Narrative #12 -- King's College Politics

Of all the ways King's College differed from its institutional peers, none remains more notorious than its politics. The other eight colonial colleges all supported the break with England when it came, with greater and lesser enthusiasm, while several of their leaders actively sought to bring it about. John Adams wrote admiringly of Princeton's Scottish-born President John Witherspoon and his polemical efforts of resistance to English rule in 1774: "He is as high a son of liberty as any man in America." If no other college was as committed to the Revolution as Princeton, they could point to presidents and to majorities of their faculty, trustees, living graduates and students identified with the battle for independence. To be sure, the faculty of the College of Philadelphia was not exactly rabid in its patriotic militancy, and some 16 per cent of Harvard's living graduates became Loyalists. But overall, and especially when compared with their ambivalent roles in most of the country's eight wars since, America's colonial colleges earned their place in the New Republic.

Not so King's College. On May 25, 1775, upon news of the clashes at Lexington-Concord, its president departed New York City just ahead of a mob bent upon doing him mortal harm for his Tory sentiments and pamphleteering efforts on behalf of the Crown. Of the College's seven faculty members (inclusive of the medical faculty), five aligned with England and against the revolution. Only the frequent butt of student escapades, Tutor Robert Harpur, became a vigorous patriot. Among the Governors, for every one who sided with the Revolution, five became Loyalists. Of the 150 King's College students whose revolutionary politics have been identified, for every Patriot there were at least three Loyalists.

These are striking numbers, even for New York, the most ambivalent of the thirteen colonies. Along with the demographically overlapping Trinity Church, no other colonial institution in America approached King's College in the comprehensiveness of its continued fealty to the Crown. That this was so speaks to the strength and extent of the identification of the College's constituent families with New York's imperial prospects. When push came to shove in 1775-76, hardly anyone identified with King's College could have imagined their lives being improved by New York's withdrawal from the Empire. That is not to say that they did not have individual grievances with English colonial policies. They were virtually unanimous, and thus one with their more militant fellow New Yorkers, that Parliament's taxing colonial commercial activities was a bad idea, and so expressed themselves at the time of the Stamp Act in 1765. Subsequent efforts by Parliament to extract revenue from the colonies produced similar reactions.

But on other issues that angered colonists elsewhere, such as the placement of British troops in the colonies and the threat of a resident Anglican bishop posed to the dissenting religious denominations that were in the majority in several colonies, the Anglican mercantile and landowning elite of New York had no quarrel. Unlike Bostonians, for example, New Yorkers had long accommodated a substantial military presence, and assured British army officers a favored place in the City's social activities. Several of His Majesty's finest, for example, had married into King's College families. Similarly, New York's Anglicans were determined that if the colonies were to have a bishop, his seat should be in New York.

The leading New York merchants linked to King's College not only recognized the benefits derived from membership in the Empire, they sensed the risks of going along with the free trade demands of their less connected and more scrambling competitors. The Crugers -- with their four King's College governors and three King's College students -- are a case in point. Trading links carefully developed by the patriarch Henry Cruger (Governor, 1754-1773) with the British West Indies, where son Teleman Cruger (KC 1755-58) maintained the family countinghouse, and with Bristol. England, where son Henry Cruger (KC 1754-57) represented the city (along with Edmund Burke) in Parliament, were not about to be jeopardized to satisfy the demands of New York's lesser merchants for access to non-English ports. Business is business.

Similarly, other King's College families, such as that headed by Frederick Philipse (Governor 1754-75), with immense landholdings (1/4^th of Westchester County!) title to which were confirmed by the Crown, saw no economic purpose in aligning with troublemakers clamoring for tenants' rights. So, too, with the family of William Kempe (Governor1754-59), who had such a lock on the provincial post of Attorney General that upon his retirement in 1759 he passed it to his son, John Tabor (Governor 1760-1775), for whom ties to crown officialdom and claims to crown offices had simply become too much a way of life to be put at risk.

For the New York merchants, landholders and crown appointees who headed King's College families, the tensions that developed between the colonies and England were the unfortunate result of untimely Parliamentary legislation and an over-reaction on the part of colonial troublemakers. For families professionally identified with the Anglican Church these tensions were exacerbated by Parliament's unwillingness to assign bishops in the colonies and thereby secure for the Anglican communion in America the full rights and privileges of the established church. For the successive rectors of Trinity Church, Henry Barclay and Samuel Auchmuty, "Presbyterian" and "Republican" were interchangeable, as they were for Presidents Samuel Johnson and Myles Cooper.

