Please wikify this article or section. Help improve this article by adding relevant internal links. (November 2008)

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (November 2008)

Henry Livingston, Jr. (13 Oct 1748 - 29 Feb 1828) was born in Poughkeepsie NY to Henry Livingston, Sr. and Susannah Conklin. In 1771, Henry purchased part of the property of his parents as his own farm and, in 1774, married Sarah Welles, the beautiful daughter of Rev. Dr. Noah Welles, the minister of the Stamford (CT) Congregational Church.^[1]

Their first child, Catharine Livingston, was born the week before Henry took up his post as a new Major^[2] in the regiment being put together by his cousin Janet's husband, General Richard Montgomery.^[3] Henry's commission came through the patronage of his older brother Gilbert, then a NY legislator. The mission of the regiment was to invade Canada, but Henry's diary shows a far greater interest in the vegetation of the area through which the regiment traveled than in the military expedition itself.^[4]

Henry's military career is especially prone to confusion with one of the other 24 Henry Livingstons,^[5] since Henry Jr. was accompanied in Montgomery's regiment by his cousin Janet's brother, Henry Beekman Livingston.

Upon completion of his six month enrollment, Henry returned home from Montreal, thereby missing the death of General Montgomery during his attack on Quebec City. During the remainder of the Revolutionary War, Henry served as a Commissioner of Sequestration,^[1] a post more suited to his experience as a surveyor and farmer.

Their family expanded when Henry and Sarah's daughter Catharine was joined in 1776 by a son, Henry Welles Livingston, but the young boy was only 14 months old when he was fatally burned. Five months later John and Sarah Jay, both cousins, came to spend 9 days with Henry and Sarah^[6] as John Jay took up his post as president of the 5th Continental Congress, which was then being held in Poughkeepsie. A few weeks later Sarah delivered a son, whom they also named Henry Welles Livingston.^[1]

During this period, Henry's focus was on his farm and his growing family. He received another 215 acres of the family farm from his father in 1779^[7], and made extra money as a surveyor. Although John Jay's wife referred to Henry's voluminous correspondence while Jay was serving as Minister Plenipotentiary to Spain, there are few documents by Henry still in existence from this period, the major one being a Day Book held in the New York Historical Society.

But Henry's life changed in 1783 with the illness of his wife. Catharine was boarded out, and Henry brought Sarah to stay with her mother, widowed since Rev. Welles had died while visiting prison ships in 1776. But even the ministrations of her mother were not enough. Sarah's funeral sermon was given by her first cousin's husband, Rev. Timothy Dwight, later the president of Yale.^[1]

For the next year and a half, Henry boarded out his children and threw himself into his work.^[1] It was during this period that Henry began writing his poetry manuscript (mss).

To the memory of Sarah Livingston
who was born on the 7th of Novr. 1752
& died Sepr. 1st, 1783

BEYOND where billows roll or tempests vex
Is gone the gentlest of the gentle sex!
---Her brittle bark on life's wild ocean tost
Unequal to the conflict soon was lost.
Severe her sufferings! much, alas, she bore,
Then sunk beneath the storm & rose no more.

But when th' Archangel's awful trump shall sound
And vibrate life thro all the deep profound
Her renovated vessel will be seen,
Transcendant floating on the silver stream!
All beauteous to behold! serene she glides
Borne on by mildest & propitious tides;
While fanning zephyrs fill her snow white sails
And aid her passage with the friendliest gales
Till safe within the destin'd port of bliss
She furls her sails and moors in endless peace. 

To the memory of Sarah Livingston^[8]

Over the next ten years, Henry filled his life with poetry and drawings for his friends and family, some of which ended up in the pages of the New-York Magazine and the Poughkeepsie Journal. Although he signed his drawings, his poetry was usually anonymous or signed simply "R". Henry's joyous nature and mischevious imagination show up in poetry quiz games for friends,^[9] observations of life on nearby planets through a telescope carved from the ice of the River Volga,^[10] prescriptions for the love lorn,^[11] the origin of many common English words,^[12] the memoirs of a pine tree,^[13] and a long-lost war journal of Alexander the Great.^[14]

With the ladies' permission, most humbly I'd mention
How much we're oblidged by all their attention;
We sink with the weight of the huge obligation
Too long & too broad to admit compensation.

For us (and I blush while I speak I declare)
The charming Enchanters be-torture their hair,
Till gently it rises and swells like a knoll
Thirty inches at least from the dear little poll;
From the tip-top of which all peer out together
The ribband, the gause, & the ostrich's feather;
Composing a sight for an Arab to swear at
Or huge Patagonian a fortnight to stare at.

Then hoops at right angles that hang from ye knees
And hoops at the hips in connection with these
Set the Fellows presumptuous who court and alliance
And ev'ry pretender, at awful defiance.

And I have been told (though I must disbelieve
For the tidings as fact, I would never receive)
That billets of cork have supplied the place
Of something the Fair-ones imagine a grace;
But whether 'tis placed behind or before;
The shoulders to swell, or the bosom to shoar
To raise a false wen or expand a false bump
Project a false hip or protrude a false rump,
Was never ascertain'd; and fegs I declare
To make more enquiry I never will dare.

Acknowledgement^[15]

...
446th Olympiad, June 25th. Three in the afternoon. 
My scouts have this moment come in and inform, that I can easily reach the 
banks of the Granicus in two hours; and that the Persians, gay as gems and 
gold can make them, and numerous as locusts, line the eastern shore as far 
as the eye can reach. My men expect a scratch, but I and Darius's general 
perfectly understand each other. I have promised him a province when I shake 
his hand at Babylon, and I know the coward will rely upon me. I am to make the 
onset with great play fury, and he is to retreat as ostentatiously as he pleases.

