The Revolutionary War was as much a civil war as it was a war between two opposing powers. This meant that fights often involved family members on both sides as each person was forced to decide where their loyalties lay.
The Livingston family of Clermont was rather unscathed by this as they were a pack of patriots. They all lost friends who remained loyal to the crown. Janet Livingston's husband Richard Montgomery had the most to lose by rebelling against the crown as most of his family was still in Ireland but the fact that family welcomed his widow openly when she visited after the war show that they were
willing to forgive, if not support his decision.
People living in the area around Clermont and Livingston Manor were not so lucky. Over the course of the war several young men would sneak down to New York City to join loyalist forces, for which their father's were fined by the local Committee of Safety
In the case of John Cox Jr. it was the son who was a patriot while the father was a loyalist. At the age of 15 Cox was sent from New York City to the Clermont area to apprentice with Will Cockburn as a surveyor. Cox became a skilled surveyor, eventually laying out the town of Rhinebeck, where he would teach school serve as town clerk and eventually represent the town as a member of the New York State Assembly. He even married a local girl, Maria Schotter, in 1776.
Margaret Beekman Livingston, one of Cox's Livingston bosses
John Cox Sr. on the other hand stayed in New York City as a merchant even when the British captured the city in 1776. By the time the war was over Cox Sr. realized he would not be welcome in the new country and he, along with his wife and several of his other adult children took passage to Nova Scotia.
This story has a happy ending though,. In 1789 John Cox Sr. and his wife returned to New York City. Two years later following an incident with his son Jameson, in which Jameson threatened to cut his throat, the elder John Cox moved to Rhinebeck near his name sake son, John Cox Jr. in the mean time had become estate agent for Margaret Beekman Livingston. He soon exchanged that job for a job as estate agent for Janet Livingston Montgomery.
Seven boxes of Cox's papers survive in the Edward Livingston papers at Princeton University. This article owes a great deal to Stacy F. Roth and her article "Loyalist Father, Patriot Son: The Cox Family at Shelburne, Nova Scotia" from The Princeton University Library Chronicle Vol. 51 No.2 Pages 183-200.
It takes a special
kind of person to be cursed by two different men on their way to the gallows.
Especially if you are not a judge or a hangman. Robert Livingston was just that
Robert Livingston
type of man. When you rise from a simple clerk to one of the most powerful and richest
men in the colony of New York you are bound to make one or two enemies.
The first man to curse Robert Livingston on the gallows
was Jacob Milbourne, the son-in-law of Jacob Leisler. Leisler had attempted to
take over the colony following the Glorious Revolution in England but was
opposed by Robert Livingston.
The Revolution left New York in the hands of Lieutenant
Governor Francis Nicholson who was a deeply unpopular man. He felt so unliked
that he once threatened to burn the entire town of New York. Poor leadership
combined with economic issues made the town of New York ready for a change into
which Jacob Leisler stepped. Seizing the town’s fort and a letter from the
crown Leisler feigned legitimacy.
However the town of Albany and its leaders like Robert
Livingston and the Van Rensselaers resisted Leisler largely because of
Livingston’s money. Unfortunaltey, Livingston was forced to leave the city
after the Massacre at Schenectady, to go to Massachusetts and Connecticut to
seek help defending the western frontier.
Jacob Leisler
In his absence Albany surrendered to Leisler and
Livingston spent the next year exiled to Connecticut and Massachusetts. Despite
Livingston’s absence Leisler continued to blame him for all the problems he had
in New York.
The arrival, in early 1691, of the new legitimate lieutenant
governor, Henry Sloughter put an end to Leisler’s rebellion. Leisler blamed all
this on Livingston. Sloughter threw Leisler and the other ringleaders in jail
and soon sentenced them to death. He commuted all the sentences except for Leisler
and his son-in-law Jacob Milbourne.
At the May, 1691 hanging Milbourne spotted Livingston in
the crowd and said to him; “You have caused the King that I must now die but
before God’s tribunal I will implead the same for you.”