Not surprisingly, then, of all the King's College families, it was the clerical ones for whom the decision to become Loyalists seems in retrospect to have been the most foregone. Thus, Barclay's son and two nephews -- Thomas (KC 1772), James (KC 1766) and Thomas (KC 1763-65) -- all sided with the Crown, as did Auchmuty's sons -- Samuel (KC 1775), Robert (KC 1774) and Richard (KC 1775). Richard Auchmuty was captured in battle and died as a prisoner of the Continental Army, while his brother Samuel, earlier intended for the ministry, joined and then stayed on in the British army after Yorktown, eventually becoming Commander-in-Chief of all British forces in Ireland. All eleven King's College graduates ordained as Anglican ministers prior to the Revolution sided with the Crown, several as chaplains to the British army. Another, John Vardill (KC 1766), exploited his college ties with his classmates John Jay and Gouverneur Morris, as well as his friendship with other American revolutionaries (most notably, Silas Deane) to spy upon them as a secret and well-paid agent of the British government.

But what then of the John Jays, Gouverneur Morrises, Robert R. Livingstons and Alexander Hamiltons, King's College men who became active Revolutionaries? First, there weren't many who did; and, second, for most who did, it was a near thing. Perhaps least so for Alexander Hamilton (KC 1774-75), whose links with the Anglican establishment of New York were only as solid as a bright young man just up from the Islands could make them. He possessed neither wealth nor family to ease his way. However unkind, John Adams's characterization of him as " the bastard son of a Scotch peddler" was geneaologically precise. His was a name yet to be made -- and place to be secured (as by subsequent marriage to a Schuyler) -- by exemplary Revolutionary effort, not by siding with the ancien regime. Even so, as Hamilton's post-revolutionary politics made clear, he was never one for governance except by "the right sort.".

John Jay (KC 1764) also joined the Revolution, but as one of the more reluctant of reluctant New Yorkers to do so. In his case, marriage in 1774 to the daughter of William Livingston, earlier of Independent Reflector fame and subsequently the revolutionary governor of New Jersey, may had been the difference between him and, say, Peter Van Schaack [KC 1766], his college friend and legal colleague, who refused to disavow the sovereignty of the Crown. Schaack's wartime activities, while punctiliously neutral, were nonetheless deemed conspiratorial by Jay in his official capacity as a member of the New York provisional government. Jay liked being sent by others to represent them, first to successive Continental Congresses, then to New York's provincial government, to the New York Constitutional Convention, and later to Congress, all the time managing to do as little gladhanding as necessary, and no more than befit his standing in both the old and new order. He remained throughout persuaded of the dictum that "those who own the country should govern it."

Of the handful of King's College's notable revolutionaries, Gouverneur Morris (KC 1766) was perhaps the most knowingly self-denying in his siding with the future against the past. His mother, three sisters and their husbands all sided with the Crown, hoping thereby to protect their estates and crown offices, while Morris sensed beforehand that to throw in with the Revolution was to back a movement wherein " a herd of mechanicks are preferred before the first families in the colony." But throw in he did, perhaps under the influence of his oldest brother, Lewis, a representative to the Second Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike Hamilton and Jay, or even the less famous Robert R. Livingston (KC 1766), whose revolutionary activities were later rewarded with the governorship of New York and several diplomatic posts, Morris,. after a string of wartime jobs, a move to Pennsylvania and effective participation in the 1787 Constitutional Convention, gradually dropped out of politics altogether and took up residence in France (where he carried out some diplomatic chores for President Washington), before returning to New York in the late 1790s as a Jefferson-baiting gentleman farmer. During the last two decades of his life, he was, by all estimates, including his own, certifiably unelectable to any public office. Not that such a fate should have surprised him, for back as early as 1774, eight years out of King's College, the twenty-three year old Morris saw clearly what the future was to be:

Yesterday I was at a grand division of the city, and there… my fellow citizens … fairly contended about the future forms of our government, whether it should be founded upon aristocratic or democratic principles. I stood in the balcony, and on my right hand were ranged all the people of property … and on the other all the tradesmen. … The spirit of the English Constitution has yet a little influence left, and but a little. The remains of it, however, will give the wealthy people a superiority this time, but the mob begin to think and reason… The gentry begin to fear this. Their committees will be appointed, they will deceive the people, and again forfeit a share of their confidence. And if these instances of what with one side is policy, with the other perfidy, shall continue to increase, and become more frequent, farewell aristocracy.

Farewell, too, King's College.

Sources: Mary-Jo Kline, "Gouverneur Morris and the New Nation, 1775-1788," PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 1970; George Dangerfield, Chancellor Robert Livingston of New York, 1746-1813,
(1960); Carl Becker, "John Jay and Peter Van Schaack," Everyman His Own Historian (1935); James Thomas Flexner, The Young Hamilton: A Biography (1978); Richard B. Morris, John Jay: The Making of a Revolutionary (1975); Humphrey, From King's College, pp 140-144.