style="font-size:15px;"> According to the chancellor, New York City’s government had become incapable of following through on even basic tasks. New Yorkers had gotten good at “[projecting] useful schemes for posterity to carry into effect,” the chancellor wrote. Streets that should have been repaired for “the health & embellishment of the town” had instead become “the abode of verb & excuses.” The city corporation had planned to plant trees that would re-create the “cool & shady walks” New Yorkers had enjoyed before the war. With the planting season nearly over, however, the chancellor marveled, “[N]o step has yet been taken.” “Even this shadowy improvement,” he predicted, “is liable to cheat our hopes.” A “scheme,” Livingston reflected, “is extinguished with the same rapidity that it was embraced.” “Half a dozen old women” could arrest work on a project by merely “scold[ing] … the profanity” entailed in “[exposing] dark recesses of stone street … to publick view.”
Livingston thought city leaders had been cowed into inaction by incumbent interests and entrenched monopolists who were “too powerful for the rest of the citizens” to defeat. The influence of these forces, Livingston believed, distorted the city’s political economy and marketplace to the detriment of consumer-citizens. Spoiled bread flour that should have been “held up to public view” by a regime of city-appointed inspectors was instead being sold to unsuspecting buyers, all to keep “the customs of our ancestors, encourage luxury, and discourage … the sale of unmarketable flour.” An abundance of fresh water that could have provided “comfortable refreshments” to residents while “guard[ing] us against the alarming ravages of fire” was instead unavailable—all because the proprietors of a spring-fed well called the “Tea-Water Pump” stood in the way. “It is a notorious fact,” he wrote, “that the greed of this city is worse than that of any other place upon the continent.” “[A]las we have little hope to expect,” Livingston sighed, that such an improvement “will be crowned with [success] while there are tea-water men, and tea-water women & tea-water children” insisting they alone had gained in 1757 the permanent and exclusive right to supply the city with water for all time. As long as their government refused to challenge the status quo, New Yorkers would be left with no choice than to be “tormented from seeing the cup glide by them after it was brought to their chins,” destined “neither to eat or drink like other folk.” “It is our common reproach to want bread and water” even though “the means of obtaining both are in our power.” The only public project New Yorkers could truly be proud of, Livingston bitterly concluded, was the city’s decades-old gallows. They were “distinguished,” he noted, by their strength, and were “in the word[s] of Hamlet’s grave digger, built stronger than the carpenter or mason.”6
In his lifetime, Robert Livingston sent thousands of letters and published nearly a dozen widely read essays. This, however, was not one of them.
There is no indication that Livingston returned to this essay or revised it or that it was ever sent—to anyone. One of Livingston’s biographers linked it to another letter sent to New York City mayor James Duane—the husband of one of the chancellor’s cousins. But that missive is mocking and mischievous in tone, clearly intended to irk the mayor. This letter was a bridge-burner that flayed both the city’s political leadership and the public alike and was originally written for publication in a newspaper.7 It was an essay written at a moment when, in a bitter letter to his friend John Jay, the chancellor said he had “concluded my political career.”8
Livingston might have simply wanted to spare his family embarrassment or shield himself from this momentary departure from rhetorical elegance. However, his statement to Jay about having “concluded” his political life cries out for further scrutiny. By what measure could Livingston credibly claim to be exiting politics? It certainly would have surprised New York State’s legal and political community to learn that their sitting chancellor considered himself retired, particularly when his daily actions and ongoing engagements plainly contradicted this statement. As a man raised in the innermost circles of New York politics during British dominion, Livingston was clearly irritated and even disturbed by his state’s postwar politics during these first years of American independence now called the Critical Period.9
The Revolution fundamentally challenged the colonial status quo, empowering people who wanted to deny former colonial aristocrats the chance to return to their positions at the top of the new nation’s political and socioeconomic ladders. Some ideological imperatives, therefore, demanded that Robert Livingston feel frustrated in 1784, and a cadre of state legislators stood ready to make his political life as difficult as possible.10 Livingston’s reaction was evidence of just how unfamiliar, at least to him, this new environment had become. He remained determined, however, to turn his lands, money, connections, and family name into sources of profit and influence—not as an aristocrat but as a political entrepreneur.
Yet the chancellor was all too aware that not every New Yorker with capital was committed to the same agenda. When the chancellor railed against the “notorious fact” of the “greed of [New York City],” he was drawing a contrast between himself and others who sought privileges in the political marketplace. Livingston saw himself as a positive force in his country’s politics. Profit was just one of several reasons he was interested in banking and real estate investing, activities that he viewed as constructive contributions toward the commercial success and political stability of his state. The marketplace regulations and interventions he desired—flour inspections, freshwater supplies, street paving, tree planting—had long been permissible and even definitional duties of municipal governments that had been constituted under a royal charter, operated within common law, and rechartered following independence.11
Although localities, states, and the developing national confederation had adopted formal articles and constitutions, the nation’s actual day-to-day governing habits—its applied political economy—were still up for grabs at this moment in American history.12 In New York, as in the nation, the proper extent of the state’s mixed economy of public-private enterprises had hardly been debated, let alone defined. The ideological imperatives of the Revolution were competing with familiar practices of pre-Revolutionary governance, and although some lawmakers wanted to further exploit their opportunity to effect social and economic change, others sought to settle the Revolution as soon as possible. The state government, Livingston told Robert Morris, was “weak, unsettled.”13 The monopoly-holders of the Tea-Water Pump and deceitful flour merchants were fine with that and with exploiting a lack of competition in the political marketplace to wring profits from an already anemic economy. To Livingston, their greed was parasitic, and the city government’s inaction amounted to a betrayal of the Revolution’s “spirit of enterprise” that was to be “encourage[d] … in others.” Livingston’s essay, therefore, did not merely address a personal agenda; the larger question hovering over his words and the country as a whole in 1784 was: What happens now?
Political economy is a well-defined term in American history: the way that states and governments ordered the economy and operated within the marketplace.14 As much as is known about it in theory, however, less is understood about the interactions among legal and extralegal voluntary associations, chartered and informal institutions, and political officials with backgrounds and futures in commercial and transportation development.15 But these ground-level machinations, complex and often messy, are what political economy is once it is operationalized.16
Building the Empire State surveys and samples the changing institutional ecology of New York State during the first five decades following independence, a period my fellow historians call the early republic, by following a community of entrepreneurs like Robert R. Livingston, and their enterprises. New York was a onetime mercantile colony that, as a state, became home to the first bank incorporated after the Revolution (the Bank of New-York), utilities, canals, railroads, and other internal improvement companies, as well as the country’s most powerful steamboat monopoly and the largest public works project of the early republic: the Erie Canal.17
