 He was the son of Philip Henry Livingston (1769–1831) and Maria Livingston (1770–1828).His paternal uncle was Edward Philip Livingston (1779–1843), the Lieutenant Governor of New York, and his maternal uncles were Henry Walter Livingston (1768–1810), a U.S. Representative, and Robert Fulton (1765–1815), an engineer who developed a successful steamboat that ferried passengers from New York City to Albany and back again and invented the first practical submarine in history.His paternal grandfather was Philip Philip Livingston (1741–1787), who was born in colonial New York and had settled in Jamaica, West Indies prior to the Revolutionary War, therefore remaining a British subject.