Historian Publishes New Book on Forgotten Founding Father

The book cover of "William Livingston's American Revolution" and associate professor Jim Gigantino.

A new book explores how New Jersey's first governor, William Livingston, experienced the American Revolution and managed a state government on the war's front lines. Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, William Livingston's American Revolution details how Livingston, a wartime bureaucrat, played a pivotal role in a pivotal place, prosecuting the war on a daily basis for eight years. Such second-tier founding fathers 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.

James Gigantino, the book's author, presents the first biography of Livingston published since the 1830s. His 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.

Gigantino is an associate professor of history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas and also currently serves as department chair. He is also the author of The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865 (Pennsylvania) and the editor of The American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Home Front (Rutgers) and Slavery and Secession in Arkansas: A Documentary History (Arkansas).