William Livingston's American Revolution explores how New Jersey's
first governor experienced the American Revolution and managed a state
government on the war's front lines. A wartime bureaucrat, Livingston
played a pivotal role in a pivotal place, prosecuting the war on a daily
basis for eight years. Such second-tier founding fathers as Livingston
were the ones who actually administered the war and guided the
day-to-day operations of revolutionary-era governments, serving as the
principal conduits between the local wartime situation and the national
demands placed on the states.
In the first biography of Livingston published since the 1830s, James J.
Gigantino's examination is as much about the position he filled as about
the man himself. The reluctant patriot and his roles as governor, member
of the Continental Congress, and delegate to the Constitutional
Convention quickly became one, as Livingston's distinctive personality
molded his office's status and reach. A tactful politician, successful
lawyer, writer, satirist, political operative, gardener, soldier, and
statesman, Livingston became the longest-serving patriot governor during
a brutal war that he had not originally wanted to fight or believed
could be won. Through Livingston's life, Gigantino examines the complex
nature of the conflict and the choice to wage it, the wartime
bureaucrats charged with administering it, the constant battle over
loyalty on the home front, the limits of patriot governance under fire,
and the ways in which wartime experiences affected the creation of the
Constitution.
