a gentleman. And Jacob Schieffelin, as so many young men of the day were doing, had “married up,” into one of New York’s proudest families.

  The Schieffelin family traces itself back to the thirteenth century, to the town of Nördlingen, in Bavaria, where the family were German Protestants from the very beginning of the Reformation. There is a family portrait, painted in 1538, of Hans Leonard Schieffelin with his two sons, adoring the Paschal Lamb, the family crest (Schieffelin is a corruption of the German word for “little sheep”). This Hans Schieffelin became a pupil of Albrecht Dürer’s and was a distinguished painter and printmaker. In 1735, the first Jacob Schieffelin, a ninth-generation descendant of Hans, immigrated to Philadelphia, bringing with him a Schieffelin family bible, printed in 1560, which is still in the family’s possession. His son, Jacob, Jr., married a Philadelphia girl of German extraction named Regina Ritschaurin, and their son Jacob Schieffelin III, was born in Philadelphia in 1757.

  Jacob had grown up very much a Tory and a loyalist to the British king. As a young man he had gone to Detroit, where he went into the trading business with the Indians and was employed in the Indian department of the provincial government as secretary to Governor Henry Hamilton. With the outbreak of the Revolution, Jacob volunteered and was commissioned a lieutenant in the Detroit Volunteers. Here he was attached to the staff of his former boss, who was now General Sir Henry Hamilton, “with the rank and pay of an officer of the British Army.” In this capacity, he was a part of the expedition that attacked and captured Vincennes, Indiana.

  But when the French-speaking townspeople of Vincennes learned that France had sided with the American rebels, many of them pledged support to the rebel cause. Thus, when an American force led by Colonel George Rogers Clark set out from Kaskaskia, Illinois, for Vincennes in 1779, Vincennes was recaptured after a brief battle, and both Sir Henry Hamilton and Lieutenant Schieffelin were among the British officers taken prisoner. Both were transported to Williamsburg, Virginia, and imprisoned there in the “Old Gaol.”

  Jacob Schieffelin was only twenty-two years old at the time and, from all reports, was an exceptionally good-looking fellow with, it seems, a way with women. Instead of concentrating on ways to escape his jailer, he focused his attentions on the jailer’s daughter and, by April 19, 1780, after less than a year behind bars, he was able to persuade this young lady to smuggle him a key to his cell. Escaping, he made his way by foot across Virginia and into Maryland, traveling at night and hiding in haystacks by day, and finally to Chesapeake Bay, where he was able to board a British man-of-war bound for New York, which was still in British hands. Here he was appointed a lieutenant in the Queens Rangers by Sir Henry Clinton and assigned to quarters in the home of John Lawrence and his wife Ann.

  The Lawrences were an aristocratic family descended from Sir Robert Lawrence of Ashton Hall, Lancashire, England, who had accompanied Richard Coeur de Lion on the Crusades and who had been the first to plant the banner of the Cross on the battlements at Ptotemars, for which he had been knighted by the king and received a grant of arms. The first American Lawrence, William, had been given the original royal patent for Flushing, Long Island. With these royal patents went not only vast tracts of real estate (including what is now the entire town of Lawrence) but also great political power. In America, the Lawrences acquired even more distinction through marriage to the Bownes, an American family that was important in New York even before the Livingstons. So it is an indication of Sir Henry Clinton’s high opinion of young Jacob Schieffelin that he was billeted with a family as prominent as the Lawrences.

  But neither Sir Henry nor the Lawrences could have predicted the outcome of this arrangement—no sooner had the handsome lieutenant moved in than he had fallen head over heels in love with the Lawrences’ beautiful twenty-two-year-old daughter, Hannah, and she had quite obviously fallen in love with him. Theirs was a whirlwind and, necessarily, a secret courtship, because what would colonial society—much less Jacob Schieffelin’s military commander—have said if it had become known that the British soldier was wooing the Lawrences’ daughter right under the family’s roof? Hannah Lawrence kept a remarkable diary of the love affair in which she disguised herself under the pseudonym of Matilda, and Jacob under the romantic code name of Altimonte—presumably in case her parents happened to stumble upon her impassioned jottings and discovered what was going on. A typically breathless entry, for July 27, 1780, reads,

  The last evening gave me the company of the Gentle Altimonte. How ardent were his professions; how amiable does he appear. Can such simplicity of manner conceal a treacherous soul? Can such warmth and apparent openness of expression cover a heart acquainted with guile? But, ah! The world is full of dissimulation, and shall she from whom her friends expect unvarying prudence fix her affections on a young stranger, and throwing herself foolishly in his power abandon every other dear connection?… Perhaps I may yield—but yet what then may be my fate? But should my heart plead in his favour—where will be reason, where discretion?

  Hannah Lawrence’s misgivings were based on the fact that the Lawrences were Quakers and conscientiously opposed to any form of war. Yet here was Hannah, toppling helplessly into love with an army officer. Her dilemma was doubly poignant because she herself was passionately anti-British and had expressed her feelings in a “notorious” piece of verse a year earlier. Han
nah’s poems had been published in various journals and periodicals of the day, and in 1779 she had become incensed at the attitudes and manners of the British soldiers occupying New York City. A favorite gathering place for the redcoats, it seemed, was on lower Broadway, in front of Trinity Church and its cemetery. And here it also seemed—in the habit of soldiers anywhere and of any day—the young men enjoyed making improper remarks and indecent suggestions to young colonial ladies as they passed by. Hannah’s poem addressing this situation was titled “On the Purpose to Which the Avenue Adjoining Trinity Church Has of Late Been Dedicated” and began:

  This is the scene of gay resort,

  Here Vice and Folly hold their court.

  Here all the martial band parade

  To vanquish—some unguarded maid.…

  The poem continued with such quatrains as:

  Heavens! Shall a vain inglorious train

  The mansions of our dead profane?

  A horde of undistinguished things,

  That shrink beneath the frown of Kings.…

  It continued in this vein for some twenty more lines. Hannah had left the poem unsigned, but she had dropped it deliberately on the sidewalk in front of the church, where she hoped it would be picked up and read by the British troops. It was, and a great sword-rattling fuss ensued among General Clinton’s officers. Though the words of the poem seem rather mild today, they were denounced as high treasonous sedition at the time. Dropping the poem in the street was a courageous thing to do, because if its authoress could have been found—she was not—she could have been hanged.

  And now here was the authoress of those words herself, in love with a member of the vain inglorious train, one of those undistinguished things, a redcoat soldier.

  But Hannah Lawrence did not linger over this crisis of her conscience long. Scarcely three weeks after the above-quoted entry in her diary was written—on August 16, 1780—Hannah’s heart had prevailed, and she had succumbed to her lover’s entreaties and agreed to marry him. To avoid a family furor over a marriage of different religious persuasions, they eloped in the classic way, with the bridegroom-to-be propping a ladder against his intended’s bedroom window at midnight. She had climbed down the ladder into his arms, and they were married by the chaplain of his garrison.