In 1747, recent Yale graduate and aspiring (if unenthusiastic) lawyer William Livingston entered public life with the publication of Philosophic Solitude, a lengthy poem in which he imagined an idyllic life spent in rural retreat from the corruption and insincerity of high society. Livingston envisioned a life of intellectual stimulation in conversation with God, Nature, a carefully chosen circle of friends and wife, and the ideas contained in a carefully curated library.
In the years that followed, Livingston would find little of the solitude he craved, but he would continue to engage with the world of ideas in the public sphere. With two of his closest friends, he launched The Independent Reflector Or, Weekly Essays on Sundry Important Subjects, More Particularly Adapted to the Province of New-York, a short-lived but ambitious journal featuring essays on topics ranging from religion and education to immigration and free speech.
Like his fellow Enlightenment thinkers, Livingston believed not just in the power of books, but also in the power of education. In a 1755 letter to his cousin Philip, then a student at The College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in hopes of persuading him to stay in school, Livingston extolled the virtues of education: “Innumerable are the instances of persons having been advanced to the most splendid stations in the Commonwealth by that Knowledge of Books and capacity for serving the Public which they had acquired in the course of their students insomuch that many a man without either the assistance of an Estate or those in Power has by the Strength of a Genius cultivated by a Liberal Education vanquished the frowns of fortune and finally ecclipsed [sic] those of the Greatest affluence and external advantages.”
With foresight he wrote, “. . . as learning is evidently growing into Fashion tis highly probable that by the time you are settled in the World, it will be a scandalous reflection on a . . . man of Distinction not to have the best education the country can afford.” And he added, with a sense of superiority, “And to a Man of spirit it must be extremely mortifying to see himself out stripped in fame and performance . . . by Multitudes of the rising Generation of no family or fortune, while is pedigree & efforts [serve] him in no other stead with Men of Judgement & Merit, than only to render his Ignorance so much the more conspicuous.” Livingston’s belief in the importance of education was not just personal and familial: he advocated publically for the creation of King’s College in New York City (that would eventually become Columbia University), but the free-thinking Presbyterian Livingston fought to ensure that the school not be connected to the Anglican Church.
In the late 1760s, Livingston planned his retirement from the practice of law and, hoping to achieve that philosophic solitude he imagined decades earlier, moved to the home he built on the outskirts of Elizabeth Town, New Jersey: Liberty Hall. At Liberty Hall, he built an orchard furnished with fruit trees imported from London, assembled his personal library (the contents of which are being analyzed by History students at Kean), cultivated political, religious, and social connections in Elizabeth Town, and presided over the wedding of his daughter, Sarah, to John Jay in April 1774 (recreated at Kean University on film as “A Revolutionary Wedding” as part of LH360).
With the outbreak of the American Revolution, solitude gave way to service as Livingston was named Brigadier General of the New Jersey militia and in August 1776, and was elected governor of New Jersey, a role he filled until his death in 1790. As governor during the Revolution, he worked closely with George Washington to ensure that national military needs were supported on the state level through the recruitment and provisioning of troops, and the suppression of loyalists. To shore up support for the Patriot cause, he turned once more to print. Knowing the importance of communicating directly with the American public, he not only collaborated with printer Isaac Collins to create the New Jersey Gazette when New York and Philadelphia newspapers fell under loyalist control, but also put pen to paper in writing propaganda in support of the war for Independence. Indeed, he was the most prolific and effective propagandist on the Patriot side of the war, as the timeline created by Kean history student Nicole Skalenko makes clear.
Livingston’s work and conduct during the American Revolution and in the Early Republic reveal him to be very much a man of his time, sometimes leading as he did in effectively guiding New Jersey through the war and participating in the drafting of the United States Constitution, and sometimes struggling with change, as he did, for example, with regard to slavery. Livingston embraced the abolitionist cause by joining the New York Manumission Society and freeing his two slaves in 1787, but expressed ambivalence in attempting to find a means to end the practice and personal frustration with the consequences of hiring servants to run his household.
But Livingston lived a carefully examined professional and personal life, acting with intellectual rigor, formidable eloquence, and a belief in the power of the expression of ideas to change the world. It is more than fitting, then, that Liberty Hall, thanks to the generosity of the Kean family, is now connected to Kean University, one of New Jersey’s public institutions of higher education dedicated to providing the means to bettering the lives of its students. It is in this spirit that the Kean University Department of History, now in its new home in the Liberty Hall Academic Center, launches its new blog, HISTORYBlogs@Kean. As this first blogpost makes clear, William Livingston’s world (with the support of an NEH Humanities Initiative Grant) has already provided ample fodder for the exploration by Kean history students of the founding of the United States and New Jersey and the lives of the those who lived in that world. With Livingston serving as a model public intellectual and public servant dedicated to understanding and bettering his world, HISTORYBlogs@Kean will offer periodic posts dedicated not only to William Livingston’s historical world and the world he and subsequent generations of Keans created at Liberty Hall, but also to the role of history in understanding our world today. We in the Department of History, Liberty Hall Museum, and Kean University look forward to sharing this conversation with you via this blog and other programming. Stay tuned!
Elizabeth Hyde, Chair
Department of History
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