Robert R. Livingston and the Brothels of New York

Last month, as part of a series of articles on members of Congress and slavery, the Washington Post published Gillian Brockell’s survey of artwork in the U.S. Capitol.

One passage that caught my eye was about the two sculptures New York has chosen to display:

One is Declaration of Independence co-writer Robert R. Livingston, who came from a prominent slave-trading family and personally enslaved 15 people in 1790. He also owned brothels that housed Black women who may have been enslaved.

Livingston (1746–1813, shown here) was on the committee of five Continental Congress delegates appointed to write the Declaration in May 1776. He participated in committee discussions but didn’t contribute memorably to the text, abstained from voting for independence along with the other New York delegates, and left the Congress before the formal signing.

But of course that wasn’t the detail that caught my eye—the reference to brothels did. That included a link to this article at the Gotham Center’s webpage about the Robert Livingston Papers, which says:

Along with members of his family, Livingston was also a slaveowner. According to the first federal census of 1790, he owned at least fifteen enslaved people. . . . By 1810 he owned at least five slaves. In addition, the Chancellor owned several brothels in lower Manhattan, which made have been homes for Black servants, or prostitutes.

That looks like an authoritative source. The Gotham Center says it “was founded in 2000 by Mike Wallace, after his landmark work Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, co-authored with Edwin Burrows, won the Pulitzer.”

But here’s where the trail gets twisted. Page 484 of Gotham said:

One of the most enterprising de facto whoremasters was John R. Livingston, brother of the Chancellor (and steamboat financier) Robert Livingston. By 1828 he controlled at least five brothels near Paradise Square and a score more elsewhere in the city, with a tenant roster that included some of the best-known madams in New York. His involvement was well known, and when irate neighbors complained, he simply reshuffled the offending women to another of his buildings.

Going back further in that book’s sources, Timothy J. Gilfoyle’s City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (1992) laid out many details about John R. Livingston’s brothels. But Robert R. Livingston appears in that study only as John’s brother. Neither book states that Robert owned any brothels, even as part of a family concern.

Students at Columbia University used city records and newspaper reports to study the university’s connections to slavery. One section of that digital presentation is titled “Livingston Brothels: Columbia and Profits from Black Bodies.” That includes a “Timeline of Livingston Brothel Ownership” which states:

From 1820 - 1829 the Livingston family owned an astonishing number of properties on Anthony St; 26, 28, 30, 143, 147, 149, 154 Anthony St, and briefly 24, 30, 45, 140, 141, 142, 153, 155, and 157 Anthony St. John R Livingston owned the majority of these brothels, however, Robert R Livingston, one of Columbia’s most important founders, owned 154 Anthony St through this decade.

I’m not sure what “one of Columbia’s most important founders” means here. Columbia was founded as King’s College in 1754, and Robert R. Livingston attended as an adolescent, graduating in 1765. He’s thus a Founder associated with Columbia, but he didn’t found Columbia. (His older cousin and successor in the Congress, Philip Livingston, was involved in setting up the college.) 

As for owning 154 Anthony Street in the 1820s, or 152 Anthony Street in the 1830s as a later panel says, Chancellor Livingston died in 1813. Perhaps this property was part of an unsettled estate, or there was another member of the family with a similar name (John had a son named Robert M. Livingston). But the Robert R. Livingston of the Continental Congress wasn’t around in the 1820s and 1830s when those properties were documented brothels.

Once again, Gilfoyle’s City of Eros and Wallace and Burrows’s Gotham don’t link Robert R. Livingston to buildings where prostitutes worked—they just say he was the older brother of John R. Livingston. There’s clear evidence that John owned and managed those properties, but that evidence dates from after Robert’s death. Furthermore, according to Gilfoyle, Robert tried to dissuade John from trading with Britain during the Revolutionary War, and John did it anyway, so we can hardly conclude the brothers always acted in concert. I welcome news of more recent findings that would change this picture, but I didn’t come across any.

Robert R. Livingston was undeniably a slaveholder. But as for him owning brothels, that idea appears to be a mistake. Robert’s historical celebrity seems to have drawn a couple of authoritative sources into blaming him for his younger brother’s activities. 

Robert Fulton’s Submarine Struggles

Here’s another submarine design from the eighteenth century, this one from the artist and inventor Robert Fulton.

