GEORGE WASHINGTON AND WILLIAM LIVINGSTON:
A FRIENDSHIP FORGED IN FIRE
Dr. Carl E. Prince (1984)

Drawing on the 450 Washington-Livingston letters in the William Livingston Papers at New York University, Dr. Carl E. Prince underscores the staunch support that New Jersey’s first state governor provided to Washington not only during the Revolution, but throughout the Confederation period and at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. He describes a patrician governor brought closer to the farmers, artisans and shopkeepers he governed because he was forced to spend five years moving from place to place for safety in a state contested by loyalists for virtually the entire Revolution.

There is not much I can tell you about George Washington that you don't already know, so before I go on to talk about the intriguing personal and professional relationship between Washington and William Livingston, I should say a little about Livingston's place in the American Revolutionary scheme of things. First, it is important to understand that, inasmuch as New Jersey formed the chief battleground of the Revolution between 1776 and 1781, both William Livingston's ability as a civil and inspirational leader, and his remarkable willingness to defer to Washington's judgment, were critically important and often overlooked factors in the winning of a tough war.

According to Washington, William Livingston may well have been the best state executive in the thirteen states during the American Revolution. It was not merely his grasp of administration and use of executive authority that made him a strong leader. More subtly, his success derived as well from his unity with the people of the state. A patrician by birth himself, he was able to establish a close rapport with a population of farmers, artisans and shopkeepers at war. That he was able to do so in a state racked for five years by invasion, the internal divisions triggered by widespread royalism, enemy occupation, and devastation of the land, was all the more remarkable.

Yet as the real William Livingston emerges from the shadows of history, he appears increasingly as an amalgam of the cold, austere private person he was on the one hand, and the witty, compassionate, accessible and human public person he also proved himself to be, on the other. In short, what the Livingston Papers project has discovered behind the mass of historical documents brought together for the first time is a complete human being, with all the foibles, internal contradictions, weaknesses and inconsistencies of any person. We have also learned a great deal about New Jersey in the American Revolution along the way.

Born in 1723 to a patriarchic family headed by the Lord of Livingston Manor in New York State, he knew instinctively and by early training how to exercise authority. As governor, he disdained due process under law for the many loyalists in New Jersey. Occupation of the state's soil by the enemy, and internal harassment by these same loyalists for more than five years, did not permit him to do otherwise. Between 1777 and 1779, he was perfectly capable of using the all-powerful New Jersey Council of Safety to prosecute individuals even suspected of royalism and “aiding the enemy.” As president of this revolutionary tribunal, he would order the arrest, interrogation and jailing of hundreds of suspect Jerseymen in the name of order and endangerment of the state's precarious internal security.

That precariousness was underscored by the fact that, as Governor, he lived his life on the run. He rarely spent a week in one place for more than five years between 1776 and 1781. As a result, he came to know his constituency with an intimacy borne of that experience, an experience probably unique or nearly so, for an American political figure at any time in any place. Because he was so visible in so many places so often, it appears most Jersey residents were comforted by his austere, strong, energetic presence among them, looking on him with ever deepening paternal feelings.

In return and almost in spite of himself, Livingston came to respect and admire the stolid citizenry of New Jersey, the farmers whose harvests were threatened, the townsmen and women undermined and harassed intermittently by a strong loyalist presence and British and Hessian occupiers. As he moved almost weekly from one place to another, from Newton in Sussex County to Morristown, Elizabethtown, and on to Woodbridge and Princeton, then perhaps southward to Trenton, Burlington, Pittstown, Haddonfield and a dozen other places scattered across the New Jersey landscape, he came to know and observe an ever-widening number of people. Most of these formed a class he had only limited contact with heretofore, in the segregated society of eighteenth century America. And as he came to know these people, he came to respect them. For the first time in his life Livingston perceived these farmers and artisans in ways that were more than one-dimensional.

The rapport that grew out of this growing mutual respect manifested itself in several ways. Livingston was elected governor annually fourteen times in as many years, designated by a legislature highly sensitive to the moods of its constituents, and itself elected annually.

The Governor came face to face with tough, bitter experiences, notably several narrow escapes from assassination attempts by either Loyalists or British agents. In 1778, two attempts were made to either kill or kidnap him from Liberty Hall, his Elizabethtown estate. Once, he had departed only minutes before the Loyalists arrived. On another occasion, the home was looted and his daughters harassed. Livingston wrote wryly to a friend that “I am not often so near home as they (the British) imagine.” That was true. His administration-in-motion was so well known to the Loyalist press he was dubbed “the Invisible Governor,” and was chided, “your agility in New Jersey has been proverbial.”
Livingston wrote of these experiences to his friend Henry Laurens, President of the Continental Congress:

The Enemy have lately tempted me to consider myself in a point of light in which I should never have had the vanity to consider myself but for their most gracious opinion of me, that is as a Man of Consequence. I hope they will never succeed in killing me, as I should by that means most certainly lose the honor of being hanged in Company with some of you more illustrious Rebels (George Washington included).

As a result of these experiences, as well as his life on the run, Wil Livingston developed an appreciation for both the responsibilities and anguish of power. He learned to use it well, not a common characteristic of American politicians in general, history would indicate, but a trait he shared with Washington.

As both a militia general and governor, Livingston supported George Washington down the line. Washington and Livingston worked closely and well for five critical years between 1776 and 1781. Some 450 Washington/Livingston letters in the possession of the William Livingston Papers Project at New York University bear this out. In the critical summer of 1776, with British troops massing on Staten Island, Livingston was the general commanding the New Jersey militia; he voluntarily placed himself and his soldiers under Washington's orders, acknowledging that “Your Excellency must be sensible that as the department (militia general) I now act in is to me entirely new, I must be desirous of every aid that can possibly be obtained from you.” Washington responded with a vote of confidence, noting “I should think no Person could run a Risque in doing what is immediately necessary under your appointment.” This was the beginning of a mutual trust that endured until Livingston's death in 1790.

