“The unanimous assent of 11 States and Colonel Hamilton’s”

The Statutes and Stories blog has a couple of new posts detailing an archival discovery related to the New York delegation to the Constitutional Convention.

The first article by University of Wisconsin professor John Kaminski, attorney Adam Levinson, and Sergio Villavicencio of the Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society is a bit breathless for my taste, but the second steps back and raises a lot of thoughtful questions about how to interpret incomplete evidence.

The background of this story is that the state of New York sent three delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, aimed at revising the Articles of Confederation. One of those men was a leading proponent of having that meeting, Alexander Hamilton. You may have heard of him.

The other two were judge Robert Yates (1738-1801) and his former trainee, attorney John Lansing, Jr. (1754-1829?), both from Albany. The two men were related by marriage and also allied in politics. Like Gov. George Clinton, they opposed strengthening the national government. In sum, they went to Philadelphia to outvote Hamilton on the state’s delegation.

Around 30 June, after the convention had met for a little more than a month, Hamilton went home to New York City. He was getting to propose his ideas, but he couldn’t even get his own state to support them.

Yates and Lansing followed about 10 July. They could see that the convention was moving toward creating a constitution for a stronger federal government, and they didn’t want any part in that.

As the blog posts explain, on 20 August Hamilton told his fellow Federalist Rufus King:

I have written to my colleagues informing them, that if either of them would come down I would accompany him to Philadelphia. So much for the sake of propriety and public opinion.

No one has found Hamilton’s actual letter, so we don’t know how he phrased that offer. As the three authors ask, “Did Yates and Lansing understand Hamilton’s letter to mean that he would only go back to Philadelphia if one of them joined him?” The comment “So much for the sake of propriety and public opinion” suggests Hamilton wrote to the two men purely as a political move.

In any event, Hamilton did go back to participate in the closing sessions. He couldn’t vote on behalf of New York since that state had required all three of its delegates to be present for votes. But he was talking.

In early September the meeting approved a new draft Constitution for the U.S. of A., totally rebuilding the national government. On 17 September the chairman of what had become a Constitutional Convention, George Washington, wrote in his diary:

Met in Convention, when the Constitution received the unanimous assent of 11 States and Colonel Hamilton’s from New York.

Washington distinguished between the eleven states that had a quorum of delegates at the convention and the lone voice from New York piping up unofficially. (Rhode Island wasn’t there at all.) Everyone knew Hamilton didn’t represent his colleagues’ views. Nonetheless, New York didn’t oppose the new document.

Proponents of the new Constitution emphasized that seemingly unanimous vote of the states. Hamilton insisted that every delegate present should sign it. Gouverneur Morris came up with language to indicate the men were signing as witnesses to the state votes, not to endorse the new document personally. Even so, Elbridge Gerry, George Mason, and Edmund Randolph refused to sign.

The new archival discovery is an expense report from Robert Yates to the government of New York for his service as a delegate, including “May June & July 1787 59 Days at 32s pr Day.” At the bottom of that document is the entry:

To my Comming as far as New York in my Way to Philadelphia for the Same purpose where I heard that the Convention rose [i.e., adjourned] a Day after my arrival and my return home 12 Days at the Same rate

As Kaminski, Levinson, and Villavicencio point out, this record shows Yates was on his way to Philadelphia as the convention was completing its work. Had he arrived in early September, his voice would have canceled out Hamilton’s approval of the Constitution. He could have added to the chorus protesting the document and refusing to sign. He could even have sent for Lansing and turned New York’s vote to a no.

Instead, Yates got as far as New York City, learned the convention was done, and went back home. He and Lansing both argued against ratifying the proposed Constitution at New York’s state convention. Their side lost narrowly, 30 votes to 27.

The Statutes and Stories blog posts discuss other small revelations coming out of these expense records, as well as questions they don’t answer but other documents might. It’s a good example of how even mundane bureaucratic documents can reveal crucial facts.

“The secret of Chancellor Lansing’s fate died with him”

Newspaper publisher and political organizer Thurlow Weed died in 1882. Soon afterward, his grandson published a memoir of him, which described John Lansing’s disappearance in New York in 1829 and offered an explanation of how Weed had come into information about that mysterious event:

In Mr. Weed’s nature there was a certain wonderful quality which invited sympathy and confession. Children, as well as men and women, made him their confidant. He was, in his day, a sort of “father confessor” for the greatest and the least among the people of New York. Presidents, governors, diplomats, speculators, clergymen, doctors, and lawyers sought him, when yearning to speak freely of their errors, perplexities, or expectations.