Fulton was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1765, and moved to Philadelphia at the end of the Revolutionary War, establishing himself in the new republic. A few years later he went to London, where he studied art under Benjamin West and became interested in the big engineering developments of the age, particularly canal building and steam engines.

In the 1790s Fulton also tackled the challenge of submarines. I started looking into his work in those waters because some sources said he was inspired by David Bushnell’s Turtle. But Bushnell’s plans weren’t published until 1799, when Thomas Jefferson passed them on to the American Philosophical Society. There doesn’t seem to be any private link between Bushnell and Fulton. The two men’s designs show some similar points but many differences, and, as I wrote yesterday, many Europeans had been working on submarines for a long time.

In the spring of 1797 Fulton sold a big chunk of the proceeds from his canal-building system to John Barker Church in exchange for a big chunk of cash. Now flush, the inventor decided to visit France. He embarked in June so suddenly that he didn’t obtain a passport, which looked a bit suspicious. After all, Britain and France were at war. Even being an American was no guarantee of being welcomed since the U.S. of A. had just ratified the Jay Treaty.

Fulton planned to stay in France for six months. Instead, in December 1797 he laid out his system of submarine warfare to the French government and asked for funding to develop it. Even though he didn’t get that grant, Fulton saw enough opportunity in France that he stayed for more than six years.

In 1800 Fulton moved to Brest to build and test a submarine large enough for a crew of three. As shown above, the Nautilus had spinning propellers, a breathing tube, and a fold-out sail for propulsion when it surfaced. It worked fine in tests. Fulton also developed torpedos for that ship to use against enemy vessels.

The target of those torpedoes was the Britain’s Royal Navy. The Quasi-War between France and America also heated up in the late 1790s. Fulton had friends and interests in both Britain and the U.S. of A., but he didn’t seem worried about his inventions being used to attack those countries. Instead, he enjoyed being able to bring his ideas to reality and being lauded as one of the country’s relatively few engineers.

Like many Americans, Fulton admired republican France and hoped it would succeed. When he was actually in the country, however, Napoleon Bonaparte was taking over, turning France into a dictatorship on its way to an empire. And then, just as Fulton completed his experiments and submitted his report to the government, France made peace with its enemies and cut defense spending. Napoleon also became suspicious of Fulton when he dismantled the Nautilus for rebuilding, so no further funds were coming his way. In 1804 Fulton gave up on France and returned to Britain.

The British government looked at Fulton’s submarine designs and gave him some money. He refined his ideas, producing the image shown below, but Britain never moved to the construction stage. Apparently the government was more interested in making sure Fulton didn’t go work for any other government than in actually realizing his designs. After a couple of years the inventor, now in his forties, got impatient and headed home to America.

In the U.S. of A. Fulton went back to steam engines. His partner in that enterprise was Robert R. Livingston, formerly of the Continental Congress. The two men had met in Paris, Fulton as an aspiring submarine builder and Livingston as his country’s minister to France. In New York, Fulton even married into the Livingston family. The result of that alliance was the first practical, long-lasting steamboat, which stayed on the surface but transformed travel all over the world.

Seeing Early Plays at the Boston Public Library

Earlier this month, Jay Moschella of the Boston Public Library tweeted news of the library’s ongoing project to digitize its sterling collection of early British drama. So I took a look.

More than 350 playbooks have been digitized and can now be read through archive.org. To find those items, follow this link to the B.P.L. catalogue. Then click on “More Search Options” in the center of the page and when the window opens choose “Boston Public Library - Online” at the upper left. Click “Set Search Options” below. Or, if you just want to browse, you can go straight here.

Among the late-eighteenth-century items is a 1771 edition of Nahum Tate’s version of The History of King Lear, first performed in 1681. Tate removed the Fool and finished big with the marriage of Cordelia and Edgar. That became the standard form of the play for the next century or so.

Here’s William Henry’s Ireland’s late-1795 booklet announcing his discovery of various William Shakespeare manuscripts—all of which he had forged. Ireland ran into trouble the next year when he produced an entire play called Vortigern, which was quickly recognized as awful. Ireland’s own literary ambitions weren’t easily quelled, however, so here’s the script of Henry II, proudly credited to “the author of Vortigern.”

