Van Berckel, rather than working with partners and splitting commissions as he would have to under Sayre’s proposal. He hoped the minister and his “friends” would “think the interest I offer sufficient to enduce you to lend your money … draw[ing] bills upon England or Holland” to “put into my hands;” it would then “be vested in real property.” Offering that he was “not nor ever was engaged in trade” as a merchant and that his “property consists of … land and houses as I live within my income,” Livingston even assured Van Berckel that he would offer a personal bond as security for a Dutch loan of £6,000. “It is impossible,” he boasted, “for any person to offer better securities than I can.” Moreover, if the minister personally became an investor, Livingston could advance him funds for a shared “joint account” that he would personally manage on Van Berckel’s behalf.24
This was a bold and an underhanded offer on Livingston’s part. And he knew that if his letter were shared, its contents would be toxic both to his reputation and to the opportunities at hand. Livingston not only would be betraying his partners but also would be putting their entire scheme at risk by tipping off other investors about gains to be made in New York. Moreover, if Van Berckel shared the letter’s contents, the chancellor feared that people in Philadelphia might initiate “speculations that serve to empower enemies.”
“Enemies” might seem a hyperbolic term to use in the context of real estate speculation, but Livingston was not referring to business rivalries or the scandal of being exposed as a double-dealing partner. Rather, he was worried that faraway Philadelphia investors could “empower” already mobilized factions of mutually suspicious Tories and Whigs in New York City. Thus there would be no better way to “empower enemies” in New York than by revealing that there were large profits to be made from the purchase and sale of Tory estates. Should they learn that out-of-state and foreign investors were pooling their capital to take advantage of the state’s real estate market, New York lawmakers might be tempted to intensify anti-Tory hostilities and adopt even more aggressive laws to punish Tories and seize their property, violating the spirit and letter of the peace treaty between Britain and the United States and upending the revolutionary settlement that Livingston, Jay, and other moderate Whigs hoped to achieve.25
Making matters even more potentially explosive, Livingston was seeking British credit to finance his plans. The chancellor had asked John Jay to “establish … a credit for me upon some good house (either in England or Holland)” that could be used by him and his partners, who were likely spending their time casting about in London, Liverpool, and Amsterdam in search of credit as well. Therefore, as they conspired to profit from anti-Tory hostilities and expulsions by speculating in real estate that had been seized from or abandoned by Tories, they were looking to make those purchases with foreign—and even British—credit. No wonder Livingston feared that “hotheaded” Whigs would paint him and his associates as “suspected.” If anyone found out about his partners’ plans and his own personal duplicity, his credibility could be devastated.26 As reckless as these actions might seem, Robert Livingston took them as a man of sound mind. He was a political entrepreneur and an aristocrat operating in New York during the immediate months that followed the end of the Revolution—a man who felt at liberty to conduct business as he saw fit, negotiating and negating agreements that privately contradicted his public statements. Perhaps because he did not feel that Stephen Sayre was one of his peers, Livingston considered their arrangements to be provisional. He saw himself as a man without boundaries.
Yet Livingston was about to learn that both his name and the pre-Revolutionary habits and impulses with which he had been raised would prove to be insufficient in helping him successfully navigate the political economy of post-Revolutionary New York. Only days after sending his letter to Peter Van Berckel, Livingston received a reply. In it, the Dutch minister declined his request for credit. He simply did not have “time enough to write to my friends” in Amsterdam right then. Then Van Berckel revealed that he could not partner with Livingston since he had already “thought it prudent to join with gentlemen” who were pursuing a similar scheme to invest in Toryowned New York properties. They included Gouverneur Morris, New York land baron Philip Van Rensselaer, and Robert Morris. These men, the minister explained, had “experience and knowledge” and his “engagement” with them “put out of any power to do for another what I want to do for myself.” Van Berckel closed his letter by suggesting that Livingston lift his request for silence; he wanted to know if the chancellor would be willing to join with them to everyone’s “mutual advantage.”27 In reply, Livingston had no choice but to grudgingly “congratulate” Peter Van Berckel for making allies with men of “judgment & integrity.” He hoped, however, that their “objects may not be the same” as his, and steered them away from “this Island” of Manhattan toward “improved and unimproved Land in other parts of the State.”28 Thus it turned out that Livingston would need his partners after all. Without credit from Van Berckel or Jay, he also needed a new plan.
It was at this moment that Livingston decided to try to become a banker. A corporation offered the institutional advantage of installing himself and his partners at the center of their real estate speculations, and an incorporated bank—particularly a land bank—would enable him to raise outside investment capital and convert his personal land holdings into cash.
Although Livingston’s shift of priority from real estate speculation to bank proprietorship had taken place in just under two weeks and smacked of pragmatic opportunism, it nevertheless forced him to recalibrate both his goals and his stated agenda. When dealing solely with private partners, the chancellor had mainly expressed interest in the private profits to be had in real estate speculation. But once he began pressing for a bank charter, Livingston began highlighting the civic benefits such an institution could deliver to the city and state.
Newspaper advertisements placed in the 12 February 1784 editions of the New York Independent Gazette and the New York Packet claimed that the land bank would be both a “place of safety for cash” and a tool that “renders aid to merchant and tradesman.” Livingston and his partners pointed to Venice, Amsterdam, London, and even Philadelphia in its “infancy” as places where “great profits” had rewarded the “proprietors” of banks and “supported and created a system of credit extremely advantageous to … trade and revenues.” They suggested the bank could reconcile Whigs and Tories by tying the two groups together through business relationships and pushing back against aggressive anti-Tory legislators. It was “universally acknowledged,” they claimed, that there were “great benefits to commerce and society at large, to be derived from well regulated BANKS, especially in republican governments, where the hand of arbitrary power is restrained by law.” In addition, banks created order in commerce and society by “compelling society to punctuality in contracts,” enabling people to “make fresh ones.” They made it possible to do “more business in less time and with greater facility.”29
These public statements about banking were not about profits; they offered a prospectus of civic benefits, reflecting an awareness that the public good would have to be served by the state’s first incorporated bank. Livingston, the consummate political operator and entrepreneur, simply did not feel that it was appropriate to seek a corporate charter to serve his private ambitions. There was something inherently transactional about applying to the state legislature for a bank charter. Even Robert Livingston felt that it was appropriate to place the public character of that institution at the center of his mobilization efforts. As an institutional extension of the state, a bank would be an agent of regulation, making commerce orderly, monitored, and efficient. And as an institution operating within the apparatus of the state, a bank could act as a safeguard against abusive legislators. In this vision, there was no conflict between incorporated banking and the flowering of a democratic republic; banking, in fact, promised to stabilize the regime. Incorporated banking was therefore being sold to the investing public as a commercial activity that had an inherently political character, and bank directors would be individuals who would wield both political and financial power within the early republic’s economy of influence. For these reasons, the Livingston-backed proposal was to be