A decade later another man went to the gallows cursing
Livingston’s name. He was William Kidd, better known as Captain Kidd the
pirate.
He had started out as William Kidd the sea captain when
he met Livingston in London. Livingston arranged the backing of several members
of the upper class of English society for a voyage, commanded by Kidd, to
capture and destroy French flagged ships and pirates. Even the King signed a
special license for Kidd to keep all prizes he captured. The Adventure Galley a 34 gun warship was
built in record time, only five weeks, for Kidd, and he sailed it to New York
where he would start his mission from.
William Kidd
Trouble began almost immediately when Kidd secretly
agreed with the crew to give them ¾ of the mission’s profits rather than the ¼ his
backers had agreed to. Livingston heard about this less than five days after
Kidd sailed and called for him to be seized.
Aboard ship Kidd was not himself. He had a reputation as
a bully to his crews but on this cruise he seemed timid, even scared of the
crew. He was certainly not in control of them. When they stopped an English ship
to talk, Kidd entertained the captain in his cabin while his crew tortured the
other crew and seized supplies from the ship. They had made Kidd a pirate
whether he liked it or not. Later, his gunner, William Moore openly threatened Kidd
with a chisel, to which Kidd responded by hitting him in the head with a bucket
and killing him.
By the time Kidd returned to the western hemisphere he
found that most of the English world was hunting for the pirate Captain Kidd.
He sold the ship he was on and most of the goods he had plundered in the
Caribbean. He took a new ship the Saint
Antonio to New York and then to Boston where he was arrested.
His treasure though was missing. Livingston was brought
before a court in Boston and admitted to receiving an enslaved boy and possibly
some cheese from Kidd but no money. Certainly not the hundreds of thousands of
pounds that Kidd had supposedly plundered.
With no information on the money coming the backers
turned their backs on Kidd and he was sent to London to stand trial for murder
and piracy. After a trial in which the outcome was never in doubt he was
sentenced to hang. He said “My Lord it is a very hard sentence, for my part I
am the innocentest, person of them all, only I have been sworn against by
perjured persons.” Kidd went to the gallows believing he had done nothing wrong
and that if Livingston or any of the other backers had spoken up for him his
innocence would have
After he was hung Captain Kidd was
gibbeted as a warning to other pirates
been proven.
Robert Livingston made more than a few enemies in his
time, as many ambitious men did. It was rare though that Livingston’s ambitions
saw more than a few men take their last steps off the gallows cursing his name
as they went.
Sources:
Zacks, Richard The Pirate Hunter: The
True Story of Captain Kidd Hyperion, New York 2002
Leder, Lwrence H. Robert
Livingston and the Politics of Colonial New York University of North
Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1961
Seitz, Don C. Under
the Black Flag: Exploits of the Most Notorious Pirates Dover Publications
Inc. Mineola, 2002 (Originally published 1925)
Cordingly, David Under
the Black Flag; The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates Harcourt
Brace and Company, San Diego 1995.
In the November 1873 Dawson's Historical Magazine the war stories of James Thompson of the 78th Highland Regiment were published. Among them is a rather violent story about Richard Montgomery
"It wasn't me"
that, if true, would cast a rather large shadow on his legacy.
According to Thompson, Captain Montgomery was stationed near the falls of Montmorency outside Montreal in 1759 and was told to advance to Ange Gardien. There they were met by a French-Canadian militia commanded by a priest. Montgomery's men killed many of the French-Canadians including the priest. At least one prisoner, who had surrendered to one of Montgomery's sergeants, was summarily put to death.
The only problem with this story? It couldn't possibly be Richard Montgomery. One of the biggest give aways is the fact the Richard was not a captain in 1759, but a lieutenant in the 17th Regiment of Foot which did not join the attack on Montreal until the spring of 1760. When the incident with the priest and the executed prisoner happened Richard was hundreds of miles away in the Mohawk Valley.