Years after that event, the mystery surrounding Chancellor Lansing’s fate was communicated to Mr. Weed, by a gentleman of high position, who submitted also certain papers, not only showing that, and by whom, the Chancellor was murdered, but explaining the motives which led to the crime, and describing the circumstances under which it was committed. At the same time an injunction was added that he should make all the facts public in case he survived those whom his information implicated, — men who lived useful lives, and died with unblemished reputations. . . .

Not knowing exactly how to act, he [Weed] submitted all the facts to his friends R. M. Blatchford and Hugh Maxwell, on whose joint judgment he felt that he could place unquestioning reliance. These gentlemen, after carefully considering the question in all its aspects, came to the conclusion that if Mr. Weed’s informant were living he would revoke his request for publication. . . .

When he [Weed] died, therefore, the secret of Chancellor Lansing’s fate died with him, for except to Mr. Blatchford and to Mr. Maxwell, whom he survived, it never passed his lips.

Except that in August 1869 someone at the New York Times did know that Weed had this information, and that the conditions set for disclosing it had been met with a recent death. So there was a leak of some kind. In fact, the Times item about the case might have been an attempt to pressure Weed into disgorging his secret.

Many months later, Weed acknowledged that he knew something, but refused to say anymore. All Weed’s account leaves us is that his informant was a “gentleman of high position” in New York who died shortly (by some scale) before August 1869.

Curiously, a few months before Weed died in 1882, he did set down in writing what he said someone had confessed to him about another mysterious disappearance of the 1820s—that of William Morgan. That man’s presumed murder led to the formation of the Anti-Masonic Party, which was also Weed’s entrance into political power. Weed made sure what he (supposedly) knew about that case got into the public record even as he concealed what he’d heard about Lansing.

And there don’t appear to have been any further revelations. According to Joseph Reese Strayer, who edited Lansing’s notes on the Constitutional Convention for publication in 1939, “descendants of Lansing who investigated [Weed’s] story were satisfied that it had no basis of fact.” To be exact, that information came to Strayer from Lansing’s grandson’s nephew’s widow.

It’s hard to see how the chancellor’s descendants could investigate the story if Weed never disclosed it. John Lansing Livingston clearly wanted to hear more from Weed in 1870. Nonetheless, by the twentieth century John Lansing’s descendants said they believed he had fallen into the Hudson or been killed in a random robbery.

By that point Judge Crater had disappeared, and our culture has mental room for only one missing New York jurist at a time, so the mystery of Chancellor John Lansing, once a member of the Constitutional Convention, has faded away.

Of course, that’s what any conspirators would want, isn’t it?

“Mr. Weed should give to the world the facts”

The argument over whether Thurlow Weed should disclose his information about the alleged murder of state jurist John Lansing four decades earlier naturally prompted more attention to the mystery of that man’s disappearance.

On 18 Dec 1870, the New York Times announced news that broke upstate the day before:

The Schnectady Star this evening contains an article relating to the mysterious disappearance of Chancellor LANSING. The writer says that the Chancellor hung himself in his room at the City Hotel, New-York [shown above]; that his body was secretly removed to his brother’s, buried in the family vault in that City, and that the manner in which he came to his death was hushed up. Insanity, caused by the loss of his property, is ascribed as the motive for his suicide. The writer’s information was obtained from a minister of this city, who expressed himself sincere and confident that the assertions made are true.

However, on 26 December, the Times ran a smaller item in the middle of a column:

Upon further investigation, the Schenectady Star finds that the statement in regard to the alleged suicide of Chancellor LANSING cannot be sustained.

That upstate paper said sheepishly that its informant had heard the suicide story “nearly thirty years ago,” and had no reason to doubt it, but had “no clear evidence or proof to sustain this version.”

On the other hand, the Star said:

we have the statement made by Thurlow Weed that the Chancellor was murdered, and that he, Weed, had evidence in his possession which, in his own opinion,…is sufficient to establish the fact not only that he was murdered, but to convict certain persons now dead, of the crime. . . .

