Robert R. Livingston. State-builder. His was a mind of construc tive bent and force, both in the intellectual and the material spheres. Of Livingston as a lawyer we really know nothing, and of him as a judge, next to nothing. There are no extant records of his decisions as chancellor, and of the character and extent of the business of his court there is very little evidence. But judging from what we know of his mental aptitudes and from the results of his public career, it is easy to believe that his judgments were dis tinguished for sound sense and a practical sense of justice rather than for legal learn ing and research and a sensitive weighing of precedents. Doubtless when he was ap parently listening to the prosy and intermin able arguments of the legal Dry-as-dusts of his court he was gazing out of the window on the sheep nibbling on the neighboring hills, on the sloops crawling like snails up the North River, and cogitating how he could make that grass richer, that wool longer, and those slow-paced craft to in crease their speed. Certainly he did noth ing, like his famous successor in the chancellor's chair, to build up an equity system for this new world of English-speak ing folk. Very probably the world is better off for his inventive speculations and vaga ries than it would have been if he had pass ed his quarter of a century of chancellorship in covering reams of paper with immaterial distinctions and useless doubts, solved in obscure and tedious phraseology, or in not solving those doubts at all, like that celebrat ed English chancellor who came in just as he went out. But perhaps his age was too rude and practical for the full flowering of the beautiful and expensive system of chancery. So far as evidence exists it is difficult to see why Chancellor Jones on the one hand should have declared that "this august tri bunal, though since covered with a halo of glory, never boasted a more prompt, more able, and more faithful officer than Chancel lor Livingston," or why Judge Duer on
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the other should have averred that Kent "rescued the court of chancery from a con dition of utter inefficiency." Robert Ludlow Fowler, with more tangible foundation, says, (23 Albany Law Journal, 287;, "Those de cisions of Chancellor Livingston bearing on jurisprudence, and preserved in the re cords of the council of revision, indicate the same qualities which so distinguished his career as a statesman and diplomat." The utter absence of precedents from his court however is shown by Kent, who wrote in 1826 (6 Albany Law Journal, 41), "For the nine years I was in that office" — the chancellorship — "there was not a single decision, opinion or dictum of either of my predecessors, Livingston and Lansing, from 1777 to 18 14, cited to me or even suggest ed." Kent also states that in the last four teen years before he came in, only thirteen lawyers had been admitted to practice in that court. There was probably never a more impor tant legislative grant to individuals than that which was made by the New York legis lature, in 1807, to Livingston and Fulton, of the monopoly for twenty years of navi gating the waters of the State by boats pro pelled "by steam or fire," contingent on their building within two years a boat thus propelled, which should attain a speed of five miles an hour, and successfully running it for a year from New York to Albany. The first grant was in 1798, to Livingston alone. Under this he built a boat at his own cost, but it was a failure. In 1803 a similar grant was made to Livingston and Fulton jointly, and it was under this that they experimented on the Seine at Paris. This grant was renewed in 1807, and under this at length success was attained with the "Clermont." ' This grant was as an induce ment and indemnity to them for embarking capital in experiments in this kind of naviga tion. The consideration for the grant is 1 The vessel was thus named because the Livingston manor-house was at Clermont, Columbia county.
