1
TWO FAMILIES
AT THE TIME of Elizabeth Setonâs birth, New York was a city made by empire and defined by water. Its deep harbor had drawn goods and people for generations, and the Hudson, the great river on Manhattanâs western edge, was the finest road into the interior of the northeastern colonies. The cityâs merchants traded in patterns established by Britainâs power: wealthy New Yorkers drank fortified wine shipped from Madeira, kept time on clocks imported from England, and sipped tea from cups made in China. Merchants also proved cheerfully willing to smuggle when the opportunity arose, which it often did. So fast did cargoes pile up that the men who unloaded them accidentally tipped containers into the harbor, leaving shoes and ceramics to be found by the archaeologists of later centuries.1
Water flowed over as well as among the islands that rose up through the waters of New Yorkâs harbors and bays. On Manhattanâs western side, streams tumbled into the Hudson; on the east, farmers cut channels to drain surface water into what they called the East River, really just a splinter of the Hudson that Manhattanâs landmass forced to find its own way to the bay. Convinced that the âstagnation and rottennessâ of marshes caused the fevers that plagued them, New Yorkers drained swamps in lower Manhattan as a radical solution to the problem. They also pushed the city slowly out into the harbor, building wharves on land made from discarded bottles, ship parts, and animal bones.2 Despite the transformations wrought by its inhabitants, Manhattan Island was still as much a landscape as a city during Elizabethâs childhood, a place not only of merchants, laborers, and buildings but of hills, creeks, and trees. Most of its residents, including the Bayley and Seton families, lived within a mile of Fort George at the islandâs southern tip.
FIGURE 1.1. A Plan of the city of New York, 1776. Courtesy of the digital collections of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
YOUNG MEN ON THE RISE
At Elizabethâs birth, her father, Richard Bayley, was twenty-nine years old. William Seton, the man who would become her father-in-law, was twenty-eight. Like Manhattan itself, both men were made by empire and water. Bayley was a surgeon who crossed the ocean for training in London, then returned and devoted himself to combating the fevers that thrived near the cityâs swamps and docks. Seton, born in England, made his money selling New Yorkers the goods they coveted from across the sea. The characters and careers of these two men shaped the circumstances of Elizabethâs life well into her young womanhood, so we will take time to know them now.
William Seton came from a Scottish clan who, like other merchant families, knit themselves into skeins of cousins and commerce: a Seton by both birth and marriage, his mother possessed the stutteringly dignified name of Elizabeth Seton Seton. Like tens of thousands of Scots during the eighteenth century, Seton sailed to the North American mainland hoping to find opportunities his home failed to provide.3 He arrived in New York at seventeen, bearing high hopes and letters of introduction to Richard Curson, another English-born merchant who had found his way to the thriving colonial port. Cursonâs advertisements capture the mix of transatlantic hub and early modern village in which Seton sought his fortune. âWines Wholesale and Retail, to be sold by Richard Curson, on Potsbakers Hill, near the new Dutch Church,â reads a notice from 1757. âAlso, Old Jamaica and Barbados Rum, Brandy, Geneva, and Velvet CorksâŠ. Said Curson is removâd lower down, in the House of Capt. Burchill, fronting the Street that leads to the Widow Rutgersâs Brewhouse, opposite to the Sign of the Three Pidgeons.â4 In this world, personal ties were as essential to merchant life as goods and credit; amiable William Seton knew how to weave them. By 1765, still not twenty years old, he was an officer of the cityâs St. Andrewâs Society, founded to provide charity and promote social intercourse among Scottish immigrants and their descendants.5
Elizabethâs father found his way to Manhattan a few years after William Seton. Richard Bayley had spent his childhood in New Rochelle, an area of tiny towns and fertile farms some twenty-five miles north of Ft. George, just across the sluice of water separating Manhattan from the mainland. New Rochelle had been settled by French Protestants fleeing the endless rounds of sectarian violence following the Reformation. The descendants of those Huguenot settlers maintained their piety, their French language, and their loathing for the religion they called popery. Bayley possessed neither the intense Protestant piety that permeated his hometown nor any other kind. Nor was he content, as his brother was, to stay and make his way amid the regionâs farms. Instead, he set off for Manhattan, determined to become a âscientificâ physician who used observation and experimentation to understand the causes of disease.6 Bayley was as ambitious as Seton. But Seton sought profits and never made an enemy when he could form an alliance; Bayley sought truth and relished a good fight.