Mr. Weed should give to the world the facts in his possession, and we hope the press of the whole country will continue to demand this of him, until public opinion forces the “old man” to divulge.

Instead, Weed sent a letter to the Commercial Advertiser refuting that suicide theory and dismissing another “story about the misapplication of trust funds, as well as that of alleged pecuniary difficulties.” But he offered no other information.

TOMORROW: Taking the secret to the grave?

“Wishes of the descendants of Chancellor LANSING”

On 15 Nov 1870, the New York Times reprinted Thurlow Weed’s letter about the disappearance—and alleged murder—of former Constitutional Convention delegate John Lansing. That naturally caught the attention of John Lansing Livingston (1830-1904), one of the missing man’s grandchildren.

On 7 December, he wrote his own letter to the Times about Weed’s decision not the share the confession of some unnamed man:

These reasons for refusing to fulfill a solemn promise made to his deceased friend, may be satisfactory to Mr. WEED and the gentlemen with whom he consulted, but will hardly be accepted as sufficient by the public, and certainly not by the descendants of Chancellor LANSING. It cannot escape remark that, according to Mr. WEED’s own statement, he has been for many years in possession of evidence, implicating certain parties, living, at the time, in the crime of murder, and that the failure to disclose such evidence while justice could reach the guilty, made him in the eye of the law particeps criminis, and guilty as principal.

The persons named to Mr. WEED as guilty are now dead and beyond the reach of human tribunal, but his solicitude for their feelings of their descendants and associates is so great that he cannot bring himself to disclose the evidence placed in his hands, in trust, under promise to make the same public. No such thoughtful consideration has been given by him to the natural feelings, or wishes of the descendants of Chancellor LANSING, to none of whom, the parties in the world most interested, has he thought proper to communicate any of the facts in his possession, respecting the death of their relative, although his attention has been drawn to their claims both by letter and at a personal conference. It is to be hoped that Mr. WEED will, upon further reflection, see the propriety of making known all the facts and circumstances communicated to him. . . .

I dissent altogether from the conclusions at which Mr. WEED has arrived, and confidently believe that his course, in suppressing the evidence in his possession regarding the murder of Chancellor LANSING, will not be sustained by public opinion, to which he appeals for justification with so much seeming confidence.

John Lansing Livingston was also the grandson who found his ancestor’s unedited notes of the Constitutional Convention, which the New-York Historical Society just purchased.

TOMORROW: New attention to the case.

“Chancellor Lansing was murdered”

Thurlow Weed was a powerful newspaper publisher and leader of the Republican Party in New York in the mid-1800s. The December 1870 issue of The Galaxy magazine ran this letter from him:

The following letter, though written several months ago, as seen by its date, I only now send for publication:

New York City, Feb. 18, 1870.

To the Editor of The Galaxy:

Since our conversation the other morning, in which you assumed that an article in the “New York Times” some months since, relating to the mysterious fate of the late Chancellor [John] Lansing of Albany, referred to myself, as possessing information that the public might look for at no distant day, I have concluded to submit what I have to say on that subject, with your permission, through the pages of THE GALAXY.

Twenty-three years ago an eminent citizen of this State, now deceased, put me in possession of information which in his judgment clearly demonstrated that Chancellor Lansing was murdered through the agency of parties whom he named, asking and receiving my promise to publish the facts, should I survive the parties implicated—parties who lived useful lives and died leaving unblemished reputations.

By a strict or literal construction of my promise, the contingency on which it was based has occurred. My distinguished informant and the persons whom his proofs implicated have gone to their final account. As the time therefore had arrived when it became necessary to act upon this question, I found it surrounded by great difficulties. The facts and circumstances, if given to the public, would reach further, as I believe, in their consequences than my informant contemplated—certainly further than I was myself aware when I gave him my promise.

While it is true that the parties named are beyond the reach of human tribunals, as of public opinion, yet others, immediately associated with them and sharing in the strong inducement which prompted the alleged crime, survive, occupying high positions and enjoying public confidence. To these persons, should my proofs be submitted, public attention would be irresistibly drawn. This fact, independent of the circumstance that a large circle of immediate descendants of the deceased persons more directly accused would suffer, led me not only to pause, but to seek advice. Several months ago I submitted the question to two enlightened, experienced, and calm-minded professional gentlemen, the Hon. Hugh Maxwell and Richard M. Blatchford, Esq., on whose judgment and friendship I knew that I could safely repose.

