Troup, Robert (1757-14 Jan

Troup, Robert (1757-14 Jan. 1832), lawyer and land agent, was born in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, the son of Robert Troup, a sea captain and privateer, and Elinor Bisset. Robert Troup, Sr., earned much glory and booty in King George's War and the French and Indian War and left a large estate when he died in 1768. His wife died soon thereafter and Robert was thus orphaned at age eleven. Unidentified family friends sent the boy to Princeton for a year and then to King's College (now Columbia) in New York City. He graduated in 1774. At King's College he forged close friendships with Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Duane, and Nicholas Fish--men who would influence and aid him for years to come.

Following his graduation, Troup began to study law with John Jay in New York City, but at the outbreak of the American Revolution he enlisted in Lasher's New York militia and then in the Continental army. He was captured at the battle of Long Island in August 1776 and was a prisoner of war until he was exchanged in December. Appointed aide-de-camp to General Horatio Gates, he rose rapidly in rank from lieutenant to major. He missed the battle of Saratoga because Gates had sent him to Pennsylvania to deliver reports to Congress. After the battle, a grateful Congress promoted him to lieutenant colonel. He served as secretary to the board of war under Gates until November 1778 and then became secretary to the board of treasury. He resigned from the army in February 1780 to return to his law studies.

In company with Aaron Burr, whom he had met during the Revolution, Troup began study with William Paterson in New Jersey, but in March 1781 they became students of Thomas Smith of Haverstraw, New York, who provided a quick, intense, and practical introduction to New York legal practice.

Troup and Burr moved to Albany in 1781, and Troup began his law practice there in September 1782. Within a week of the British evacuation of New York City in November 1783 Troup returned to the city. Thanks to his own ability and to the postwar scarcity of experienced lawyers, he prospered. Though he accepted any case in his early years, he began to specialize in matters relating to speculation in land, a frenetic activity in postwar New York. By the early 1790s he represented major land investors, including Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham, Alexander Macomb, William Duer, and Charles Williamson, the agent for British investors in western New York.

In 1787 Troup married Jennet Goelet, daughter of Peter Goelet, a moderately wealthy merchant; by 1795 the couple had four children. Believing devoutly that a man's chosen calling should provide "a support for his family during his life and a comfortable provision for them after his death," Troup gradually increased his caseload and his fees, established a branch office in Albany, and became one of the best-paid lawyers in New York. In less than a decade of practice, he had a large home, a country estate, servants and two slaves, and enough capital to invest in lands on the New York frontier.

In 1796 he was appointed U.S. judge for the District of New York--a reward, in part, for service to the Federalist cause. Troup was an early supporter of Hamiltonian policies, such as a strong central government, a centralized financial system, federal assumption of national debt, and tariff protection for American industries, and he actively advocated the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. He served one term in the New York Assembly in 1786--his only elected office--and served as fundraiser and organizer for Federalist candidates. He coordinated John Jay's gubernatorial campaign in 1792. Thereafter he utilized politics to serve his own investments and those of his law clients.

Troup resigned his federal judgeship in 1798 after thirteen months service because a dramatic decline in land prices jeopardized his investments. He returned to practice, confined himself to major cases relating to insurance and land, and in three years of intense labor restored his fortune. In 1801 Sir William Pulteney, an enormously wealthy English investor, appointed Troup chief agent of the Pulteney estate, a tract of over 1.2 million acres in the Genesee region of western New York. Troup gave up his law practice and for the rest of his life devoted himself to the interests of the Pulteney estate. Pulteney had by 1801 spent 650,000 sterling, much of which was wasted by Charles Williamson, Troup's colorful but impractical predecessor as chief agent. Troup set up a system of accounting and of proper legal procedures. He promoted turnpike companies and later contributed to the Erie Canal and feeder canals, and underwrote construction of mills, all to benefit the economy of the estate and its settlers. He supported agricultural societies and livestock breeding groups and established a bank at Geneva, New York, to facilitate the estate's financial transactions. To promote the estate's image, he gave land or money to hundreds of schools and churches and to several public buildings. By 1831 he had paid all the estate's debts, sold 800,000 acres of land, remitted over $1.5 million to Pulteney's heirs, and spent over $1 million on taxes, improvements, and salaries.

Troup remained at heart an old Federalist, but he maintained a strict public neutrality among New York's political factions while he secretly supported any faction or individual whose policies favored the estate. He was a master lobbyist and lived in Albany for several years to be near the New York legislature. By cultivating influential legislators he secured the passage of a number of bills relating to turnpikes, the Geneva bank, and the division of counties and location of county seats. He also secured several bills to legalize landholding by the Pulteney family, including the unanimous passage of such a measure in 1813 when the Pulteneys were enemy aliens.

Troup lived in Geneva, New York, the estate's headquarters, from 1815 to 1824 and then returned to New York City. He was still an active land agent but devoted more time to religious and philanthropic activity. He was a lay leader of Trinity Church and contributed money and time to the American Bible Society, Columbia College, the board of regents of the University of the State of New York, and other cultural and educational groups. He died in New York City, leaving an estate of $347,821.

Troup was a major figure in the settlement of western New York after the American Revolution. He regarded the law primarily as a source of income; his view of politics was equally practical. Scrupulously honest, he nevertheless worked hardest for acts that benefited his business interests and his church. He associated easily with business partners whose policies differed from his own. Yet he has been viewed by historians as a political figure, an early Federalist, and by his contemporaries as an adornment of the New York bar. In a manuscript obituary of Troup, James Kent, chancellor of New York's equity courts, rated him the equal of Hamilton, Burr, and other paragons, but also observed, perhaps with regret, that in Troup "the passion for accumulation became predominant."

Bibliography
The major manuscript sources for Troup are the Bronson papers and Troup papers at the New York Public Library. There are also Troup materials in the Columbia College Papers and Jay papers at Columbia University; miscellaneous letters are at the Library of Congress, the New-York Historical Society, the New York State Library, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Manuscript materials relating to Troup and the Pulteney estate are in the Collection of Regional History, Cornell University; the Geneva (N.Y.) Historical Society; the Ontario County Historical Society, Canandaigua, N.Y.; the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences; the Rochester Public Library; and the Steuben County Clerk's Office, Bath, N.Y. Wendell Tripp, Robert Troup: A Quest for Security in a Turbulent New Nation, 1775-1832 (1973), is a full-length biography. See also Nathan Schachner, "Alexander Hamilton Viewed by His Friends: The Narratives of Robert Troup and Hercules Mulligan," William and Mary Quarterly 4 (1947): 203-25, and John G. Van Deusen, "Robert Troup: Agent of the Pulteney Estate," New York History 23 (1942): 166-82. Works that deal in part with Troup or his activities include Paul D. Evans, "The Pulteney Purchase," Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association 3 (1922): 83-104; Helen I. Cowan, Charles Williamson (1941); and Orsamus Turner, History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham's Purchase (1851). For contemporary estimates of Troup, see William Berrian, Recollections of Departed Friends (1850); Memoirs and Letters of James Kent, ed. William Kent (1898), and Donald M. Roper, " . . . James Kent's Necrologies," New-York Historical Society Quarterly 56 (1972): 199-237.

Wendell Tripp

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