The Montgomery in question for the 1759 incident may have been Richard's much older brother Alexander who was a captain in the 43rd Regiment of Foot which was outside Montreal in 1759. He had already earned the nickname "Black Montgomery" for an incident involving a scalping earlier in the war.
So why then did Thompson remember Richard committing the violence? Perhaps by the time Thompson recorded his experiences time had played tricks on his memory. Richard had become the much more famous brother by the time of the Revolution. He was in fact one of the war's first martyrs. Which leads to the question could Thompson, as a loyal British Army officer, have been trying to smear the reputation of an American hero?
We'll probably never know why Thompson leveled his accusation of unwarranted violence against Richard Montgomery. The one thing we do know is that it cant possibly be true, that Montgomery was nowhere near Montreal when the incident happened.
Edward Livingston's second career in Washington D. C. put him in the company of some of the most famous politicians the United States has ever seen. His term as a representative from Louisiana from 1823 through 1829, his time in the senate from 1829 through 1831 and his time as a member of Andrew Jackson's cabinet placed him among the men that would shape America in the lead up to the Civil War. First and foremost Edward was a close personal friend of Andrew Jackson's. They had met in congress in 1796 and formed a relationship of mutual respect. The Battle of New Orleans Read about that here made them brothers in arms. Jackson was comfortable enough with Edward to joke, when a British rocket whizzed over his head and he ducked, that he never "saluted" enemy fire but as that was the first rocket he had seen the least he could do was to "pay his respects."
Martin Van Buren
When Jackson became president he did not forget the friendship and wise advice Edward had given him. He made him Secretary of State in 1831 and counted him among his primary advisers. Edward was so trusted that Jackson allowed him to draft his response to the Nullification Crisis, which of course worked and delayed the Civil War by thirty years. Edward followed another famous politician into the Secretary of State's office, future president Martin Van Buren. Van Buren would serve as Jackson's vice-president from 1832 until the end of his presidency and would follow him as president. Interestingly enough Van Buren, though 18 years younger than Edward was born and raised in Kinderhook only a few miles from Livingston's home of Clermont. Both men were northerners who had thrown their lots in with the southern Jacksonian Democrats for the time being.
Thomas Hart Benton
Other allies of Jackson and Edward included Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Benton advocated strongly for Jackson's election while he was in the senate. Jackson then counted on Benton and his oratorical skills to get his legislation through the Senate. Interestingly, over his career Benton became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of slavery. Which Democrats like Jackson and even Edward had no real problem with. In 1849 he ended his senate career by declaring himself against slavery. Reaction to this and his anti-slavery stance during the debate on the Compromise of 1850 led a a senator from Mississippi to attempt to shoot Benton on the Senate floor. Benton served two years in the House of Representatives after the end of his senate career but politically he was effectively done. Benton was one of eight senators written about by John F. Kennedy in his book Profiles in Courage.
David Crockett
The King of the Wild Frontier, Davy Crockett or as he preferred to be called the Representative from Tennessee David Crockett was also an ally of Jackson and Edward during his first term in office from 1827 until 1830. Then Crockett earned the loathing of both Jackson, and by extension Edward and his constituents by speaking out strongly against Jackson's Indian Removal Act. The Act that when passed lead to the Trail of Tears as the Cherokee Tribe was forced west of the Mississippi. Crockett called the bill wicked and unjust. Without the support of the president of most of his people Crockett lost his bid for reelection in 1831. He was reelected in 1833 but defeated again in 1835 leading to his most famous statement on the people of his district, "they could go to Hell, he would go to Texas." He died there on March 6, 1836 at the Alamo Edward Livingston spent twenty of his 71 years holding some political office or another. It was nearly inevitable that he would meet some legends in his time. But Edward was their equal. Standing as he did, a bridge between the revolutionary generation and the antebellum generation. Perhaps the highest praise came from Thomas Jefferson, a one time political enemy of Edward's called him the greatest legislator to ever live.
