America's Secret Aristocracy (11 page)

“The British are always so
superior
. My husband and I would notice it when we traveled in England—even in the finest houses. A certain sense of
condescension
, as though we Americans had never quite learned to do things right. I think what Mary King did about the silver was not just a spunky thing. It was the sensible thing, the right thing. Goodness me, if a relative of mine had stolen someone else's silver, and I'd been caught with the goods, I'd have immediately apologized, and sent the stuff back, of course—but with a note. To me, not even writing so much as a note to Mary was the most inexcusable part of it. But so British. Not even to apologize. Not very classy, if you ask me.”

8

From Camping Out with Indians
…
to Dinner at the Jays'

If the inclusion of the Royalist Alsops seemed a little odd on Sarah Jay's dinner list of guests, the inclusion of Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Schieffelin III seemed even odder. Jacob Schieffelin had fought for the British during the war. But as New York society closed ranks under President and Lady Washington, it had to be admitted that the young Schieffelins had much in their favor. Both were attractive and obviously well bred. The Schieffelin family pedigree, in pre-Revolutionary America and in Germany even before that, was excellent. Jacob Schieffelin had been an
officer
in the British army, not an ordinary soldier, and this stamped him automatically as a gentleman. And Jacob Schieffelin, as so many young men of the day were doing, had “married up,” into one of New York's proudest families.

The Schieffelin family traces itself back to the thirteenth century, to the town of Nördlingen, in Bavaria, where the family were German Protestants from the very beginning of the Reformation. There is a family portrait, painted in 1538, of Hans Leonard Schieffelin with his two sons, adoring the Paschal Lamb, the family crest (
Schieffelin
is a corruption of the German word for “little sheep”). This Hans Schieffelin became a pupil of Albrecht Dürer's and was a distinguished painter and printmaker. In 1735, the first Jacob Schieffelin, a ninth-generation descendant of Hans, immigrated to Philadelphia, bringing with him a Schieffelin family bible, printed in 1560, which is still in the family's possession. His son, Jacob, Jr., married a Philadelphia girl of German extraction
named Regina Ritschaurin, and their son Jacob Schieffelin III, was born in Philadelphia in 1757.

Jacob had grown up very much a Tory and a loyalist to the British king. As a young man he had gone to Detroit, where he went into the trading business with the Indians and was employed in the Indian department of the provincial government as secretary to Governor Henry Hamilton. With the outbreak of the Revolution, Jacob volunteered and was commissioned a lieutenant in the Detroit Volunteers. Here he was attached to the staff of his former boss, who was now General
Sir
Henry Hamilton, “with the rank and pay of an officer of the British Army.” In this capacity, he was a part of the expedition that attacked and captured Vincennes, Indiana.

But when the French-speaking townspeople of Vincennes learned that France had sided with the American rebels, many of them pledged support to the rebel cause. Thus, when an American force led by Colonel George Rogers Clark set out from Kaskaskia, Illinois, for Vincennes in 1779, Vincennes was recaptured after a brief battle, and both Sir Henry Hamilton and Lieutenant Schieffelin were among the British officers taken prisoner. Both were transported to Williamsburg, Virginia, and imprisoned there in the “Old Gaol.”

Jacob Schieffelin was only twenty-two years old at the time and, from all reports, was an exceptionally good-looking fellow with, it seems, a way with women. Instead of concentrating on ways to escape his jailer, he focused his attentions on the jailer's daughter and, by April 19, 1780, after less than a year behind bars, he was able to persuade this young lady to smuggle him a key to his cell. Escaping, he made his way by foot across Virginia and into Maryland, traveling at night and hiding in haystacks by day, and finally to Chesapeake Bay, where he was able to board a British man-of-war bound for New York, which was still in British hands. Here he was appointed a lieutenant in the Queens Rangers by Sir Henry Clinton and assigned to quarters in the home of John Lawrence and his wife Ann.

