Old Money

It started because David Crosby died yesterday (January 19) and I wanted to look up what songs he wrote.

I never got to those facts, though, because I noticed on his Wikipedia page that his middle name was Van Cortlandt. And then that his mother's name was Aliph Van Cortland Whitehead and her father was named Cortlandt Whitehead. I've mentioned before that I'm from New York State, and I know that Van Cortlandt is an old New York Dutch name, so I thought... let me look into that.

I'll spare you most of the details of how I went through the rabbit hole, but here's some of what I found out about David Crosby's family background.

• Though he grew up in Los Angeles, both of his parents are descended from old New York Dutch families; that's listed right on his Wikipedia page.
• His mother traces back to the earliest North American Van Cortlandts, including the first "native-born" mayor of New York City. That mayor's mother might be the person who brought the Santa Claus myth to these shores. (Clement Moore was married to one of her descendants, too!)
• The mayor was married to a Schuyler, another of the original colonizing Dutch families. She was a sister of the colonial governor, who was also mayor of Albany. (By the way, the Schuylers were enslavers at least through the Revolution.)
  
• Another of the mayor's close descendants was married to General Thomas Gage, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and the British commander-in-chief in the earliest part of the American Revolution. Her name was Margaret Kemble Gage, and there is some thought that she may have tipped off the Sons of Liberty about British plans at Lexington and Concord.
• In general there was lots of intermarrying between Van Cortlandts, Schuylers, and Van Rensselaers, a third old Dutch colonist family.

Beyond the Van Cortlandts who led to David Crosby's mother, what about his father's progenitors?

Catherine Floyd (known as Kitty) was a 15-year-old girl who Founding Father James Madison became infatuated with in 1783 Philadelphia when he was 32 years old. Her father, William Floyd, was Madison's fellow member of the Continental Congress; they were all staying in the same rooming house at the time. Instead of Madison, she decided to marry a medical student closer to her age named Clarkson. (I don't care how many write-ups I read about how Kitty broke the future president's heart, I still find this story kind of creepy: a 32-year-old man? a 15- or 16-year old girl? She broke his heart?)

Later, her daughter Harriet Clarkson married a man named Crosby. I don't yet know where Harriet and her husband got their money, but it had something to do with the Rutgers family, which is another of the founding (colonizing) Dutch families in New York, since Harriet's husband William Bedlow Crosby and his brother were raised by an Uncle Colonel Rutgers, who was worth $1 million in 1830. I'm currently looking into a book called Women of Privilege: 100 Years of Love and Loss in a Family of the Hudson River Valley to see if I can figure it out. In any case, this is an image of the house Harriet and her husband built in lower Manhattan, which was called Rutgers Place:

It's one of Harriet's descendants who is David Crosby's father Floyd. He's clearly named for his long-ago Revolutionary-era ancestor. That William Floyd — by the way — still owned six enslaved people at his rural estate in central New York when he died in 1820. I don't imagine that was very common that late in New York.

Another one of Kitty Clarkson's Crosby descendants — not part of David Crosby's particular line of descent, more like a cousin several times removed — married back into two other New York Dutch aristocratic families, the Schuylers and the Van Rensselaers, before the Civil War, resulting in several wild life stories of the rich and formerly sort of famous. 

First is Harry Crosby, who was also connected to the ultra-wealthy J.P. Morgan on his mother's side. Harry survived World War I as a young man, and then became a restless expatriate in France, among other places. In about 10 years he, along with his wife Caresse (more on her soon), wrote some poetry, had a hand in creating the Lost Generation, took a lot of drugs, and committed what would be a number of sex crimes today. He died at age 31 in a scandalous suicide (or murder-suicide) pact with a young woman 10 years younger than him, who had recently been married.

When I first started looking into Harry Crosby, I thought David Crosby might be descended from Harry or one of his close relatives, but that turned out not to be the case. Instead, I found not only Harry, but the second wild life story: Caresse Crosby, first known as Mary Phelps Jacob, who was married to Harry Crosby and outlived him by close to 40 years, though she was six years older. Reading Caresse's story can give any woman courage to do what she wants in this short life, despite what society thinks.

When she was 19, Mary Jacob invented what became the modern bra, filing the first patent for one in 1914. By the time she met Harry just after 1920, she was already married, with two young kids. She and Harry shocked uppercrust Boston with an obvious extra-marital affair, finally marrying after her divorce in 1922, not long before they left for Europe. As they became friends with writers and artists in the expat community in Paris (while smoking opium, drinking, and who knows what else, while living on Harry's trust fund), they began to create a small press that became Black Sun Press. Among others, the press was the early or first publisher of writers D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and the first photographs of Walker Evans. This is also around the time when Caresse changed her first name.

By the late 1920s, their open marriage found Caresse involved with Henri Cartier Bresson, while Harry was obsessed with the young woman who he ended up dying with. After his death, Caresse continued the press work for a number of years, including attempting to publish paperbacks, an innovation at the time. She had an ... interesting... connection with Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. During the years before, during, and after World War II, she lived near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and had a modern art gallery there. She did a bit more publishing as well, including being the first to publish Albert Camus in English. She founded a group called Women Against War in 1950, dedicated to forming a Department of Peace and offering Peace Bonds.

Caresse Crosby died in 1970, after spending her latest years among an artist colony she created in Italy,  Washington, and New York. Her papers are collected at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, including 1,600 photos. 

Whew.

Did I mention that Harry Crosby's mother was a founder of the Garden Club of America? And his father was just three generations from "Peggy" Schuyler of the Schuyler Sisters, made famous in the musical "Hamilton"?

Oh, and that Harry's aunt, Angelica Schuyler Crosby, was married to a man named John Henderson... whose father was the U.S. Senator who co-authored the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, and whose grandmother was Eunice Foote, who is now credited with identifying the greenhouse gas effect. And just to bring it back full circle, that same aunt, Angelica Schuyler Crosby Henderson was also descended from William Floyd, which is where her Crosby last name came from.

Old East Coast money. It's all connected somewhere.

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More Dutch ancestors (through Crosby's paternal great grandmother, Elizabeth Van Schoonhoven).