Early Life
Robert R. Livingston was the eldest son of Judge Robert Livingston (1718-1775) and Margaret Beekman Livingston. He had nine brothers and sisters, all of whom wed and made their homes on the Hudson River near the family seat at Clermont Manor. Livingston graduated from King's College, the predecessor to today's Columbia University, in 1765.
He married Mary Stevens Livingston, daughter of Continental Congressman John Stevens, on September 9, 1770, and built a home for himself and his wife south of Clermont, called Belvedere, which was burned to the ground, along with Clermont, in 1777 by the British Army. In 1794, he built a new home called New Clermont, which was subsequently renamed Arryl House – a phonetic spelling of his initials, "RRL" – which was deemed "the most commodious home in America" and contained a library of four thousand volumes.
Read more about this topic: Robert R. Livingston (chancellor)
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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