| I guess this hangs on your definition of "came to America rich". America was a frontier, not the kind of place that rich people came to for fun, but the kind of place that people went to escape glass ceilings and exploit natural resources for profit. It required capital and connections to make it big in the Hudson valley: many of the wealthiest families in the US at 1776 were descended from people of relative wealth and influence (again, not Windsors and Hohenzollerns), who found the british colonies to be a place where skill, capital and connections could be compounded into meaningful wealth at a far higher rate than their birth countries. Jay's progenitor fled asset seizure in France to take up commodity trading in NY, where he became cozy with the established elites: Jay's mother was a Van Cortlandt, themselves married into the Van Rensselaers, who were among the founders and directors of the Dutch West India Company. (Most prominent New Yorkers of the 1770s intersect with the Van Rensselaers). Alexander Hamilton married a Schuyler, a family whose history mirrors the Van Cortlandt's (wealth deriving from the furs trade, cemented with marriage to the "Vans"). Robert Livingston the Elder fled to the Netherlands from Scotland, where his well-to-do father had faced religious persecution. He ended up in New York, where he married a Van Rensselaer widow and was granted a "patent" to 160,000 acres of farmland along the Hudson. --- South of the Potomac River, the stories are pretty similar if you substitute "fur trade" for "tobbacco trade". e.g. James Madison's paternal grandfather was a man of influence and landowner in Virginia, who cemented his family's future influence with a marriage into the Penn family. The Penns, along with the Baltimores, represent an extreme end of the "arrived wealthy" spectrum. |