The Lawrences were an aristocratic family descended from Sir Robert Lawrence of Ashton Hall, Lancashire, England, who had accompanied Richard Coeur de Lion on the Crusades and who had been the first to plant the banner of the Cross on the battlements at Ptotemars, for which he had been knighted by the king and received a grant of arms. The first American Lawrence, William, had been given the original
royal patent for Flushing, Long Island. With these royal patents went not only vast tracts of real estate (including what is now the entire town of Lawrence) but also great political power. In America, the Lawrences acquired even more distinction through marriage to the Bownes, an American family that was important in New York even before the Livingstons. So it is an indication of Sir Henry Clinton's high opinion of young Jacob Schieffelin that he was billeted with a family as prominent as the Lawrences.

But neither Sir Henry nor the Lawrences could have predicted the outcome of this arrangement—no sooner had the handsome lieutenant moved in than he had fallen head over heels in love with the Lawrences' beautiful twenty-two-year-old daughter, Hannah, and she had quite obviously fallen in love with him. Theirs was a whirlwind and, necessarily, a secret courtship, because what would colonial society—much less Jacob Schieffelin's military commander—have said if it had become known that the British soldier was wooing the Lawrences' daughter right under the family's roof? Hannah Lawrence kept a remarkable diary of the love affair in which she disguised herself under the pseudonym of Matilda, and Jacob under the romantic code name of Altimonte—presumably in case her parents happened to stumble upon her impassioned jottings and discovered what was going on. A typically breathless entry, for July 27, 1780, reads,

The last evening gave me the company of the Gentle Altimonte. How ardent were his professions; how amiable does he appear. Can such simplicity of manner conceal a treacherous soul? Can such warmth and apparent openness of expression cover a heart acquainted with guile? But, ah! The world is full of dissimulation, and shall she from whom her friends expect unvarying prudence fix her affections on a young stranger, and throwing herself foolishly in his power abandon every other dear connection?… Perhaps I may yield—but yet what then may be my fate? But should my heart plead in his favour—where will be reason, where discretion?

Hannah Lawrence's misgivings were based on the fact that the Lawrences were Quakers and conscientiously opposed to any form of war. Yet here was Hannah, toppling helplessly into love with an army officer. Her dilemma was doubly
poignant because she herself was passionately anti-British and had expressed her feelings in a “notorious” piece of verse a year earlier. Hannah's poems had been published in various journals and periodicals of the day, and in 1779 she had become incensed at the attitudes and manners of the British soldiers occupying New York City. A favorite gathering place for the redcoats, it seemed, was on lower Broadway, in front of Trinity Church and its cemetery. And here it also seemed—in the habit of soldiers anywhere and of any day—the young men enjoyed making improper remarks and indecent suggestions to young colonial ladies as they passed by. Hannah's poem addressing this situation was titled “On the Purpose to Which the Avenue Adjoining Trinity Church Has of Late Been Dedicated” and began:

This is the scene of gay resort
,

Here Vice and Folly hold their court
.

Here all the martial band parade

To vanquish
—
some unguarded maid
.…

The poem continued with such quatrains as:

Heavens! Shall a vain inglorious train

The mansions of our dead profane?

A horde of undistinguished things
,

That shrink beneath the frown of Kings
.…

It continued in this vein for some twenty more lines. Hannah had left the poem unsigned, but she had dropped it deliberately on the sidewalk in front of the church, where she hoped it would be picked up and read by the British troops. It was, and a great sword-rattling fuss ensued among General Clinton's officers. Though the words of the poem seem rather mild today, they were denounced as high treasonous sedition at the time. Dropping the poem in the street was a courageous thing to do, because if its authoress could have been found—she was not—she could have been hanged.

And now here was the authoress of those words herself, in love with a member of the vain inglorious train, one of those undistinguished things, a redcoat soldier.

But Hannah Lawrence did not linger over this crisis of her conscience long. Scarcely three weeks after the above-quoted entry in her diary was written—on August 16, 1780—Hannah's
heart had prevailed, and she had succumbed to her lover's entreaties and agreed to marry him. To avoid a family furor over a marriage of different religious persuasions, they eloped in the classic way, with the bridegroom-to-be propping a ladder against his intended's bedroom window at midnight. She had climbed down the ladder into his arms, and they were married by the chaplain of his garrison.

