While not among the first men to come to mind when considering the “Founding Fathers,” William Livingston played a very active and influential role in the politics of colonial North America. Livingston played an equally central role in the American Revolution itself and in the establishment of our national government. He frequently corresponded with George Washington throughout the American Revolution and served as the Brigadier General of the New Jersey Militia for a period of time during 1776. William Livingston went on to serve as the first elected Governor of New Jersey from 1776 until his death in 1790, being responsible for governing the state during the time in which it earned its epithet as the “Crossroads of the American Revolution.”

However, outside of the State of New Jersey, William Livingston played an even larger role in shaping our nation. Despite his desire for – and plans of – “retirement” from the bustle of New York City law, politics, and high society to his newly-built home in rural Elizabethtown, New Jersey in 1772, Livingston served as a representative of New Jersey to the First and Second Continental Congresses. Over a decade later, he would also represent the state at the Constitutional Convention in which he would help draft the plan for a national government that continues to survive today.

Livingston’s work and conduct during the American Revolution and in the Early Republic reveal him to be very much a man of his time, sometimes leading as he did in effectively guiding New Jersey through the war and participating in the drafting of the United States Constitution, and sometimes struggling with change, as he did, for example, with regard to slavery. During his lifetime, Livington claimed ownership over enslaved persons, emancipated the enslaved in his household late in his life, and yet seems to have failed to hold firm in his convictions to end his association with the institution of slavery.

Livingston lived a carefully examined professional and personal life, acting with intellectual rigor, formidable eloquence, and a belief in the power of the expression of ideas to change the world. The breadth of his life’s experience and role in the founding of the nation and New Jersey make his life and household an ideal window into the world that created our nation. Through his publications, letters, and family archives, it is possible not only to explore the thoughts and ideas that led to the creation of American democracy, but also the experiences and constraints shaping the lives of the enslaved in his world, and his wife and daughters in revolutionary America.