William Livingston (1723-1790)

Leading opponent of the original Anglican sponsors of King's College, William Livingston was born in Albany in 1723. His family was one of New York Province's largest landowners, with links to the earliest Dutch settlers and the subsequent English mercantile elite. He followed three older brothers to Yale, from whence he graduated in 1741. He then settled in New York City where his brothers were already leading merchants, though he had decided on pursuing the law. An apprenticeship with attorney James Alexander (and defender of the newspaperman Peter Zenger) confirmed a commitment to civil libertarianism and an identification with the legislative or popular cause as against the Anglican gentry aligned with Lieutenant Governor James DeLancey and his Council.. That his branch of the Livingstons were thoroughgoing Calvinists of the Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian denominational persuasions, further fueled his antipathy to Anglicanism.

 Livingston was an early advocate of the plan broached in 1745 by his mentor Alexander to construct a college in New York City. He saw it as a means of promoting knowledge and as a check on the city's unruly "bashers." In 1751 he was appointed to the Lottery Commission charged with drawing upo plans for a publicly supported college. When it appeared in 1753 that the proposed college was likely to be controlled by the City's leading Anglicans and governed as an extension of Trinity Church, which had offered to provide the college with a site, Livingston moved into public opposition.

His principal vehicle for doing so was a weekly journal, The Independent Reflector, that he and like-minded friends -- William Smith, jr. and John Morin Scott -- had begun publishing in late 1752. Livingston devoted six successive issues of the Reflector , beginning on March 22, 1753, to examining "our intended college" from the perspective of New York's non-Anglican majority. Although these polemical exertions on behalf of a non-sectarian institution and against an "Episcopal college" did not stop the college project from going forward, or the College taking on a distinctly Anglican character rather than becoming, as the College's president-elect Samuel Johnson accused Livingston of seeking, "a sort of free thinking latitudinarian seminary," they did turn an earlier supportive Provincial Assembly sufficiently against the College that it took no part in the granting of a royal charter in 1754 and withheld more than L6000s generated by a public lottery from the College. Not until two years after the College had opened, was a compromise reached whereby the Assembly split the lottery funds between the College and New York City, for construction of a municipal pest house. Unreconstructed foes of King's College took to referring to the division as between "two pest houses." "Relative to the affair of the College, " Livingston wrote resignedly to an ally in 1757, " we stood as long as our legs would support us, and, I may add, even fought for some time on our stumps."

Livingston continued throughout the 1760s to do battle with the DeLanceys for political control of New York, until a political defeat in 1769 led him to remove himself to Elisabethtown, New Jersey and to the life of a gentlemen farmer. Soon thereafter, however, he was drawn back into revolutionary politics, first on the Essex County Committee of correspondence and then representing New Jersey at the First and Second Continental Congresses. From 1777 to 1791 he served as the first governor of New Jersey. He was also a delegate at the Federal Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, where he played an uncharacteristically subdued role in favor a strong national government. In so doing he aligned himself with William Samuel Johnson, a delegate from Connecticut, the son of his old King's College nemesis (and soon-to-be president of Columbia College) and two of King's College's most distinguished alumni, Gouverneur Morris (KC 1768) and Alexander Hamilton (a. 1774). Small world. Livingston died in 1790.

Robert A. McCaughey

Bibliography: Milton Klein, ed., The Independent Reflector, by William Livingston and Others (Harvard University Press, 1963)