You will recall that General Washington spent much of the next five years in New Jersey, and the continuous mutual dependence, one on the other, was never strained, never forced. As with so many others eventually, Livingston fell under Washington's spell, seeing in the Continental Army general a towering figure, larger than life. Typically Livingston referred to Washington in his public addresses, for example, as “our wise, our enterprizing and glorious General.” The veneration was continuous and without limit. The two remained in touch after the war, with a brief reprise of close proximity and support during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, to which both Livingston and Washington were delegates. Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Livingston's son-in-law John Jay depended on the New Jersey Governor to deliver the New Jersey vote for ratification of the new U.S. Constitution in 1788, and subsequently see to it that Federalist representatives and senators were elected. It was Washington's expressed opinion that Livingston never failed him, and the latter did not this time either, as New Jersey was among the first states to ratify, and elected Washington supporters uniformly to the First Federal Congress. It is fair to say that, had Will Livingston lived into the 1790's, President Washington would almost certainly have named him either to a cabinet post or the U.S. Supreme Court.

But the best measures of the relationship recur always to the years 1776-1781. Personal feelings were in evidence even before the Battle of Trenton on the night of December 25, 1776. Washington had written Livingston privately that he was ill and discouraged a few weeks before the engagement. Livingston wrote back, “May God support you under that Fatigue both of Body and Mind to which you must be constantly exposed.”" He told Washington to rely on his innate “Prudence, Fidelity to the Cause, the Magnanimity” in deflecting the assaults of his many critics. It should be remembered that, while many sang Washington's praises after Trenton at the end of 1776, and the victory at Princeton ten days later, very few did so before those successes.

Washington never forgot who his few friends were in those hard early days of “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots,” to quote the redoubtable Tom Paine. Washington heard great things about himself later in life; but it should not be forgotten in the perspective of his now-universal good name how little encouragement he met with when he needed it most.

An even more dramatic example of Livingston's unswerving loyalty occurred in the dog days of late 1777 and early 1778--before the American victories at Saratoga and Monmouth, and just after the Continental Army's disastrous defeats at Brandywine and Germantown. Many in the Continental Congress were on Washington's back, and so were some of his generals, Horatio Gates and Thomas Conway included. George Washington was convinced, as early as November 1777, following the losses in Pennsylvania, that some generals and members of Congress were out to discredit or replace him, a confrontation historians now call the “Conway Cabal.”

Governor Livingston threw his considerable weight behind the Commander in Chief of the Army. Politically he pressed his close friends and relatives in Congress, notably Continental Congress President Henry Laurens and his son-in-law John Jay, to affirm openly their support for Washington. In the newspapers, Livingston wrote an ode, widely circulated as all his pseudonymous writings were, “To His Excellency General Washington.”

As poetry it can only with the greatest generosity be described as mediocre; in truth, it was wretched verse. As propaganda, however, at a critical juncture in Washington's career, it was a winner:

O Washington, Thy worth unequall'd, thy heroic deed, Thy patriotic virtues, and high-soaring fame, Prompt irresistibly my feeble arm, to grab the long-forgotten lyre,, and join the universal chorus of thy praise
The strong foundations of victory laid, methinks I see the god-like Hero gracefully retire, And . . . His rural seat (Mt. Vernon) regain; His rural seat Fresh blooming at his visitation, smiles . . .

It goes onÅ\and on, and on. But I am not without mercy, so I stop here; but you get the drift.
For the reading public, though, and the hearers to whom it was read in the taverns and coffee houses of America, it recalled to mind very vividly in terms the late eighteenth century mind understood that George Washington was a civilian first, a general second, that he was a reluctant leader, that he had won crucial victories earlier at Trenton and Princeton, that had saved the Revolution. George Washington, overlooking the bad poetry, was not one to forget who his friends were when he was at his most vulnerable.

These two examples of Livingston's early loyalty earned George Washington's rare conferral of friendship on Livingston, who eminently deserved it.

Because of these human qualities, Livingston not only survived under the toughest of political conditions, he shared major responsibility for holding the state's civil government together at a time when its role in the American war effort was crucial. This personally taciturn, austere, aristocratic and judgmental figure actually came to be revered by most of the whig civilians of the state, even as Washington came to be revered by a grateful nation. “You are the father of us all,” one Jersey farmer wrote to Livingston. His popularity among the rank and file was testimony to his personal indefatigability and political and administrative good sense. Although he would remain governor throughout the Confederation era, indeed until his death in 1790, the war years proved the toughest in his life. The Revolutionary War called forth all the consummate intelligence and ability to communicate he possessed. It would be too much to claim that he was beloved by all, he was hardly that. But he was respected by most, and perhaps George Washington first and foremost, and no political figure can ask for more than that.

William Livingston was proud of his friendship with George Washington through all his remaining life. For the General in retirement in the 1780's, and after his elevation to the presidency, Washington always felt that Livingston had earned that friendship with his unwavering support when the Virginian was at his most vulnerable, before the victories at Trenton and Princeton, and again after the defeats at Germantown and Brandywine.

As John F. Kennedy said two hundred years later, after the Bay of Pigs, “victory has many fathers, defeat is an orphan.” Few risked defending the commander of the Continental Army in defeat, but Wil Livingston was among those few.