Dangerous Companion: Chancellor Robert R. Livingston and the Traitor's Wife

Benedict Arnold
Traitor



          The story of Benedict Arnold’s treasonous actions at West Point is so well known that the man’s very name is synonymous with traitor in the United States. He planned to turn over the fort at West Point along with all the soldiers stationed there to the British in exchange for a great deal of money and a commission as a British officer. But how did Arnold get command of the exact position the British needed him to give up? The answer is his wife.

Peggy Shippen Arnold
She looked so innocent

            Arnold married Margaret Shippen (commonly known as Peggy) of Philadelphia in in 1779. Almost immediately she helped him contact the British to begin arranging the terms under which he would turn his coat. Their contact was a former suitor of Peggy’s, Major John Andre, whom she had met while the British occupied Philadelphia in 1777 and 1778. In a touch of irony for the Livingston family, Andre had been captured by General Richard Montgomery at Fort Saint Jean in Canada in 1775. Had he not been released later in a prisoner exchange perhaps none of what followed would have happened.



John Andre, self portrait done shortly before he was hung



            Peggy also began making friends with important Americans in the city in order to further her husband’s aims. One of these men was Chancellor Robert R. Livingston. Livingston was a fan of Arnold’s before Peggy got involved. His brother-in-law Montgomery had fought with Arnold in Canada. His brother Henry had praised and in turn been praised by Arnold for actions at the Battles of Saratoga. Livingston thought Arnold was a competent and active officer and much superior in comparison to Israel Putnam, for instance, who the Chancellor spent most of 1778 trying to have removed from the army for his inactivity. In February of 1780 when Arnold’s court martial sentence for corruption was sent to Congress for approval the Chancellor was one of only three members of Congress to vote against it.

            Peggy and the Chancellor spent a great deal of time together in Philadelphia. By the summer of 1780 he was convinced that Arnold was the man to command West Point, which was one of the most tactically important positions in the country as it commanded the Hudson River but for the Livingstons represented the only real barrier between their land and a repeat performance of the destruction wrought by the British army in 1777. On June 22, 1780 the Chancellor, long accustomed to providing welcome military advice to the General, wrote to George Washington:

A French Plan of West Point in 1780
nary a stream or a swain to be seen

“I might presume so far I shd beg leave to submit it to your Excellency whether this post might not be most safely confided to Genl Arnold whose courage is undoubted—who is the favourite of our militia, & who will agree perfectly with our Govr”

General Philip Schuyler of Albany also put his support behind Arnold to command West Point and soon Washington responded to the Chancellor that he would give command of the fort to Arnold at the first opportunity which came in August of that year.

            The Chancellor’s closeness with Peggy Arnold had not got unnoticed though. On September 4, 1780 Arnold’s sister Hannah wrote him a gossipy letter, now in the collection of Harvard, from Philadelphia that included the following warning:



Robert R. Livingston
dangerous companion

“As you have neither purling streams nor sighing swains at West Point, tis no place for me; nor do I think Mrs. Arnold will be long pleased with it, though I expect it may be rendered dear to her for a few hours by the presence of a certain chancellor; who by the by, is a dangerous companion for a particular lady in the absence of her husband. I could say more than prudence will permit, I could tell you of frequent private assignations and of numberless billets daux, if I had an inclination to make mischief. But as I am of a very peaceable temper I’ll not mention a syllable of the matter.”

It is important to note here that Arnold’s sister was a bit of a busy body. No one else has ever accused the Chancellor of anything more than flirtation with pretty ladies. Furthermore Arnold probably knew and encouraged Peggy to spend time with the Chancellor as it furthered his goals.



            Arnold was now in command of West Point though and events began to happen very quickly. On September 20, 1780 Andre came up river on the Vulture to make the final arrangements with Arnold. They met on September 21. On September 22, a distant cousin of the Chancellor’s, Col. James Livingston was in command at Verplanck’s Point. He took offense to the Vulture idling in the river in front of his post and ordered his men to open fire with a small cannon. They holed the Vulture several times forcing her to fall back down the river. Andre could no longer return to New York City by river and was forced to try to go overland. He was captured and documents he carried revealed the entire plot. On September 24 Arnold slipped aboard a British ship. Peggy was sent to New York City to join him a few days later. Andre was hung as a spy on October 2.



            In the immediate aftermath of the revelation some accused both Schuyler and Livingston of being involved with the plot to turn over West Point to the British. Both men had pushed for Arnold to receive the post and some no doubt remembered how close Peggy and the Chancellor had been in Philadelphia. Washington however refused to believe that either man could have had anything to do with the plot and the matter was dropped.



