Free America's Secret Aristocracy by Stephen; Birmingham Page A

house into a hospital to care for wounded soldiers and other refugees from New York. At one point, according to the story, the material comforts of life were at such a low point that there was only a single darning needle in the entire community. This precious commodity was passed from neighbor to neighbor, to sew bandages and mend and patch hospital blankets and clothing. One day Lady Stirling needed to borrow the needle and dispatched a little boy, Quincey Morton—the son of the Revolutionary general and signer of the Declaration of Independence John Morton—to fetch it from the last woman who had used it.
    Quincey Morton obtained the needle, but somewhere along the route back to The Sycamores he stopped to play with some children his age, and when he reached Lady Stirling’s house the needle was nowhere to be found. The loss of the darning needle galvanized the entire town. Young Quincey was grilled until he broke down in tears, but he had no idea where or how he had lost the needle. Then the whole town turned out to search for the needle, not in a proverbial haystack but across a considerable stretch of rural countryside. The search went on for hours, and every possible route Quincey might have taken was traced and retraced. Finally, a sharp-eyed member of the search party spotted a tiny silvery object speared in the trunk of a tree. It was the needle. When Quincey had stopped to play, it seemed, he had absentmindedly stuck the needle there and forgotten all about it.
    Other Revolutionary tales have come down from more than word of mouth and have less happy endings. Helping Lady Stirling at her impromptu hospital was a young woman named Nannie Brown, an orphaned niece of the Brockholst family, who traced their lineage back to the first English lieutenantgovernor of New York and who, it may be redundant to report, were also related by marriage to the Livingstons (Sarah Livingston Jay’s brother was named Brockholst Livingston). And during the Battle of Trenton a young lieutenant from the Virginia infantry named James Monroe was carried, wounded, to The Sycamores. While Nannie Brown helped to nurse him back to health, the two fell in love. When he recovered, he asked her to marry him, and she accepted his proposal.
    Her Brockholst relatives disapproved, and so did Lady Stirling. Monroe, they insisted, was not good enough for Nannie Brown. His background was obscure; he was from a tiny settlement called Monroe Creek. His lineage was undistinguished. He was tall, stoop-shouldered, not particularly handsome or particularly bright, a dropout from the College of William and Mary. He only wanted to marry Nannie Brown, Lady Stirling warned, because of her family connections.
    And here it is important to state a rule of the American aristocracy that applied then and continues to apply today. An aristocratic wife can make an aristocrat of her husband, but it does not work the other way around. We shall see it happen again and again as men of lower social standing, or of no social standing whatever, manage to elevate themselves through the proper choice of a wife. But when men marry beneath them, they inevitably sink to the lower social status of their wives. A contemporary example of this rule at work occurred when King Edward VIII of England decided he must marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson.
    And so, when Nannie Brown and James Monroe protested that their love was true, Major General Lord Stirling promoted his wife’s friend’s fiancé and made him his aide-decamp, demonstrating that even an engagement to a young woman of good family could advance a man in the world. Plans for the wedding proceeded, and it was to be as grand an affair as wartime shortages and austerity would allow. The Van Horne family had offered their elegant family homestead on the banks of the Raritan River near New Brunswick for the wedding and reception, and Monroe had presented his bride-to-be with a gold engagement band inscribed with the