In April 1775 Robert Livingston was chosen to represent Dutchess County in New York City at the Provincial Convention. The Convention’s main goal that spring was to choose representatives to the new assemblage recently called for in Philadelphia, the Second Continental Congress. Livingston was unanimously chosen to represent New York.
On April 23, the day that the news of Lexington and Concord arrived in New York City, he wrote to his father in law, John Stevens, of New Jersey; “Some cautious persons w [ill] advise me to decline but I am resolved to stand or fall with my Country.” Livingston had begun his personal break with Great Britain. He went on to reveal much of his motivation for joining the Revolution in a later line; “My Property is here, I cannot remove it & I will not hold [it] at the will of others.[i] Livingston knew that his fortune and the fortune of his entire family was more than simple money or event he monetary value of the land they owned. It was the status and the perks that owning vast swaths of land could bring. Preserved and used properly the land would provide a much more than comfortable life for Livingstons for many generations. Threatening the land, as the British were doing, threatened Livingston’s future and the futures of untold number of children, grandchildren and their descendants.
Livingston took his seat in Congress on May 15, 1775. He, like most of the representatives, sought some form of peace with Great Britain that would satisfy both sides, reduce the taxes or at least give the colonies a say in how they were passed and collected ad make the British feel that the colonies were still loyal to the empire. The representatives from New York were instructed by the convention that sent them:
“to concert and determine upon such measures, as shall be judged most effectual for the preservation and re-establishment of American rights and privledges, and for the restoration of harmony between Great Britain and the Colonies”[ii]
They were looking for a return to normal relations before more violence made that impossible.
However much Robert R. Livingston and the other representatives to the Continental Congress desired a peaceful resolution to the crisis, most of them still recognized the need to prepare for war. Livingston was acting as an agent for his father’s gunpowder mill. Despite all his work to prevent a civil war the Judge had begun to prepare for that eventuality before much of the rest of the colony. In early 1775 the Judge had recognized that gunpowder would be in short supply in the colonies if importation were cut off. He began construction of a mill six miles south of Clermont, on the Saw Mill Creek. The mill would become fully operational in the summer of 1775. Even before it began production the Livingston’s felt it was threatened by loyalists. Margaret reported to her son on June 27, 1775 that the Judge planned to request a guard for the mill.[iii]
It was in the summer of 1775 that the Judge resigned from the bench, which was symbolic of his personal break with Great Britain. The recently returned Governor Tryon petulantly suspended him from the bench at the same time, after having asserted the Judge would never resign his position over the troubles.[iv]
Robert’s job was to secure salt peter, the one ingredient that was not readily available on Livingston land near the mill. As salt peter arrived in Philadelphia Robert worked to ensure that some would be sent to the mill near Clermont. When an accident at the mill led to an explosion which took it out of operation between December 1775 and February 1776, Robert’s associates in Congress kept him appraised of the salt peter arriving in the city and expressed their hopes that the mill would soon be operational again.[v]
Robert’s younger brother John and his mother had the mill restored and throughout the war it produced thousands of pounds of gun powder for the American cause.[vi] John went on to open a second mill further south in Dutchess County. On August 30, 1776 General William Heath reported to George Washington that “about 4Tons and a half of gunpowder” had arrived at Kingsbridge from the Livingston Mill. John continued to be a major supplier of gunpowder to the army for the duration of the war.[vii]
In June of 1775 Congress voted to produce a series of documents that would explain the reasons for the rebellion to the people of the British Empire and the various branches of British government and ideally perhaps even put an end to further fighting. At this point in the war the only major actions had been Lexington and Concord and the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. Many of the representatives hoped that there was still time to put out the fire that had started in Massachusetts.
The most famous of this set of documents was the Petition to the King, more popularly known as the Olive Branch Petition. Other documents in the set included Addresses to the people of Ireland, the people of Jamaica and the Address to the People of Great Britain.
On June 3, Livingston was chosen along with Richard Henry Lee and Edmund Pendleton to draft an address to the people of Great Britain. Authorship of this document was long attributed to Richard Henry Lee, who had a reputation for producing such inflammatory works. However, the discovery of the original draft of the address at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in New York City in 2013 changed all this. The draft was in Robert Livingston’s handwriting.
