USA > Connecticut > Connecticut as a colony and as a state; or, One of the original thirteen, Volume II > Part 11
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Among the colonels of the Connecticut Line was Erastus Wolcott, born in East Windsor, Sept. 21, 1722; son of Judge and Governor Roger Wolcott, to whom we owe half our knowledge and more than half our puzzle on the hiding of the Charter. He was born to public office, from his heredity and capacity; lawyer, repeatedly member and Speaker of the Assembly's lower house, justice, judge of pro- bate and of the county court. Sent to Boston in 1775 to keep watch of British movements, he shortly joins Washington at Cambridge at the head of a regiment of Connecticut militia ; in 1777 becomes brigadier-general, and commands the first
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brigade of Connecticut militia, whom he leads to Peekskill and Danbury. Later he was judge of the State Supreme Court, and died in his native town, Sept. 15, 1793.
James Wadsworth was born in Durham, July 6, 1730; graduated from Yale in 1748; was town clerk of Durham for thirty years, and a member of the Committee of Safety before the Revolution. In 1776 he was colonel and then brigadier-general in the Connecticut militia; the next year major-general; and appointed to the defense of the Sound coast. He was afterwards judge of the New Haven county court, delegate to Congress 1783-6, and member of the Exec- utive Council 1785-90; dying in Durham, Sept. 22, 1817.
Connecticut was represented in the Continental army by other than her own divisions of troops : she lent as well as borrowed important men. John Paterson, born 1744 in what is now New Britain, graduated from Yale in 1762, taught school and practiced law in his native place; in 1774 removed to Lenox, Mass., at once took position as one of the ablest of the patriot leaders, and was a member of the first Provin- cial Congress at Salem in that year. Eighteen hours after Lexington he reported at Cambridge at the head of a regi- men of minute-men; he aided in fortifying Bunker Hill and defended the American rear in the battle. He shared the Canadian campaign; was at Trenton and Princeton; in 1777 was made brigadier-general and attached to the Northern Department, where he aided materially in the capture of Burgoyne; fought at Monmouth, New Jersey, and was made major-general. Serving till the close of the war, he after- ward removed to Lisle, New York; where, after filling various political offices, including membership in Congress, he died July 19, 1808.
Among the representative Continental officers from Hart-
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ford was Samuel Wyllys, who was born there Jan. 15, 1739; and graduated from Yale in 1758. On the outbreak of the war he was commissioned lieutenant-colonel; he commanded a regiment at the siege of Boston, and served with distinc- tion through the war, becoming colonel in the Connecticut line. He succeeded his father as State Secretary in 1796, resigning in 1809; this office was held for ninety-eight suc- cessive years by three generations of the Wyllys family. Colonel Wyllys died June 9, 1823.
Joseph Trumbull, a son of the first Governor Trumbull, was born at Lebanon, March 11, 1737, and graduated at Harvard in 1756. He was the first commissary-general of the Continental Army, appointed in July 1775 : it was inevit- able that the commissary headship should be among Connec- ticut merchants, for the colony had the only large surplus of food unreachable by the British. In November 1777 he was placed on the Board of War; after five months' ser- vice he resigned from ill health, and died not long after at Lebanon, July 23, 1778.
Connecticut's representative in the United States' inchoate navy was Elisha Hinman, born at Stonington, March 9, 1734. At sea from the age of fourteen, he was a captain at nineteen, making voyages to Europe and the Indies. He was one of the first captains commissioned for naval service in the Revolution; was wounded in an engagement under Commo- dore Esek Hopkins, in April 1776; in August was appointed captain in the regular navy; was successively in command of three vessels, the "Alfred" last, which was captured and he was taken to England as a prisoner, but escaped to France. In Arnold's burning of New London, Captain Hinman lost all his property. When the Federalists began the new navy in 1794, he was offered the command of the "Constitution," but
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declined on account of his advanced years. He was collector of customs at New London 1798-1802, and died there Aug. 29, 1807.
Ezra Lee, a native of Lyme, born in 1749, wins recollec- tion from risking his life in an enterprise for the good of his country, supposed to be certain death. David Bushnell had invented a torpedo called the "Marine Turtle"; and General Parsons, with Washington's approval, selected Lee to attach it to the British war-ship "Eagle," anchored in New York harbor. The copper sheathing of the vessel rendered the plan abortive; Lee then tried the same experiment on another frigate, but was discovered too early. He served through the war, and died Oct. 29, 1825.