In the mid to late 19th century Clermont or John Henry Livingston
purchased this candelabrum depicting the capture of Andre which
now resides in the library of Clermont State Historic Site

The letter from Hannah Arnold to Benedict Arnold can be viewed on Harvard’s website here



A transcription of the letter from the Chancellor to George Washington can be viewed here

For more information see

Secret History of the American Revolution by Carl Van Doren

Treacherous Beauty: Peggy Shippen, the Woman Behind Benedict Arnold’s Plot to Betray America by Mark Jacob and Stephen M. Case.

The Lord of Vice

John R. Livingston. If you were looking for a soundtrack for this post I would suggest "Big Pimpin"

John R. Livingston was an unrepentant businessman. During the Revolutionary War he had made quite a bit of money selling supplies to the continental army. Anything from gunpowder to rum. After the birth of the new nation John moved into a more tantalizing trade. As one historian put it John became the “Lord of Vice” in New York City. Another, less generous historian has called him a “whoremaster”.

John had cut his teeth as a merchant during the Revolutionary War. After a brief stint in the army during the Canadian campaign of 1775 he returned to his family’s land in 1776 to rebuild his father’s gun powder mill. He went on to buy and sell rum and other supplies for the army. John joined Benedict Arnold in a scheme to buy property from New York City loyalists which left him scrambling to prove his patriotism after Arnold turned his coat. He also bought up large quantities of depreciated Continental currency and encouraged his brother Robert R. Livingston to get Congress to buy it back for its full value.

To put it as simply as possible John R. Livingston was a businessman who placed profit above almost everything else once saying “Poverty is a curse I can’t bear.” So it should come as no surprise that when he saw an opportunity for profit in New York City after the war he jumped in with both feet.  

Edward Livingston mayor of NYC, brother of pimp

He began buying up property by 1802 and continued for years at every opportunity. He bought some of his brother Edward’s properties at auction when Edward fled the city following a scandal while he was mayor of the city. He later converted some of his older brother, Robert’s, city property into brothels after the Chancellor’s death in 1813. He even turned one property he bought from his mother, Margaret Beekman Livingston, into a den of iniquity. Most of John’s properties were on Thomas, Chapel, Anthony and Orange Streets making him the “most prolific entrepreneur of five points vice.” By the time John died in 1851 he owned at least 30 houses of ill repute. From a purely business perspective renting property to ladies of the night makes very good sense. There is little chance they would not have money on hand to make the rent, which is what John was mainly concerned with.

Five Points 1831

Some of the most famous courtesans of the day worked in John’s brothels including Abby Mead, Rosina Townsend, Mary Wall and Elizabeth Brown. Despite this John was still powerful enough that most people left his name out of condemnations of the trade. An 1836 publication described one of his houses as “so genteel in its exterior” but when on to say it was “one of the gateways to death and hell.” The houses, they claimed, were “knowingly let out for such purposes by one of our most respectable and pious citizens”, yet John was never mentioned by name.

Five Points in 1827, some of the women in this painting probably worked in John's houses

Only one time was John really called out for his activity. In 1830 a group of neighbors filed a complaint against some of his houses on Thomas Street. The complaint was not that the houses were being used as brothels but that the girls were displaying themselves in the windows of the houses nude. The complaint was against the madams who ran the houses but listed John as their “agent”.

John’s brothels also garnered the wrong type of attention in 1836 when a prostitute was found

The murder of Helen Jewett

murdered in her room. Helen Jewett had been struck in the head three times by a sharp object, most likely a hatchet, and set on fire. A suspect, Richard P. Robinson was quickly apprehended. During his trial most of the witnesses against him were other prostitutes. The Judge in the case ordered the jury to disregard their testimony. Robinson was soon found not guilty setting the dangerous precedent that it was fine to murder a hooker as long as you paid her first.

John R. Livingston lived in a golden time in American history when being associated with less than ethical business practices did not necessarily preclude a person from being a leading citizen. Despite having been known to have been involved in the prostitution trade in some form or another and being peripherally involved in several scandals John is remembered, when he is remembered, as a businessman and little more.

Sources and more information:

The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cline Cohen

City of Eros by Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Dance Puppets Dance: The Livingston Family and the Hamilton-Burr Duel

Over the course of about two decades the Livingston family destroyed two men. By the end of 1804 one of the men was dead and the other was a shell of his former self who would never return to the political power he once had. The two men were, of course, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.