Seven o'clock. Well, the farce is over, and we Invincible Macedonians have 
got the Granicus in our rear! My opponent behaved pretty well; although he 
ought to have pretended resistence a little longer than he did. I believe the 
rascal thought more than once that we were in earnest. I will give one of the 
half starved poets that hang upon me, a pistareen and mug of grog, to describe 
this days' bustling as a battle of amazing magnitude: Paint Bucephalus as 
plunging thro' the foaming current, and bearing me resistless at the head 
of thirty thousand veterans on a foe, valiant, tho' unequal -- describe the 
eagle of victory hovering over my helmet -- and the Fates fainting on the shore. 
The fools of posterity perhaps may read the nonsense and believe it.
...

Journal of Alexander the Great^[14]

Life was busy, too, with Henry now acting as a Judge in small property disputes. Politics was becoming of more interest since brother Gilbert was still active politically, Henry's immediate military commander's brother, George Clinton, had become the Governor of New York, and sister Helen had married Jonas Platt, a young lawyer with a strong interest in politics, later a New York Supreme Court justice. And that's not to mention all the politicians within the Livingston and related families.

Ten years to the day after Sarah's death, Henry remarried.^[16] Jane Patterson, at 24, was 21 years younger than her husband. Their first baby arrived nine months after the wedding. After that, there were seven more children to fill the house with love and laughter.

It was for this second family that Henry Livingston is believed by many scholars^{[17] [18]} to have written the famous poem known as the Night Before Christmas.

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

A Visit from St. Nicholas

This famous Christmas poem first saw the light of day in the Troy Sentinel on December 23, 1823. There seems to be no question that the poem came out of the home of Clement Moore, or that the person giving the poem to the newspaper, without Moore's knowledge, believed that the poem had been written by Moore. It would seem to be a done deal that the poem was Moore's except for the small detail that multiple children of Henry's remembered their father reading that very same poem to them fifteen years earlier. So how could this happen, that a man as rich and well known as Moore would have adopted someone else's work as his own? That is the question that has been argued by multiple scholars.

The weight in favor of Clement Moore is very heavy. As early as 1837, Charles Fenno Hoffman, a friend of Moore's, put Moore's name on the poem.^[19] And in 1844, Moore published the poem in his own book, Poems.^[20] At multiple times in his later life, Moore wrote out the now famous poem in long hand for friends. So there really isn't any way to claim the poem as by someone other than Moore without making Moore out to be simply a prevaricator.

Livingston Family Witness Letters

Because the poem was first published anonymously, editions of the poem were for many years published both with and without an author attribution. As a result, it wasn't until 1859, 26 years after the poem first appeared in print, that Henry's family discovered that Moore was taking credit for what they believed to be their father's poem.

That belief went back many years. Around 1807, Henry's sons Charles and Edwin, as well as their neighbor Eliza (who would later marry Charles) remembered their father reading the poem to them as his own.^[18] Following their father's death in 1828, Charles found a newspaper copy of the poem in his father's desk, and son Sidney found the original handwritten copy of the poem with its original crossouts.

The newspaper copy was probably the one printed just before Henry's death in February, as no earlier publication by Henry has been found. The handwritten copy of the poem was passed from Sidney, on his death, to his brother Edwin. But the same year the family discovered Moore's claim of authorship, Edwin lost the original manuscript in a house fire in Wisconsin, where he was living with his sister Susan.^[21][22]

As the poem's fame spread through its publication in Almanacs, so did the story of Henry's authorship to his grandchildren and great grandchildren. Son Charles and his wife Eliza read the poem to their children as written by their grandfather, and the story passed through the generations. Son Sidney, in his turn, read the poem to his son, another Henry Livingston, as the work of his father.

The Livingston Family Discover Moore's Claim

By the time the Livingston family discovered Moore's claim to the poem, their only proof was ashes on the Wisconsin wind. Since many of Henry's children had left the Dutch Reform Church and developed close ties with the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church with which Moore was associated, there was a concern not to rock their liturgical boat.

But the family frustration at hearing what they believed to be Henry's poem attributed to Moore grew with the years and, by 1879, five separate lines of Henry's descendants had begun to correspond among themselves, trying to compare their family stories in the hope that someone had some proof that could be brought forward in Henry's defense. But all they had were family stories.

The Livingston Family Goes Public

In 1899, even without proof, Sidney's grandson published the first public claim of Henry's authorship in his own newspaper on Long Island. But when put against the weight of Moore's claim, Henry's claim was almost completely ignored.^[17]

It wasn't until 1920 that Henry's great grandson, William Sturgis Thomas, back from World War I, became interested in the family stories and began to collect the memories and papers of existing descendants, eventually publishing his research in the 1919 issue of the Duchess County Historical Society yearbook. Thomas provided this material to Winthrop P. Tryon for his article on the subject in the Christian Science Monitor on August 4, 1920.^[21]

These articles, like Henry Livingston's of Babylon Long Island, seemed to end up as nothing but shouts against the wind. But they did have an impact that wasn't discovered until eighty years later. It seems that the Moore descendants were concerned enough about the publicity that they arranged to have an elderly family connection, Maria Jephson O'Conor, deposed about her memories of Moore's claim of authorship. ^[23]

It was another fifty years before another Livingston descendant attempted to bring the matter back into public view.

Notes

External links

• Henry Livingston
• Timeline
• Henry Livingston's Poetry
• Henry Livingston's Music Manuscript
• Night Before Christmas
• Scholars for Henry
• The Mouse in Henry Livingston's House
• The Poetry of Clement Moore

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (November 2008)

Index Of Related Pages

Previous page (Henriettea punctata) | Next page (Henry Maynard)