In this marital escapade, the couple had been enthusiastically encouraged and abetted by Hannah's best friend, Miss Buela Murray (Lavinia in Hannah's diary), the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Murray, after whom New York's Murray Hill is named. The Murrays, also a wealthy Quaker merchant family, seem to have thrived on conspiracy and intrigue. The Murray mansion was situated on the Middle Road, approximately where East Thirty-seventh Street intersects Park Avenue today, and the Murray cornfields occupied the acreage where Grand Central Station stands today.

In the Revolution, the Middle Road offered an important shortcut between the lower Post Road to the south and the King's Bridge section of Manhattan to the north. After the battle of Long Island, Mrs. Murray watched General Israel Putnam's disheveled troops pass by her house in full retreat from the British. Later, she noticed a far superior British force approaching her house from the same direction and saw a chance to have a bit of fun. Recognizing Lord Richard Howe in command, she suggested to His Lordship that he and his officers might enjoy pausing at her house for a bit of refreshment. It had been a long, hot march, and so Howe gladly accepted. He and his men were so charmingly entertained by the Murrays that, by the time his northward march was resumed, General Putnam and his men were safely entrenched at Harlem Heights, where he would regather his forces to face the enemy. Thus Mrs. Robert Murray entered American history, as a not insignificant footnote, apparently unconcerned that while she herself was aiding the Revolutionaries, her daughter was promoting the amorous intentions of a British officer.

Soon after Hannah and Jacob were married, Schieffelin was posted to Quebec to deliver dispatches to General Sir Fredrick Haldeman, and his bride gamely offered to accompany him. Part of the journey was by ship, but once the party entered the St. Lawrence River, they transferred to smaller boats and then to canoes, which had to be portaged around
rapids while the party continued on foot. Overnight accommodations were at primitive forts, when they could find them, or, when they could not, in makeshift tents or beneath overturned canoes. At one point, seeing a fire burning in the wilderness, the Schieffelins approached it to find a band of Indian warriors with their wives and children.

“I was a little surprised,” Hannah wrote home to her parents in New York. But the Indians

made room for me between them with the greatest civility and perceiving I was a little frightened, by the haste with which I seated myself, and knocked my head in the flurry, they desired me in their language to take courage. Their heads were shaved and painted, and their appearance altogether savage, but their manners not at all so—I was shocked to see a scalp dangling by the side of one of their ears—it was the size of a dollar, and fixed in a wooden ring, while a lock of beautiful hair hung on his shoulder. On my observing it, he pointed to his head and pronounced the word “Yankee.”

Nonetheless, Hannah added, “We slept sound till morning in our own tent and then pursued our course.”

At another juncture, Hannah was introduced to the famous Molly, the favorite Indian concubine (Hannah tastefully used the word “Sultana”) of Sir William Johnson, whose services in bringing the Iroquois nation under British sway had been rewarded by a baronetcy, a gift of a huge tract of land in the Mohawk Valley, and a pension of four thousand pounds a year for Molly. “I had the
honor
to sup with her in Captain Butler's tent, on a haunch of venison,” Hannah wrote. “She has a sensible countenance, and much whiter than the generality of Indians, but her father was white. She understands English, but speaks only the Mohawk. Which has something extremely soft and musical in it when spoken by a woman.…” This half-Indian lady, Hannah Schieffelin noted, occupied a fine house on the banks of the St. Lawrence, where she lived with several of her daughters and was attended by “a great number” of servants. In her letter home, Hannah could not help commenting on Molly's attire at their venison haunch dinner: “She was … in a traveling dress, a calico beaded gown, fastened with silver brooches and a worsted mantel.”

In 1781, the American Revolution officially came to an
end, even though the British would not evacuate Savannah until July of the following year and would not remove the last of their troops from New York until November of 1783. With his commission as a British officer now meaningless, Jacob Schieffelin returned with his wife to Detroit to resume his Indian trading business that the war had interrupted; here the fact that he had fought on the British side stood him in good stead with his Indian customers. Presently, the chief of the Ottawa tribe made Jacob a grant of seven square miles fronting on the Detroit River, and soon he had expanded his trading activities to Montreal, to the Northwest Territories, and even to London, where he spent a year in 1789–1790 acquiring goods for trade.