Two other veterans are commemorated for their enormous longevity. In the second year of the war, a body of troops known as the Washington Life Guards was organized, picked for physical endowments and general character. It com- prised 180 men, afterwards increased to 250. Connecticut had several representatives in its ranks. The last survivor of the corps, Sergeant Uzal Knapp, was a native of Stam- ford; born 1759; and died at New Windsor, New York, Jan. 11, 1857. Lemuel Cook, born at Plymouth in 1764, joined the army at seventeen, in the last year of the war, and was in the campaign against Cornwallis; was honorably dis- charged at the close, removed at about seventy to Clarendon, New York, and died there May 20, 1866, leaving but two survivors of the Continental Army. F. M.
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CHAPTER XII
SKETCHES OF THE CIVIL CHARACTERS OF THE REVOLUTION
T HE civil officials of a government, in time of war, have the same individual responsibilities as the military officers. Connecticut's states- men were active during the American con- Hlict, and they bore a prominent part in all of the national gatherings; that one of the most conspicuous of them was only a citizen by adoption does not detract from the laurels of the State, as the like condition in the military service does not.
Roger Sherman has been called a maker of the nation; he is the only man whose signature appears on the four greatest documents of early American history-namely, the Declara- tion of Independence, the Declaration of Rights, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. He was a member of the committee which drafted the first three of these import- ant documents. Sherman was born at Newton, Massachu- setts, April 19, 1721; the day memorable for the blood of Lexington and Baltimore.
He was of English descent; but his great-grandfather became a resident of Watertown, Massachusetts, during its early days. His father was a shoemaker, and young Roger learned the trade; there was not enough of this business in a colonial country town to keep him employed, and he did farming between whiles. The loss of his father when he was twenty years old threw the burden of supporting his mother and several younger children upon his shoulders; on this account he removed with the family in 1743 to New Milford, Connecticut, where his elder brother was engaged in trade. His education had been limited to a common school in boy- hood; but he was of the class who will always educate them- selves. Shoemaking by hand is a good trade for this. A book and a lapstone are natural companions; and scholarly
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shoemakers are not infrequent in history. Roger Sherman read and thought while he sewed and pegged, and he had a capacious and embracing intellect. His studies did not include the dead or foreign languages; but in the fields of history, science, mathematics, law, and theology, he was a solid stu- dent. He became proficient in mathematics, which naturally turned his attention to surveying; and while we find in 1745 that he had not entirely deserted his trade, in that year he became surveyor of lands for his county. This position was highly remunerative,-surveyors often figure in the inven- tories of colonial times,-and Sherman soon became a real- estate owner.
He passed the decade between 1750 and 1760 in trade, though in 1754 he was admitted to the bar; he also utilized his knowledge of astronomy, and published an almanac, which he continued over ten years. His political life began the year after he was admitted to the practice of law; his first office was justice of the peace, and the same year he was elected to the General Assembly. The age of thirty-eight found him a judge; two years later he removed to New. Haven, and discontinuing his law practice, confined his atten- tion to mercantile business.
In his new home, political honors awaited him: in 1764 he was again elected to the General Assembly, and two years later to the upper house of the legislature. The same year he became a judge of the Superior Court. He was elected an Assistant eighteen years, and resigned his position as judge on becoming, in 1789, a member of the national House of Representatives. As already noted he had been a member of the great convention which framed the Constitution in 1787. Other honors fell to him, or rather he was eagerly sought for other utilities: he was treasurer of Yale College for a
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decade, a reviser of the statutes of Connecticut, and mayor of his adopted city from the time of its incorporation until his death.
Roger Sherman was like his elder colleague Benjamin Franklin : their public careers were analogous, the result of the office seeking the man; they outgrew the boundaries of one State, and their lives are a portion of national history. It is said that Sherman accomplished, at the age of twenty, what is considered greater than to conquer cities,-namely, a mas- tery of his passions; he was noted and esteemed for his calm- ness of nature and evenness of disposition. His rationality was his distinguishing trait : common-sense in him rose almost to genius.
That intellectual and statesmanlike qualities are hereditary, as proved by Mr. Galton, is exemplified in Roger Sherman's descendants-three of his grandsons occupied seats in the United States Senate. Their noble ancestor was elected to that body in 1791, but did not finish his term of office, as his death occurred at New Haven, July 23, 1793.
Among the Connecticut delegates to the Philadelphia con- vention in 1776 was William Williams, a son-in-law of Jon- athan Trumbull. He was born in Lebanon, April 18, 1731; was a graduate of Harvard, a member of the Committee of Correspondence and Safety, and served in the Continental Congress. He died Aug. 2, 1811.