Manhattan was a realm of opportunity for Seton and Bayley but a place of captivity for others: everywhere the two men looked, they were likely to see an enslaved person. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company had bought and sold slaves and used them for labor in the colony. After the English acquired the area, its labor demands exceeded its attractions for free immigrants, so those who promoted New Yorkâs settlement encouraged and forced the migration of a polyglot mix of Europeans and Africans.7 In 1741, less than twenty-five years before Seton and Bayley arrived in the city, a series of unexplained fires led to rumors that New Yorkâs enslaved population was plotting insurrection in the company of Papists. (It was Catholicsâ perceived animosity toward the English, not toward the institution of slavery, that made them suspect.) White New Yorkers burned and hanged those they blamed for the rebellion, leaving rotting corpses as warnings to others. The brutal events did not slow the rise of slavery on the island. On the contrary, the institution continued to produce the capital fueling the growth of city and empire. William Seton and Richard Curson bought and sold the fruits of slavesâ labor: hogsheads of tobacco from the Chesapeake, rum from Jamaica, and white and muscavado sugar from the West Indies. Colonial religion was nearly as entangled with the institution as was the colonial economy. Although some Quakers in the colonies and England aggressively opposed slavery, many Christian churches accepted and benefited from it. Marylandâs Jesuit priests supported themselves from the labor of slaves, and Anglican pews and pulpits were filled with slaveholders too; Elizabeth Setonâs maternal grandfather, the Anglican rector on Staten Island, owned several people.8
The Bayleys had a different connection to the plantation economy; Richard Bayleyâs mother had descended from a Huguenot settler who married a young woman from the island of Martinique and for a time sold sugar cultivated by slaves. (Both that settler, who was Bayleyâs great-grandfather, and his wife died of yellow fever, a plague that would in years to come send its tendrils through Richard Bayleyâs and Elizabeth Setonâs lives.) Family legend has it that Richardâs grandfather became betrothed to a young woman during a sojourn with his motherâs family in Martinique; after returning to the island to marry her, he heard that she had married someone else. The young man sailed back to New York vowing to marry the first young woman who would have him. He did exactly that, only to learn that his fiancĂ©e in Martinique had not really jilted him.9 Whatever its kernel of truth, that is an awkward family story, and one wonders how Richardâs grandmother, the bride chosen out of mistaken pique, reacted to its telling. The grandmotherâs unknowability is the rule, not the exception, among women on both sides of Elizabeth Setonâs family. Their lives were structured by the ambitions, choices, and migrations of fathers and husbands, and their thoughts must be left to the imagining.
EMPIRE IN CRISIS
William Seton had been in America for two years when the implementation of the Stamp Act roiled the colonies. Unhappy to feel the British bureaucracy reaching into their affairs and purses, more than two hundred of New York Cityâs merchants signed a nonimportation agreement at the tavern known as Burnsâ City Arms. Seton and Curson cautiously joined in. They hoped to repair the bonds of empire, not unravel them, but others were more radical: a group called the Liberty Boys, boasting among its founders members of the Scottish St. Andrewâs Society, heckled soldiers and erected Liberty poles, encasing one in iron after British regulars splintered several others. Most New Yorkers, however, were not ready to risk their comfort and profits in resistance to the empire. Families such as the Setons and Bayleys were Britons: they imported English fashions, read English books, and watched English plays, and as they continuously remade the island of Manhattan, they named their streets and squares King, Duke, Prince, and Queen. When in 1766 Parliament repealed the hated Stamp Act, many hoped (despite the stark declaration of Parliamentâs political authority that accompanied repeal) that colonies and mother country would settle back into their familiar ways.10
As the bonds of empire held for the moment, nineteen-year-old William Seton augmented the ties of business with those of family, marrying Rebecca Curson, a daughter of his business associate.11 The young couple sailed to England to meet Williamâs family. In 1768, with trade returned to its old patterns and Rebecca far along in her first pregnancy, the Setons were eager to return to New York. So it happened that William Magee Seton, Elizabethâs future husband, was born at sea, crossing the Atlantic as his fatherâs merchandise so often did.