Robert R. Livingston, Not a good guy to mess with

      Chancellor Robert R. Livingston disliked Alexander Hamilton for a long time. Possibly as far back as 1777 when Hamilton insisted there was no way the British would attack the Hudson River Valley from New York City and discouraged Washington from sending troops to aid in the defense of the River despite the Chancellor’s belief that the redcoats would march north. The British army of course did march north and they burned down the Chancellor’s house.    



Alexander Hamilton
messed with Robert R. Livingston

In 1784 with the war over and the difficult process of building a nation ahead of them the Chancellor and Hamilton once again found themselves at odds. Hamilton was pushing a national bank based on purchasing the debt accumulated by the states during the recently ended war. Livingston opposed the plan. He favored a land bank in which capital would be provided to people based on mortgages. I don’t really want to delve deep into the economic theory of the two ideas because that is the job of an economist so to put it simply Hamilton favored an economy based on credit and Livingston favored an economy based on land. The Chancellor mustered all his influence in 1784 and again in 1786 and managed to have Hamilton’s plans blocked.



George Washington's first inauguration

In 1789 after the Chancellor swore George Washington into office as President he expected a high ranking position in the federal government, possibly a Supreme Court position or a cabinet post. He was sorely disappointed. Hamilton, who still held Washington’s ear, managed things so that the Chancellor was only considered for the post of minister to Great Britain which Livingston could not accept because he did not want to leave the country while it was still in its infancy or a fairly low ranking loan officer position which the Chancellor could not take as it was below him.

This one was of many cracks that developed in the relationship between Livingston and Federalist leaders. In 1790 when Hamilton pushed his economic plans again, Livingston once again stood against him. Livingston even went so far as to pull out his old pen name "Cato". In December of that year he called the plan a “public injustice” although the plan was eventually approved.



Aaron Burr, sir.

Philip Schuyler
Caught in the crossfire

 The following year when Aaron Burr ran for the Senate as a Democratic Republican against the Federalist incumbent Philip Schuyler, he had the vigorous support of Chancellor Livingston who sided with the emerging New York Democratic Republican party. Schuyler was Hamilton’s father-in-law, a former general in the Continental Army and a former ally of Livingston’s. The Chancellor had actually supported Schuyler in the first gubernatorial election that he lost to George Clinton. Schuyler became a victim of Livingston’s anger at Hamilton. Many people in New York assumed that Burr’s election was “the fruit of the Chancellor’s coalition with the Governor [George Clinton]”. By punishing the Chancellor in 1789, Hamilton had created a powerful enemy in New York.

Not that George Clinton

This George Clinton

Over the next few years the Chancellor slid even more into the Democratic Republican camp. In 1791 he met with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in New York City before the pair set out on a trip through New York ostentatiously to study the flora and fauna but in reality shoring up political support. A correspondent reported to Hamilton that “There was every appearance of a passionate courtship between the Chancellor, Burr, Jefferson and Madison”  In fact the Chancellor fell so far to that side that Washington would not consider him as Secretary of State when Jefferson resigned despite the fact that Jefferson was pushing for his nomination. He had become too critical of the administration, particularly of Hamilton.

The Reynolds Pamphlet: Have you read this!?
Never gonna be President now.

Hamilton also helped damage his own reputation over the next several years. In 1795 he resigned as Treasury Secretary although he was still a close friend and advisor of Washington.  In 1797 much of his public standing dissolved with the publication of the Reynolds Pamphlet, in which Hamilton divulged information about an affair he had had in 1791 and 1792 with a married woman named Maria Reynolds and her husband’s subsequent blackmailing of Hamilton.

John Adams
Guys can I be president again?
Sit down John.

Soon the election of 1800 rolled around. The Federalist Party ran incumbent president John Adams and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Hamilton was not a fan of Adams and still had enough power to draw enough votes away from Adams that he would not be returned to the presidency despite the fact they were nominally of the same party. However this

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
Was also there in 1800.

completely destroyed his reputation among Federalists. He would never hold another important office. The Democratic Republicans ran Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr with the idea that Burr would come in second to Jefferson and they would serve as president and vice president. They had considered running the Chancellor for the vice presidential spot because he would almost certainly draw votes away from Adams, but they chose Burr because it was felt he would garner more support in the south. When the electoral votes were counted Burr and Jefferson were tied for first. The decision then went to the House of Representatives, where Edward Livingston served. Burr asked Edward to carry a message to Congress that he would in fact like to be president. Many found this open campaigning for the position distasteful and after thirty six ballots Jefferson was chosen as president and Burr vice president.