From the Southern province of Georgia came Lyman Hall, as a delegate to the convention called to proclaim the colonies independent; he was born at Wallingford in 1725, and grad- uated from Yale in 1747. He made choice of the medical profession, and emigrated to Sunbury, Georgia. He was a member of the provincial convention which voted that Geor- gia should join the confederacy of the States, also of the Con-
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tinental Congress from 1775 to 178 1, and governor of Geor- gia in 1783. He died in Burke County, Georgia, Oct. 19, I790.
The convention which first promulgated a declaration of the independence of the United States, known as the Meck- lenberg Declaration of Independence,-to whose reality we do not commit ourselves,-is said to have been held in the Court House at Charlotte, North Carolina. A member of that convention, and one of its promoters, was Waightstill Avery. He was born in Groton, Connecticut, May 3, 1745 ; studied law in Maryland, and began the practice of his pro- fession in 1769, in Mecklenberg County, North Carolina. He was active in civil affairs, served as a colonel of militia dur- ing the war, and was the first State attorney-general of North Carolina. He died in Burke County, March 15, 1821.
Republics are proverbially ingrates; also proverbially, "Put not your trust in princes" : the fact is that honors or dishonors are even. The most faithful servants of either, at times, suf- fer indignities for which no subsequent vindication can fully atone, or entirely remove from the victims the stain of calum- nies engendered by political feuds. Such a sufferer was Silas Deane. He was born at Groton Dec. 24, 1737, graduating from Yale on attaining his majority; and engaged in mer- cantile business at Wethersfield. He was appointed delegate to the first Continental Congress, and became active in the formation of a naval force for the colonies. At the close of the year 1775, Congress appointed a committee for the sole purpose of holding secret communication with friends of America in foreign countries; the colonies were desirous of receiving recognition from, and obtaining alliances with, the European powers. In March, 1776, Silas Deane was appointed the first diplomatic agent for the embryo nation.
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From the painting by Alonzo Chappell.
BARON DEKALB INTRODUCING LAFAYETTE TO SILAS DEANE
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His instructions were to proceed to the French court, and operate there and elsewhere on the Continent; to obtain clothes and munitions of war for an army of 25,000 men, and to solicit the alliance of France if the colonies succeeded in attaining their independence.
Deane arrived in Paris in the summer of 1776, disguised as a private merchant; he received courteous treatment, but though Louis XV. was pleased at the break between Great Britain and her colonies, he feared to involve his country in open hostilities. Some of his advisers also had sense to see that a nominal autocracy would be mad to encourage democ- racy and rebellion. Previous to Deane's arrival, the famous Beaumarchais became acquainted with Arthur Lee, the Lon- don correspondent of Congress; secret negotiations were entered into between them, to supply the colonies with muni- tions of war. When Deane arrived in Paris, he was intro- duced to Beaumarchais by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, and completed the arrangements whereby $200,000 worth of arms and military stores were sent to America.
Congress, in September 1776, appointed Franklin, Deane, and Jefferson commissioners to the Court of France; the lat- ter declined the appointment, and Arthur Lee was substituted. This change in the formation of the commission was the beginning of Deane's downfall. Lee was of a jealous and glum temperament, and was envious of Deane's success in completing the arrangements which he had begun. Lee's ambition was the cause of discord among the commissioners ; he accused Deane of misappropriation of moneys, and of giv- ing promises of commissions to French officers, which Con- gress could not fulfil. These insinuations of the querulous Lee, suported by the testimony of other malcontents, caused a division in Congress which resulted in the recall of Deane;
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he arrived in America in August 1778, and was exasperated by the treatment received and the false reports against him. He met the charge of misappropriating the funds with the statement that his vouchers were in Europe. He was com- pelled to return for his papers; and so unjust was Congress, that, owing to the influence of Lee and his supporters, they refused to allow Deane his bill of expenses. Though Frank- lin testified to his honesty and private worth, the machina- tions of his enemies succeeded, and Deane was driven into obscurity; he died in poverty at Deal, England, Aug. 23, 1789. Over a half-century after his demise, Congress liqui- dated the country's money indebtedness to his heirs; and his memory has been purged of unjust suspicions in the minds of the better informed.
In the first Connecticut delegation to the Continental Con- gress was Eliphalet Dyer, born at Windham Sept. 28, 1721. Graduating from Yale in 1740, he became a lawyer, and was a member of the Connecticut Assembly for seventeen years. He commanded a regiment during the French and Indian War. In 1763 we find him in England, as agent of the Sus- quehanna Company, in which he was interested. Colonel Dyer was a member of the Stamp Act Congress, and of the Continental Congress during the war, excepting in the year 1779; he was chief justice of the Superior Court for four years. He died in his native town May 13, 1807.
