and Mrs. Jacob Schieffelin III seemed even odder. Jacob Schieffelin had fought for the British during the war. But as New York society closed ranks under President and Lady Washington, it had to be admitted that the young Schieffelins had much in their favor. Both were attractive and obviously well bred. The Schieffelin family pedigree, in pre-Revolutionary America and in Germany even before that, was excellent. Jacob Schieffelin had been an officer in the British army, not an ordinary soldier, and this stamped him automatically as a gentleman. And Jacob Schieffelin, as so many young men of the day were doing, had “married up,” into one of New York’s proudest families. The Schieffelin family traces itself back to the thirteenth century, to the town of Nördlingen, in Bavaria, where the family were German Protestants from the very beginning of the Reformation. There is a family portrait, painted in 1538, of Hans Leonard Schieffelin with his two sons, adoring the Paschal Lamb, the family crest (Schieffelin is a corruption of the German word for “little sheep”).
What do You think about America's Secret Aristocracy (2016)?
