Peter Van Brugh Livingston was born on October 1710 at Albany, New York, United States and baptized November 3, 1710. He was a grandson of Robert Livingston, and the son of Philip Livingston, second lord of the manor, and of Catharine (Van Brugh). Most of his boyhood was spent in Albany, where his father served as secretary of Indian affairs during the latter years of Robert Livingston's life.
He was educated at Yale, graduating in the class of 1731.
In 1731 Livingston settled in New York City, and joined the mercantile interests of the little port. His business ventures prospered sufficiently to enable him to build a mansion in the Dutch tradition on Princess Street. During the French wars he accumulated a small fortune from government contracts for supplying various military expeditions. His privateering enterprises were likewise fortunate and profitable. Having formed a business arrangement with his brother-in-law, Alexander, he secured through his partner a commission from Governor Shirley to supply the army which was being equipped for an assault on Fort Niagara in 1755. The profits from this contract were partially dissipated during a protracted suit in chancery between Alexander and Livingston over the precise terms of their agreement.
In his extensive mercantile operations Livingston was judged, even by his political foes, to belong to that group known as "fair traders and honest men". He found time during the busiest years of his career to serve from 1748 to 1761 as a trustee of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton. Livingston was a member of the Committee of Sixty organized in November 1774 to enforce the "Association" entered into by the Continental Congress and to assume such governmental powers as seemed necessary in the emergency. In this group the radicals had a clear majority, which they used to create the Committee of One Hundred, an extra-legal body charged with the responsibility for provincial affairs until the opening of the first provincial congress in 1775; Livingston was a member of this committee and was sent to the provincial congress, which promptly named him its presiding officer. He was also Chairman of the Committee of Safety from September 1776 to March 1777. In 1776, he was appointed Treasurer by the Provincial Congress, and remained in office until 1778, after the establishment of the State Government. He died at Elizabethtown, New Jersey.
In provincial politics Livingston was generally found on the side of the popular party, which was strongly Presbyterian in its religious preferences. For a time he was an able lieutenant in carrying out the plans of the Whig triumvirate consisting of his brother William, John Morin Scott, and William Smith, Jr. . He heartily indorsed the merchants' memorials in 1763 and 1764 against Grenville's projects to raise a revenue in America and he seems to have been less alarmed than his wealthy colleagues by the high-handed tactics of the mechanics and small shopkeepers in the year of the Stamp Act. At any rate, in 1774 he took his stand with the radical wing of the Whig faction. A member of the Committee of Fifty-One, organized to choose delegates to the First Continental Congress, he protested against the attempt of the conservative merchants to dominate the committee and resigned in company with such radicals as Alexander MacDougall and Isaac Sears in order to give point to his protest.
John Adams found Livingston "an old man, extremely staunch in the cause, and very sensible, " who was not afraid of the extremists in New England.
On November 3, 1739, Livingston married Mary Alexander, daughter of James Alexander, a member of the council and surveyor-general of New Jersey, and sister of William, who later married Livingston's sister Sarah. After the death of his first wife, in 1767, he married Elizabeth, widow of William Ricketts.