This will make a whole lot more if you read Part 1 first!

At this point another Livingston in-law stepped in to make Aaron Burr’s life miserable. John Armstrong who was married to the Chancellor’s sister Alida, and was a lifelong trouble maker. During his time in the army Armstrong had been responsible for writing the letters that became known as the Newburgh Conspiracy. They called for the officers of the army to assemble and demand their missing back pay from Congress. Only an emotionally devastating speech by George Washington kept this from becoming a full on mutiny. In 1792 he published a series of satirical essays about his own brother-in-law, the Chancellor, when Robert was running for governor.

To reitterate this is a man who made a room full of
angry, hardened army officers weep by putting on his glasses

Armstrong and his ally DeWitt Clinton began viciously attacking Burr. In New York they worked to ensure that Burr’s friends and allies did not receive government jobs handed out by the Council of Appointment. It soon became very dangerous to be associated with the Burr name. Even the Chancellor who was used to political maneuverings was a bit shocked at how thoroughly Armstrong and Clinton destroyed Burr.



DeWitt Clinton, George Clinton's nephew

Not that George Clinton! Go read Part 1.

In 1804 the two men arranged a deal to drive Burr out of politics completely. Through a series of negotiations and favors it was arranged that George Clinton would run for both vice president and governor that year. He would win the governor’s seat and then resign it when he was elected vice president. The state Senate would then fill the vacant chair with the Chancellor who would return from France to take the job. On February 25, 1804 the plan started to go into action. At the Democratic Republican caucus Aaron Burr received exactly zero votes to be returned as a vice-presidential candidate.

The plan was put in danger though when George Clinton refused to run for governor of New York. He was replaced by Morgan Lewis, another brother-in-law of the Chancellor’s. Lewis had been a soldier, fighting in several iterations of the Northern Army throughout the Revolutionary War. He married Gertrude Livingston during the war and became a lawyer after the war. By 1801 he had become the Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court but was largely unknown outside of legal circles.

Morgan Lewis
Third choice of his party but still whooped
Aaron Burr.

Nevertheless, when the votes were counted Lewis had won by more than 8,700 votes, the largest margin of victory in a New York gubernatorial race to that point.

Burr found himself facing the apparent end of his political career. When his term ended in March of 1805 he would have nowhere to go. He began to search about for someone to blame for his failures over the course of the last year. He focused on Hamilton and in particular a letter in the Albany Register in which Dr. Charles DeKay Cooper claimed to have heard Hamilton express a “despicable opinion” of Burr. A series of letter passed between Burr and Hamilton which lead to the anger between the two men only growing. Burr demanded a public apology for what Hamilton had said but Hamilton feared that apologizing would take away the last shred of respect anyone held for him. On June 11, 1804 the two broken but proud men faced each other, rather than any of the members of the Livingston faction who had played important roles in both of their downfalls, across the dueling grounds of Weehawken, New Jersey. There guns barked.

The exact moment Hamilton realized he had thrown away his shot

The next day Hamilton was dead and Burr was on his way to South Carolina. He eventually returned and finished his term in Washington. He then went into the Louisiana Purchase (recently completed by the Chancellor) and managed to get himself into trouble there. He went to Europe briefly but returned and lived the last few years of his life in New York City, never holding any type of political office again and occasionally having to use an alias.

The alias worked but he was never a master of disguise

The Livingston’s were nonplussed by the duel. The Chancellor returned from France the following year having doubled the size of the country. He went on to great success in agricultural pursuits and with the invention of the steamboat. Edward Livingston went on to be mayor of New York, a congressman and senator from Louisiana, Secretary of State under Andrew Jackson and Minister to France. John Armstrong was a senator and later became Secretary of War during the War of 1812. Morgan Lewis served out his term as governor. When the War of 1812 broke out he returned to the army and was promoted to major general. After the war he found success in more intellectual pursuits, serving as the president of the Historical Society of New York and helping to found New York University.

           The role that Hamilton and Burr’s personalities played in their duel cannot be over stated. Both were very proud and stubborn men. Ultimately it was their personalities that brought them to Weehawken. Events of the time contributed significantly to their dispute, events which were in part orchestrated by the Livingston family. Perhaps if Burr had not been so rash in challenging Hamilton he would have found himself facing Armstrong or another Livingston who had helped to end his time in government.

For more information see:
Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg
The Democratic Republicans of New York by Alfred F. Young
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow