Bringing to light the dramatic events in the life of a previously almost unknown merchant in early-nineteenth-century New York City

WHO WAS THOMAS HERRING? THE NAME APPEARED spottily in the New York City directory from the early 1800s to the 1830s, sometimes at the same address as Abraham Herring, a merchant about whom there is considerable information.

The family was well connected. Abraham was the youngest child of Elbert Herring, who at his death in 1773 was the owner of over onehundred acres in the Out-Ward of Manhattan, the second largest farmon the island. The surname was the anglicized version of Haring, a family descended from one Jan Pietersen, who was in New York City in the 1660s and with other farmers had bought land in the 1680s from the Tappan Indians on the west bank ofthe Hudson (by the Tappan Zee). Abraham, the merchant, was in the fourth generation from this immigrant and well connected through his sisters’ marriages to families with familiar names — Roosevelt, Kip, dePeyster, Jones, and — through his marriage to a cousin— an in-law as well as a blood member of this Haring family.These family lines are included, if sparingly, in the 1952 Haring genealogy (Herbert Ackerman, typescript)and Firth Haring Fabend’s A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660–1800 (Rutgers University Press, 1991). Considerable information about the Haring-Herring family can be found in papers left by George H. Budke to the New York Public Library (NYPL). In the early part of the last century Budke collected all manner of information about this and other families, including an unpublished article on Abraham Herring and much about his son, another Elbert, named for his grandfather. This Elbert Herring was the most well-known of the family in the nineteenth century, hailed by leading men of the bar when he died in 1876, age eighty-nine, as “the world’s oldest lawyer,” who began his career in the age of Hamilton and Burr. Elbert was born in Stratford, Connecticut, where his twenty-one-year-old father had fled when the British occupied New York in 1776. Thereare birth records of others of Abraham’s children in New York and Albany Dutch Reformed churches, but no Thomas.

The search for vital and other data on Thomas Herring became an urgent matter when I discovered anarchive with well over a hundred letters from both Thomas and Abraham. This collection was the Peter Smith Papers, held at Syracuse University and available at NYPL on microfilm. Peter Smith (1768–1837) was a trader and large landowner in the Mohawk Valley, where he was a founder of what became Utica.[1] (His son,Gerrit Smith, was the well-known abolitionist and supporter of John Brown; a niece was the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton.) I found this collection of Herring letters through the most elementary of means, a keyword search using CATNYP, the library’s catalog,  available on its website, http://www.nypl.org/. A look at the film introduced me to a wealth of information about the Herring’s business, a trade which extended from the upper Hudson and the Mohawk Valley via the Port of New York to London. It was immediately clear from the letters that Thomas was Abraham’s son, a fact that had eluded others; in addition, in two letters Thomas referred to a brother, George, not elsewhere noted.

On November 22, 1799, at the New York Dutch Reformed Church, Thomas Herring married “Miss Sally Kirkland of Paris, Oneida County.”[2] These locations made sense: the Haring-Herring family weremembers of the Dutch church and Thomas and his father traded with Peter Smith and others in Oneida County. The New York Herald carried Thomas’s death notice:“On 20th of August [1851] Thomas Herring after a few days of dysentery, an old and respectable citizen, and formerly an eminent merchant of this city.”[3]

But what about Sally (Kirkland) Herring and children of the marriage? The family in America was exceedingly prolific, with twelve or more children of the long-lasting marriages that preceded Thomas.Yet there were no baptismal records for Thomas’s children, nor a death notice for Sally or any children, nor pertinent marriage notices. Identification of Sally Kirkland came with relative ease. An inquiry to the Oneida County Historical Society in Utica led me to Hermine Williams in Clinton, New York (a section of the county once called Paris). From her I learned that Sarah Kirkland was a daughter of the famous Rev. Samuel Kirkland, missionary to the Oneida Indians before and during the Revolution, and founder of what became Hamilton College. She is cited in the Kirkland genealogy — but without mention of a marriage to Thomas Herring.[4] Her sister, Eliza (Elizabeth), later married Edward Robinson, a professor at the New York General Theological Seminary, the subject of a biography byHermine’s husband.[5] Eliza, important to this story as we shall see, was an articulate, well-educated woman, many of whose letters Hermine knew.

Three days after the 1799 wedding, Abraham reported to Peter Smith that Thomas had sailed for London.[6] With a latter-day sense of what would be expected, I assumed that Sally had sailed with her three-day husband, braving the December storms of the Atlantic for a honeymoon. How wrong I was — a useful reminder to cast aside such anachronistic expectations in research. The first sign I found of trouble between the newlyweds was a letter to Sally from Eliza Kirkland which Thomas had intercepted on his return to New York. He wrote Smith that it was an “infamous production.” It certainly is remarkable, revealing on Eliza’s part a romantic sensibility, and, to our theme, pointing to Sally’s relationship with aman she terms “Plato.” Thomas’s comment leaps from the page:“The wretch dignified with the name of Plato is ye Gods! The detestable Kirkpatrick!” Eliza began reflectively. “My hopes and wishes are few.They extend only to you and Plato.” She then plunges the reader into a complex and conflicted personality as she gives a glimpse of Sally’s involvement (and perhaps her own). “[S]hould either of you forsake me I am wretched: for, in spite of the apathy I sometimes feel and the resolutions I have sworn to maintain it, still my heart preserves natural tenuousness and is subdued by recollected friendship.”Writing from her father’s house in Clinton, only recently on the western frontier of New York settlement, Eliza continues:“I shall never visit Boston unless forcibly dragged thither nor any place save this, unless Plato will take us both to the Appalachian Mountains whither He often says He will go, and if we chuse we may accompany him.Twould be an outrageous affront to all civilized people — but I would not hesitate a moment . . .— we should have to eat, drink, and sleep upon intellect —”[7]

In a later letter by Elbert, the attorney, I found reference to a divorce proceeding.This discovery prompted a visit to the Division of Old Records of the New York County Court, where there was bald confirmation of the collapse of the marriage.A few weeks after his return from London, Thomas requested a dissolution of the marriage, claiming that Sarah had broken her matrimonial vows “between the day of the voyage and the return” with “certain company.”[8]We may presume that “the detestable Kirkpatrick”was that “certain company,” but who he was has so far eluded investigation. The divorce papers were in fact presented to the Supreme Court of Vermont — the Reno of its day? — as divorce was difficult under New York laws.[9] For Sally, it is important to note, divorce — rare as it was then — did not prevent her marriage a few years later to Francis Amory, a Boston merchant with whom she moved to Milton and had four children.[10]

A research trail which led to equally surprising and unknown circumstances was opened by the search for the divorce action.A Vermont Supreme Court case cited a New York one which noted that Thomas Herring had been jailed for bankruptcy.[11] This citation prompted another rewarding visit to the Division of Old Records.

The period following the peace that concluded the War of 1812, news of which reached a joyous New York in February 1815, was prosperous for New York merchants. Trade across the Atlantic reopened. But times were not good for Thomas Herring. John Beekman and James Beekman, heirs to Abraham K. Beekman, deceased, claimed that “on or about 1 May 1816 Thomas Herring, merchant, having occasion for money and having or pretending to be in fee or in some other good and sufficient estate of inheritance” applied to and received a loan of $7,000.A year later Thomas was unable to repay this debt, and the Beekmans sought to claim property Herring had mortgaged. There were claims by others, also, including the attorney for the Southern District U.S. Court for customs duties due.[12] The property that Thomas had given for collateral was sold at auction at the Tontine Coffee House in full view of all his peers.[13] The court record runs to sixty-four pages.

Thomas, after this devastating reverse, was no longer listed as a merchant in the directory. He found some employment from the city from 1826 to 1828, when he served as a property tax assessor. For many years he shared the same address as his father, who had evidently saved him from total ruin.

There was yet another discovery, this time of records passed down in the family. E. Haring Chandor, of New York City, a fellow member of the the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and a descendant of Abraham Herring, has kept files of his forebears and invited me to examine them. Among much of fascination was a “Haring genealogy” written in a nineteenthcentury hand on paper of that era — possibly by one of Thomas’s long-lived maiden sisters. In this was recorded the birth on October 16, 1780, of Thomas and a twin, the previously unknown George, in Stratford, Connecticut, where the family had fled to wait out the British occupation of New York.

Thomas Herring, the “respected merchant” of the New York Tribune obituary notice, died on Beekman Street, named for the family whose members had caused him to be jailed. His remains were placed first at the Old Middle Dutch Reformed Church. When that burial place was closed, they were removed to Lafayette Cemetery and finally to the vault purchased by Elbert Herring at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn in 1862.[14]

Thomas Herring, whose vital data and biography werepreviously undocumented, was part of the first generation to live fully in the independent country. His life’s journey reveals a business career that illustrates the potential for both gain and catastrophic loss in those years. His publicly failed marriage in a family whose marriages had been for life and produced progeny is asign of changes to come in an increasingly fluid American society. The search for Thomas reminds the researcher of the importance of following many trails; serendipity won’t happen unless you are looking.

Lastly there was more to Thomas than the outline of his vital data and the dire events of his life. The letters show him to have been affectionate and thoughtful; they also tell us much about trade and merchant life in the New York of the new republic. For these reasons the Herrings and their business have a chapter in my upcoming publication, More Lasting than Brass.

Notes

¹American National Biography, 24 vols. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999), s.v. “Smith, Peter.” by Richard Groves.

² Marriages from 1639 to 1801 in the Reformed Dutch Church, New Amsterdam-New York City (New York: Collections of The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, vol. 9, 1940), 277; “On Friday last 22, Thomas Herring to Miss Sally Kirkland of Paris, Oneida County,” N. Y. Spectator, November 29, 1799, as per James Gavit, American Deaths and Marriages, 1784–1829, microfilm, 2 reels (New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1976).

³ New York Herald, August 27, 1851; James P. Maker, comp., Index to Marriages and Deaths in the New York Herald, 1856–1863 (Alexandria, Va.: the compiler, 1991), 2:2.

⁴ Elfrieda A. Kraege, The Kirtland-Kirkland Families: 1600s–1800s . . . (New York: the author, 1979), 82.

⁵ Jay G. Williams, The Times and Life of Edward Robinson: Connecticut Yankee in King Solomon’s Court (Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999).

⁶ Abraham Herring in New York to Peter Smith in Old Fort Schuyler 11 December 1799, Peter Smith Papers, Reel 1.

⁷ Eliza Kirkland in “Sylvania” [Clinton, N.Y.] to Sarah (Kirkland) Herring, 19 May 1800, enclosed in Thomas Herring in New York to Peter Smith in Utica 15 August 1800, Peter Smith Papers, Reel 1. Transcription courtesy of Hermine Williams.

⁸ The petition was prepared by his first cousin, Samuel Jones Jr. Thomas Herring vs. Sally Herring , filed July 2, 1800, BM 1337, New York Co. Clerk’s Office, Division of Old Records, Chancery Court, State of New York.

⁹ Personal communication of September 15, 2002, Paul Donovan, Law Librarian, Supreme Court of Vermont.

¹⁰ Sarah Kirkland died in Milton, at the age of fifty. Kraege, Kirtland-Kirkland Families , 92.

¹¹ “Chittenden, December 1826, Thomas Herring, defendant below, vs. David Selding, plaintiff below. — IN ERROR,” Asa Aikens, Reports on Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of Vermont, Prepared and Published in Pursuance of a Statute Law of the State, vol. 2 (Windsor, Vt.: Simeon Ide, 1828).

¹² Grantors Index, citing 124:174, 3 Dec. 1816, 125:84, 9 Dec. 1816, 162:176, 22 July 1822, microfilm, Office of the City Register, New York Co., New York, N.Y.

¹³ “Notice of County Judgments, Court of Chancery at Albany, Edward Elmendorf vs. Thomas Herring, John M. Donald, and the United States of America ,” CL 53:180–84, CL 111:580–643, New York Co. Clerk’s Office, Division of Old Records, Chancery Court, State of New York.

¹⁴ Burial Records, Dutch Reformed Church, Collegiate Church, 45 John Street, New York, N.Y.


Reprinted by permission of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Peter Haring Judd, "Case Study: The Search for Thomas Herring." New England Ancestors vol. 5, no. 2 (spring 2004):26-28.