Mr. Maxwell, after weighing all the facts and circumstances maturely, stated that they might and probably would produce upon the minds of those who read them moral conviction; yet, that if the accused parties had been placed upon their trial, the testimony would have been insufficient to satisfy a court or jury. In his judgment, therefore, in a case which would occasion so much anguish among the families and friends of those who were not here to defend themselves, and where the ends of justice could in no sense be promoted, he could see no useful or wise purpose to be accomplished by the publication.

Mr. Blatchford, having carefully considered the whole question, came to the conclusion that if my informant were now living to look the question in all its bearings in the face, he would promptly absolve me from my promise.

Nor is this all. I was fortunate in meeting, a few weeks since, the widow of my friend and informant, a lady of high intelligence, cultivation, and good sense. This lady, who enjoyed to the fullest extent the confidence of her distinguished husband, had been informed by him of the trust he had reposed in me. She was prepared, therefore, to speak understandingly on the subject; and while she could not bring herself to advise me to disregard the injunctions of one whose views, suggestions, and wishes had been the law of her life, she evidently hoped that I would see my way clear to withhold the statement, and was as evidently gratified to learn that Mr. Maxwell and Mr. Blatchford had advised me to suppress it.

If I needed other evidence of the propriety of the course I have concluded to adopt, it would be found, I think, in the recent infelicitous experience of a distinguished literary personage who, under circumstances somewhat similar, felt called upon to reveal what had been communicated to her affecting the reputations of eminent persons long since deceased. In the remarkable unanimity of disapproval which that revelation encountered, there is a lesson and a moral too significant to be disregarded.

Thurlow Weed.

So according to Weed’s account, some powerful and prestigious people in New York murdered Lansing because he was getting in their way—and a later generation of powerful and prestigious people, including Weed, chose to keep the secret.

Of course, not everyone was satisfied.

TOMORROW: Lansing’s relatives speak out.

John Lansing: “His place on earth had been made vacant”

In December 1829, more than four decades after John Lansing served as a Constitutional Convention delegate from New York, he disappeared in New York City.

In March 1869, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published an article titled “Missing” by E. Crapsey. It was a round-up of stories about people who had mysteriously vanished, and included this passage:

The case of Chancellor Lansing is now preserved only in the traditions of a generation that in a few years will be unrepresented among men. It is full forty years since he left a New York hotel one afternoon to take the Albany boat for his home. He left carrying a small carpet-bag; and the porter who handed it to him at the door was long remembered as the last person who had seen him, knowing who he was. He never reached the boat, for he was perfectly well known to all of its officers; but notwithstanding the most strenuous efforts, no knowledge of his fate was ever obtained.

He was a man full of years and honors, and of great wealth and high official and social position. There was nothing in his character, temperament, or antecedents to warrant the belief that he had been guilty of self-destruction, or had unwittingly fallen a victim to metropolitan snares. His place on earth had been made vacant, but there is not, and can never be, any record of how, or when, or where.

He may have died that day; he may have lived for years afterward. He may have become food for the fishes of Hudson River; he may have been buried under the sands of Sahara. The lapse of time since his disappearance has only brought to his descendants the consoling knowledge that he is dead. If they have been robbed of the priceless memory of having watched over his last hours, they are no longer haunted by a sense of the miseries of earth he may be enduring, and that is something worth waiting forty years for.

On 20 August, a writer at the New York Times responded in an editorial column:

We speak under authority when we say that every incident connected with the disappearance of Chancellor LANSING is well known to a gentleman now living. The secret was confided to him by a distinguished citizen of this State, now deceased, whose name always commanded and does still command respect. The survivor was enjoined to publish all the circumstances when certain persons specified were dead. This condition has been fulfilled, and it is probable that a narrative calculated to startle the public will yet be given to the world. There will then no longer be room left for a single doubt in reference to Chancellor LANSING’s fate. We do not fool ourselves at liberty to hint at the nature of the revelation to be made, but this we may say, that it will be well authenticated, and that it will form one of the most remarkable pages in the history of the public men of this country.

