James Duane - Family and Early Career

Family and Early Career

James was a natural born American son of an Anglo-Irish colonial settler. His father, Anthony Duane (c. 1679 – 1747), was a Protestant Irishman from County Galway in Ireland and first came to New York as an officer of the Royal Navy in 1698. Like others of colonial background, Anthony considered himself merely settling from one part of the British Empire to another as a free subject. Consequently, he maintained strong allegiance to the crown throughout his life, values which he later passed onto to his son. He met and courted Eva Benson, whose father, Dirck, was a local American merchant. In 1702 Anthony left the navy, settled in New York, and married Eva. They had two sons before her death. When Eva died, Anthony remarried, this time to Althea Ketaltas (Hettletas), the daughter of a wealthy Dutch merchant family. Anthony entered commerce and prospered, and the couple had a son, James.

James's mother, Althea, died in 1736, and his father married a third time in 1741 to Margaret Riken (Rycken), the widow of Thomas Lynch of Flushing, New York. When Anthony Duane died in 1747, the young James became the ward of the prominent American aristocrat Robert Livingston, who was known as the 3rd Lord of the Manor. He completed his early education at Livingston Manor, then read law in the offices of James Alexander. He was admitted to the bar in 1754. Then on October 21, 1759, James married Mary Livingston, the eldest daughter of his former guardian Robert. He was Clerk of the Chancery Court of New York in 1762, provincial Attorney General in 1767 and Indian commissioner for the Province of New York in 1774.