There are also many lesser-known plays like this 1778 edition of Thomas Middleton’s A Tragi-Coomodie, called The Witch. And David Garrick’s manuscript of The Jubilee, a play he wrote for a celebration of Shakespeare in 1769. One might think the best way to celebrate Shakespeare would be to perform Shakespeare, but that’s not how Garrick managed that event.

As you can tell, much of the B.P.L.’s early drama collection relates to William Shakespeare. The library owns copies of each of the first four folio editions of his collected works and no fewer than thirteen editions of Hamlet published before 1709. That collection was the basis of a big exhibit last fall.

All of which brings up the question: How did this collection come to Boston, of all places? After all, the same people who founded the city also tried to drive London’s theaters out of business as sinful. Boston’s selectmen discouraged any public theater, even puppet shows, until after the Revolution. Surely those early settlers weren’t secretly keeping a stash of forbidden playbooks!

The answer to that mystery is that these publications were collected by Thomas Pennant Barton, a nineteenth-century diplomat who married a granddaughter of Stamp Act Congress delegate Robert R. Livingston. Barton got obsessed with Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He bought practically anything associated with Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, as long as it was in good condition (which means these items are easy to read online).

Four years after Barton’s death in 1869, his widow sold the collection to the Boston Public Library for $34,000. That was less than half of its appraised value. I’m still not sure why she chose to be so generous, and why she chose Boston over New York. (She still lived in New York.) But the result is a fabulous local resource now becoming available for anyone to study worldwide.

(The portrait above is David Garrick by Thomas Gainsborough.)

The Stamp Act Congress’s Three Messages to London

On the same day that the Stamp Act Congress approved its Declaration of Rights and Grievances, which was mostly for public consumption, it also appointed three committees to draft formal messages to different branches of the British government:

• Robert R. Livingston of New York (shown here), William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, and William Murdock of Maryland to compose “an address to his majesty,” George III.
• John Rutledge of South Carolina, Edward Tilghman of Maryland, and Philip Livingston of New York to write “a memorial and petition to the lords in parliament.”
• Thomas Lynch of South Carolina, James Otis of Massachusetts, and Thomas McKean of Delaware to pen “a petition to the house of commons of Great Britain.”

The next day was Sunday. On Monday, 21 October, all three committees presented their drafts. Probably for some reason of protocol, the “address” to the king became a “petition.” The congress read, debated, and amended the documents, approving the first two on the 22nd and the third on the 23rd.

All three documents made the same argument, with varying degrees of obsequiousness, detail, and appeals to economic benefits. Here, for example, is how each appeal began. To the king:

That the inhabitants of these colonies, unanimously devoted with the warmest sentiments of duty and affection to your sacred person and government, and inviolably attached to the present happy establishment of the protestant succession in your illustrious house, and deeply sensible of your royal attention to their prosperity and happiness, humbly beg leave to approach the throne, by representing to your majesty, that these colonies were originally planted by subjects of the British crown, who, animated with the spirit of liberty, encouraged by your majesty’s royal predecessors, and confiding in the public faith for the enjoyment of all the rights and liberties essential to freedom, emigrated from their native country to this continent, and, by their successful perseverance, in the midst of innumerable dangers and difficulties, together with a profusion of their blood and treasure, have happily added these vast and extensive dominions to the Empire of Great Britain.

To the Lords:

That his majesty’s liege subjects in his America colonies, though they acknowledge a due subordination to that august body the British parliament, are entitled, in the opinion of your memorialists, to all the inherent rights and liberties of the natives of Great Britain, and have ever since the settlement of the said colonies, exercised those rights and liberties, as far as their local circumstances would permit.

To the Commons:

That the several late acts of parliament, imposing divers duties and taxes on the colonies, and laying the trade and commerce under very burthensome restrictions; but above all, the act for granting and applying certain stamp duties in America, have filled them with the deepest concern and surprise, and they humbly conceive the execution of them will be attended with consequences very injurious to the commercial interests of Great Britain and her colonies, and must terminate in the eventual ruin of the latter.

Even as the delegates approved those documents, their united front was cracking. Although men from Connecticut and South Carolina had helped to draft the messages to Britain, those delegations insisted on not being listed among the colonies endorsing those documents. The instructions from their legislatures, they said, didn’t authorize them to approve such petitions to London. That meant only half of the colonies originally invited to the Congress were visibly getting behind its results.

And when the delegates discussed how to sign those documents, their unity would break down further.

COMING UP: A challenge to a duel?