New Yorkers waited for the revelation. And waited. Months went by.

TOMORROW: And then one of the state’s top political leaders came forward…

“The sudden and as yet unaccountable disappearance”

John Lansing, Jr., was a Revolutionary War veteran and a delegate from New York to the Constitutional Convention. As I wrote yesterday, he left early and became an Anti-Federalist, and later served as Chief Justice and Chancellor of his home state. Even after he retired from public office, Lansing continued to work as a prominent lawyer in Albany.

On 2 Jan 1830, the Farmers’ Cabinet newspaper of Amherst, New Hampshire, reprinted the following story from New York, datelined 24 December:

Notice.—On Saturday evening, the 12th inst. [i.e., of this month] Chancellor Lansing, of Albany, arrived in this city, and put up at the City Hotel; he breakfasted and dined there. Shortly after dinner he retired to his room, and wrote for a short time, and about the hour that the persons intending to go to Albany usually leave the Hotel, he was observed to leave the room. He has not been seen or heard of since that time.

He left his trunk, cane, &c., in his room. His friends in this city have heard this morning from Albany that he has not returned home. It is supposed that he had written a letter to Albany, and that he intended to put it on board the steamboat, that left here for that place at five o’clock that afternoon. He had made an engagement to take tea at 6 o’clock that evening with Mr. Robert Kay [the following article says “Ray,” which was correct], of this city, who resides at No. 29, Marketfield-street.

He was dressed in black, and wore powder in his hair. He was a man of large and muscular frame of body, and about five feet nine inches in height. He was upwards of 76 years of age. He was in good health, and has never been known to have been affected by any mental abberration.

An item datelined Albany, 28 December, said:

Perhaps no event since the lamented death of De Witt Clinton, has afforded to our citizens a more thrilling and heart-rending sensation, than the sudden and as yet unaccountable disappearance (and we fear death) of JOHN LANSING, Jr. former Chancellor of this State. . . . We fear that in approaching the steamboat he fell into the river and was drowned. Thus in a moment, (if our fears augur right,) another revolutionary patriot has gone “to that bourne from whence no traveller returns.”

Yet another item in the same newspaper said:

One hundred dollars have been offered by the friends of Chancellor Lansing, for any information which may tend to the discovery of his person, or throw any light on his mysterious disappearance.

According to the New York Evening Post, people were asked to leave information “at the bar of the City Hotel.”

On 16 January, the New Hampshire newspaper reported:

The New York papers of Monday state that the body of the late Chancellor Lansing was found in the bay of New York.

But evidently the man’s family decided that body wasn’t his. They erected a cenotaph in a cemetery in Albany. And the mystery was still unsolved four decades later.

TOMORROW: Did someone know the secret?

John Lansing’s Notes on the Constitutional Convention

This spring John Fea shared a press release from the New-York Historical Society about the acquisition of notes on the Constitutional Convention by John Lansing (1754-1829), a delegate from New York. The society plans to digitize the notes for easy public study.

Having made only limited study of the Constitutional Convention, I looked to see what this document added to the well of sources that scholars use.

I learned that Lansing thought the convention was overstepping its mandate and would produce a too-powerful national government, so he left after six weeks. (The whole convention took a little over four months.) Lansing opposed the Constitution in the New York ratification process. Though he spent many years in state offices, he never participated in the federal government.

Lansing’s notes came to light too late to appear in Max Farrand’s monumental compilation of records from the convention, but they were published by the Princeton University Press in 1939 in a volume titled The Delegate from New York, edited by Joseph Reese Strayer.

That led me to wonder how the society’s new document compares to the 1838 volume titled Secret Proceedings and Debates of the Convention Assembled at Philadelphia, in the Year 1787, for the Purpose of Forming the Constitution of the United States of America, from Notes Taken by the Late Robert Yates, Esquire, Chief Justice of New York, and Copied by John Lansing, Jun., Esquire, Late Chancellor of that State, Member of that Convention. That text is here. Yates was Lansing’s legal mentor.

And just as I, unabashed gossip that I am, was about to drift off under the influence of legal prose, I read:

Lansing’s death was the most mysterious of all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention.

TOMORROW: Wait. What?