Vol. VI.
No. 9.
BOSTON.
September, 1894.
ROBERT R. LIVINGSTON. By Irving Browne. WHEN the State of New York was called upon to contribute the statues of her two greatest citizens of the Revolu tionary era to the rotunda of the National capitol at Washington, she responded with those of Robert R. Livingston and George Clinton. In respect to the former at least there will be no question of the entire pro priety of the choice. Livingston was the very foremost figure in the eyes of State pride, at once the most distinguished and the most useful of the sons of New York, whose contributions to her material prosperity were to be subsequently equalled only by those of DeWitt Clinton. His life was not a re markably long one, but it was cast among great events. Born in the echoes of the futile uprising of the second Pretender, it witnessed the downfall of the great French Empire in America, and the successful revolt of the English colonies against the mother country; the establishment of the American Republic and the bloody birth and death of that of France; and passed away to the sound of the cannon of England's rebellious offspring in triumph over the mistress of the seas. Livingston was born in the city of New York in 1746. He was descended from the great land-owner of that name, to whom, with the patroon, Van Rensselaer, came the ownership by royal grant of most of the richest land in the eastern and middle parts of the State. The Livingston lands em braced most of the present counties of Columbia and Dutchess. His father, of the
same name, was the wealthiest land pro prietor of his day in the State, a judge of the Supreme Court, an ardent patriot and a ve hement opposer of the stamp-act. He was the only one of the colonial judges who did not support the Crown. It is not a little remarkable however how few of the greatest land-owners were Tories, although it would seem that their natural inclination would have been subserviency to the Crown. Liv ingston in New York and Washington in Virginia were shining examples of the pat riotic independence of that strenuous period. The talents and virtues of the father were inherited by his two famous sons, Robert R. and Edward.1 The younger, Robert Liv ingston, was graduated at King's, now Colum bia College, in 1765, at the age of nineteen, with probably a scholastic acquisition which would barely enable him to enter Harvard at this day. Inevitably he studied law, and he practised the profession with success in the city of New York. At one time he was partner of John Jay. Governor Tryon ap pointed him Recorder of the city in 1773, but he was soon deprived of the office on account of his patriotic leaning. All through the Revolutionary War he was a prominent and pronounced advocate of the rights of the Colonists. He was a member of the 1 Mr. Hampton L. Carson, in his excellent History of the Supreme Court of the United States, is in error in making Mr. Justice Brockholst Livingston a brother of Robert R. and Edward, and describing the latter as sons of William Livingston. The same mistake is made by a recent writer in the Albany Law Journal. It is a wise biographer who knows his hero's father.