The letter seems fiery for Livingston, who is normally considered one of the more moderate members of the continental congress. After listing grievances, including the infringement of their right of legislation, which he says “rendered our property precarious,” he goes on to try to prove that what they are doing is only right and that Parliament has backed them into the corner they now find themselves in. “ Our Enemies charge us with sedition. In what does it consist? In our refusal to submit to unwarrantable Acts of Injustice and Cruelty?” He also vaguely threatens that should Parliament continue on their course then more violence would come:
“On the sword, therefore, we are compelled to rely for Protection. Should victory declare in your Favour, yet men trained to Arms from their infancy, and animated by the Love of Liberty, will afford neither cheap or easy Conquest. Of this at least we are assured, that our struggle will be glorious, our success certain, since even in Death we will find the Freedom which in Life you forbid us to enjoy.”
The address also warns the people of England that whatever the government perpetrates against the British subjects in the colonies they could just as easily perpetrate on the people of the British Isles, “Soldiers who have sheathed their swords in the Bowels of their American Brethren, will not draw them with more reluctance against you”. And yet the whole document is tinged with the idea that should The King or the people intervene on their behalf with Parliament, then the people of the colonies would welcome a “happy and permanent reconciliation.”
Like the Olive Branch Petition, the address received little attention in Great Britain. In between the decision to produce them and their actual disbursement, the Battle of Bunker Hill had made it abundantly clear that neither side would back down from what was most assuredly going to be a horrifically bloody war. On June 17, 1775 the British army tried to dislodge the colonials from a recently fortified perch on the Charlestown Peninsula in Boston. At the end of a long day during which the British soldiers charged the fortified hill three times more than 100 colonists were dead and 300 wounded. The redcoats had more than 200 men killed and more than 800 wounded.[viii]
The only response that the Olive Branch Petition and the accompanying documents received from the King was a declaration that the colonies were in rebellion and the colonists were rebels. In September Livingston wrote to his father-in-law, “I am much afraid that his majesty plays to carelessly, considering the greatness of the stake.”[ix]
The Address to the People of Great Britain was well received among the colonials however. James Madison wrote to William Bradford of the address on July 18, 1775, that the “true Eloquence may vie with the most applauded Oration of Tully himself.” He also said “I think the traces of Livingston’s pen are visible”[x] although he was probably referring to William Livingston of New Jersey who had written some spirited pamphlets earlier. Robert R. Livingston was not widely known for his writing before the war however, John Jay was under the impression that Livingston had written at least one letter to a newspaper in 1766. He wrote: “I am Sorry you have given orders to have your Piece published before an answer thereto was prepared and agreed upon;…”[xi]
The address also represented the first in a long string of petty jabs and barbs by John Adams toward Livingston, who had a seemingly irrational deep dislike of Livingston. He wrote James Warren, a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and husband to historian Mercy Otis Warren, on July 11, “Our Address to the People of Great Britain, will find many Admirers among the Ladies, and fine Gentlemen: but it is not to my Taste. Prettyness, Juvenilities, much less Puerilities, become not a great Assembly like this Representation of a great people.”[xii]
[i] RRL to John Stevens April 23, 1775 LDC.
[ii] Journals of the Continental Congress 1774-1789 Volume II p. 16.
[iii] Margaret Beekman Livingston to Robert R. Livingston 27 June 1775 Clermont State Historic Site.
[iv] Robert R. Livingston (The Judge) to New-York Congress October 9, 1775 American Archives Volume 3 p 987, Nelson, William Tryon p 131.
[v] Connecticut Council of Safety American Archives Series 4, Volume 4, p 611.
[vi] Robert R. Livingston to Pierre Van Cortlandt February 2, 1776 American Archives Series 4, Volume 5, p 268
[vii] “To George Washington from Major General William Heath, 30 August 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Washington/03-06-02-0139 [last update: 2016-03-28]). Source: The Papers of George Washington , Revolutionary War Series, Vol. 6, 13 August 1776-20 October 1776, ed. Philander D. Chase and Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994, pp.165-166.
[viii] Boatner III, Mark Mayo Encyclopedia of the American Revolution David McKay Company Inc, New York 1966 p 129.
[ix] Robert R. Livingston to John Stevens, September 20, 1775 LDC Volume 2
[x] “From James Madison to William Bradford, 28 July 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, version of January 18, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-01-02-0050. [Original source: The Papers of James Madison, vol. 1, 16 March 1751 – 16 December 1779, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962, pp. 159–162.]
[xi] John Jay to Robert R. Livingston, March 4, 1766 Morris, Richard B. John Jay: The Making of a Revolutionary p 80.
[xii] John Adams to James Warren July 11, 1775 Papers of John Adams Volume 3.MHS