Once back in the city, the elder William steadily ascended. No longer did he piece together cargoes to sell on othersâ premises; he was now âWilliam Seton, Importer of Dry Goods, European and India Goods. Store on Crugerâs Dock.â12 In 1771, Curson formally took him on as a partner, and the newly formed house of Curson & Seton began to advertise wares ranging from âFlorence oylâ (olive oil) to Madeira to flax, arriving on ships from London, Bristol, and Liverpool.13 By 1773, after a decade in the colony, Seton was the father of three sonsâJames and Jack had joined William Mageeâand sufficiently well placed to be included by the artist Henry Pelham Copley in a handful of âvaluable friendsâ who treated him with âgreat civilities.â14 Around Seton, New York had settled into a disputatious but not radically disaffected relationship with England. The harbor was filled with ships, and a lead statue of George III, complete with gilding, rose on the Bowling Green.15
While William Seton ascended as a merchant, Richard Bayley advanced as a doctor. By 1766, he was a student of the prominent physician John Charlton, described in a nineteenth-century account of the city as âshort of stature, with a florid face, of somewhat pompous manners,â and possessed of a practice consisting of âfashionable clients, whom he leisurely attended.â16 Married to a daughter of two great New York families, Dr. Charlton ministered to the wealthy and was pleased to find himself grow wealthy in return. Working with Charlton placed Bayley in the company of genteel New Yorkers such as John Jay, a rising young lawyer who, like Bayley, hailed from the Huguenot community of New Rochelle. It also placed him in the company of Charltonâs sister Catherine. He married Catherine in 1767, the same year that Seton married his business associateâs daughter. Within a year, Richard and Catherine had a daughter, whom they named Mary Magdalen. But Bayley was not content. While Mary was still an infant, he sailed for London to continue his medical education.
Bayley thrived in London, staying for two years. At last, he returned to New York; his second daughter, the child who would grow up to become Elizabeth Seton, was born in August of 1774. Bayley rejoined John Charltonâs practice, but rather than simply tending genteel patients he investigated two diseases that plagued the cityâs youth: croup and âputrid sore throat.â Bayley peered into the throats of sick, gasping children around the city and recorded what he saw. When permitted, he dissected the corpses of children who had succumbed. It was a controversial practice in an era when many believed dissection was desecration, but Bayley had no interest in keeping to the expected path when his real quarry, truth, led him elsewhere.17
âEXCEPT PAPISTSâ
When she wrote about New York after her conversion, Elizabeth Seton portrayed the city as profoundly anti-Catholic; those whoâve written about her have tended to follow suit.18 The truth is more complicated. Manhattan was home to both daily tolerance and bursts of vitriol. In the colonies as in Europe, men and women disagreed over how to worship God and over whether they should regulate each otherâs faiths at all. New Yorkers opted for a fractious comity more often than they strove to enforce orthodoxy of any kind. At the time of Elizabethâs birth, the Dutch Reformed Church, whose black-clothed ministers known as dominies once held sway, maintained some of the privileges it had known under Dutch rule, but Englandâs official church had been the established faith for many decades, and both the Bayleys and the Setons were Anglicans. The faithâs largest New York church was Trinity, which thenâwhen the southern end of Manhattan Island was more slender than it is nowâstood a few blocks from the Hudson River. Through its trustees, Trinity parish controlled huge tracts of land, one of which it donated to start the cityâs first college, Kingâs, on condition that its presidents all be Anglicans and that the Book of Common Prayer be used in daily services.
New York was also home to many other forms of Protestantism, and followers of those denominations increasingly resisted Anglicanismâs cultural and political sway. Members of the powerful Livingston clan were Presbyterian; in 1754, Peter Livingston, along with John Morin Scott and a third lawyer, William Smith, founded the New York Society Library as an ecumenical institution intended to counter the Anglican influence of Kingâs College. Evangelical Protestantism also found a voi...