Robert Schuyler

Robert Schuyler or Robert Livingston Schuyler (September 16, 1798 – November 15, 1855), was a financier, steamboat operator, and railroad president who acted as the de facto head of the prominent Schuyler family during his adulthood. Schuyler was called "America's first railroad king." He had a role in America's first large-scale stock fraud on the New York and New Haven Railroad. His scandal is among the greatest scandals in Wall Street history alongside the Bernie Madoff scandal and the Richard Whitney scandal. Early life Schuyler was born in Rhinebeck, New York, in 1798. He was the youngest of five children born to Philip Jeremiah Schuyler (1768–1835), a U.S. Representative, and Sarah Rutsen (1770–1803), who died when he was young. After his mother's death in 1803, his father remarried to Mary Anna Sawyer (1786–1852), the daughter of Micajah Sawyer, a founding member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with whom he had three more children. His siblings from his parents marriage were Philip P. Schuyler, who married Rosanna Livingston; Stephan Van Rensselaer Schuyler, who married Catherine Morris; Catherine Schuyler, who married Samuel Jones; and John Rutsen Schuyler. His half-siblings from his father's second marriage were William Schuyler; Sybil Schuyler; and George Lee Schuyler (1811–1890), who married Eliza Hamilton, daughter of his cousin, James Alexander Hamilton (son of Alexander Hamilton and Eliza Schuyler Hamilton). After her death, he married Eliza's sister, Mary Morris Hamilton. His paternal grandparents were Philip Schuyler (1733–1804), a Revolutionary War General and U.S. Senator, and Catherine Van Rensselaer (1734–1803), a member of the prominent Van Rensselaer family. His maternal grandfather was John Rutsen (1743–1771), a descendant of Wilhelmus Beekman and inheritor of a large portion of the Beekman Patent, which encompassed much of what is now Dutchess County. Schuyler graduated with a B.A. degree from Harvard College in 1817, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa society, and the Porcellian Club, along with Samuel Atkins Eliot, Wyllys Lyman, Samuel Joseph May, Thomas Russell Sullivan, Charles Henry Warren, and Francis William Winthrop. His mathematical thesis at Harvard was on "fluxional solutions."