It’s a chilly afternoon in mid-April several years ago, one of those sunny days that invites you out into the garden, but then leaves you shivering. It had been warm standing next to the bus as the Harvesting History Club disembarked at Clermont State Historic Site in Germantown, Columbia County, but soon we were in the dirt, one with the Earth, as spring arrived. Doing the digging were a dozen or so elementary school students, our garden educator Leslie, and me.
I was assisting one of the youngest students as she methodically planted her tiny seedlings and asked me questions. I handed her another seedling, a cool-weather vegetable she’d planted in a tray weeks earlier. Just like her, before the new semester began I knew next to nothing about plant. But I did know that cakes and cheese did not grow on trees.
“Oh,” her lips pursed at my answer. She took the kale and gently patted it into the dirt.
“But,” I continued, “I know we have strawberries. You can use strawberries in cake.”
“OH!” she brightened. “Where are they?!”
I pointed to a wild tangle of leaves and vines, already vying for dominance in the far corner of the garden. The strawberries wouldn’t be ready until June, which she wasn’t thrilled about. But she perked up moments later, when another student discovered a cool bug and everyone ran to see it.
Two campers show off their gardening and nature journals.
Clermont has a centuries-old garden history. The mansion has stood since colonial times — when growing and harvesting was an essential part of life. One of the wealthiest families in early America, the Livingstons of Clermont grew most of their own food and took in significant farm contributions from their tenant farmers. Clermont Livingston (yes, they named their son after the house) kept weather journals detailing growing and harvesting on the manor from the 1840s through the 1890s.
Clermont in the 1890s.
Through the early 20th century, most of the mid-Hudson Valley was agrarian, with vast farms, orchards, dairies, and kitchen gardens populating the landscape.
Today, most people in the area are living on land that was farmed within the last century. With all of this in mind, it’s a little startling how many of us live so close to nature but are so disconnected from it.
To help reintroduce and reestablish that tie, Harvesting History began at Clermont in 2014, spearheaded by Site Manager Susan Boudreau and Garden Educator Leslie Reed. The purpose of the program is to connect Hudson Valley kids with their history and engage them hands-on by working in the garden. As they learn about seeds, plantings, and garden care, they also learn about healthy eating, the history of their home, and the natural world.
It’s amazing how many students start the program with no knowledge of where their food comes from or how it’s made. It’s not just young kids, like the little girl and the cake trees, but teenagers and young adults. I was 23 when I started working with the program and had no concept of growing seasons or how to plant something.
Two young gardeners help harvest Swiss chard.
It’s a blind spot that our parents and grandparents would not recognize, brought on by refrigerated trucks and supermarkets where you can buy tomatoes and avocados at any time of the year. By planting heirloom vegetables in the chilly spring air, students don’t just begin to understand the seasons, they begin to understand meteorology, biodiversity, and entomology.
Students use nets to capture insects and magnifying glasses to identify potential garden pests.
Harvesting History has become quite popular. When I was first out in the garden in 2014, talking about cake trees and planting kale, we were serving 100 students annually. In 2018, we served 800 and we had even more students in 2019. The program is often on the road, visiting after-school programs, libraries, and schools, working on their own gardens and learning about healthy eating.
We do garden crafts, like making your own weather journal.
We even have this amazing bike blender we use to chop up herbs and veggies. Bike blender salsa is my absolute favorite way to make salsa now.
After getting a demonstration, campers try their hands – or in this case, their feet – at making bike blender salsa.
This last spring, our little kitchen garden was expanded to 2,500 square feet, allowing for more students to visit and experience some hands-on history.
And to dream more dreams of cake trees.
Post by Emily Robinson, School Programs Coordinator and Camp Director, Clermont State Historic Site.
The Livingston family of Clermont was rather unscathed by this as they were a pack of patriots. They all lost friends who remained loyal to the crown. Janet Livingston's husband Richard Montgomery had the most to lose by rebelling against the crown as most of his family was still in Ireland but the fact that family welcomed his widow openly when she visited after the war show that they were 