The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union bear - the signatures of Titus Hosmer and Andrew Adams. The former was born in Middletown in 1736, of English parent- age; his grandfather was an officer in Cromwell's army, and on the accession of Charles II. emigrated to America and set- tled at Middletown. Titus Hosmer graduated from Yale in 1757, and went into the law, becoming an able and honorable
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attorney; he was a member of the Continental Congress, and died in the prime of life, at Middletown, Aug. 4, 1780. His colleague, Andrew Adams, was born in Stratford, Janu- ary 1736; on his graduation from Yale in 1760, he was admitted to the bar; three years afterwards he removed to Litchfield. He was a member of the Continental Congress, an adroit and able lawyer, besides being a learned judge. Mr. Adams died in his adopted town, Nov. 26, 1797.
The eastern part of the State was represented in the Con- tinental Congress by Richard Law, son of Governor Jonathan Law, born in New Milford, March 17, 1732; he graduated from Yale at eighteen, and having completed the study of law, removed to New London. He served in Congress in 1777-8, and also in 1781-4; an able student of jurisprudence, he assisted Roger Sherman in the revision of the statutes of the State; was chief justice of the Superior Court, and Wash- ington appointed him judge of the District Court of the United States. Judge Law was for over twenty years mayor of his adopted town, where he died Jan. 26, 1806.
Among the early governors of the State of Vermont was Thomas Chittenden, born at East Guilford, now Madison, Jan. 6, 1730; he emigrated to Salisbury in 1751, and before the breaking out of the Revolutionary War removed to the New Hampshire grants, settling at Williston. Governor Chittenden was prominent in the early councils of the new State, was a leader in the convention that declared her inde- pendence, and helped to frame the first Constitution; he was elected governor in 1778, and filled the office, with the excep- tion of one year, until his death at Williston, Aug. 24, 1797.
Connecticut can point with pride to the labors of her dele- gates, among the powerful intellects who gathered at Phila- delphia in the summer of 1787, to formulate a stable con-
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stitution. Conservative, watchful, alert, endowed by nature with eloquence in debate, versed in legal lore, their influence swayed a body composed of the foremost representatives of American political talent. The dean of the delegation, Roger Sherman, had been associated with other national gatherings, and brought an already solid fame with him. He was exceeded in seniority of age by only one member of the con- vention-the revered Franklin; his two colleagues, Johnson and Ellsworth, were faithful representatives of a people whose government in the past had been ultra-democratic in principle, yet where the voice of the minority had always received consideration by the majority.
William Samuel Johnson, the son of the Father of Episco- pacy in Connecticut, was born in Stratford, Oct. 7, 1727; after graduating from Yale (where his father was loth to send him, thinking a colonial college of little worth) in 1744, he adopted law as a profession. He was a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress, and from 1761 to 1771 was Connecti- cut's agent in England. While residing in London, he became personally acquainted with Dr. Samuel Johnson, and on his return to America, he carried on a correspondence with the mighty Ursus Major. He became a judge of the Superior Court of Connecticut, and was a member of Congress from 1784 to 1787. Judge Johnson filled other important offices, which are mentioned elsewhere in this work. He died in his native town, Nov. 14, 1819.
A noted historian has said, "never was harmony between private and public virtue more complete than that which existed in the character of Oliver Ellsworth," who was born at Windsor April 29, 1745. His father brought him up in the characteristic and needful virtues of the hard New Eng- land life, work, frugality, and forethought; but he was proud
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of the boy's precocious intellect, encouraged him, and had him alternate physical labors with preparatory studies for college. Oliver entered Yale at seventeen, but decided that he could obtain better advantages at the College of New Jer- sey (now Princeton) ; and in 1766 graduated there .. After five years' law study, intermingled with farming, he began the practice of law; appointed State's attorney, he removed to Hartford, and on the opening of hostilities took an active part. He was a member of the Continental Congress from 1776 to 1780, and was elected to the Council of Connecticut; in 1784 he was made judge of the Superior Court. Judge Ellsworth after his retirement from national affairs, of which further mention will be made, declined the office of Chief Justice of Connecticut on account of an incurable internal disease. His death occurred six months later at Windsor, on Nov. 26, 1807.
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CHAPTER XIII CONNECTICUT BEFORE THE ADOPTION OF A FEDERAL CONSTITUTION
A T the close of the Revolutionary war, public affairs were in a chaotic state; while the inde- pendence of the United States had been acknowledged by foreign powers, the internal governments of the States were not uniform, and their diverging interests did not tend to the advantage of the body politic. The Articles of Confederation and Per- petual Union, which, with the tardy adoption by Maryland, were finally ratified by all the colonies, became a frame of government for the United States.
It would have been devoid of diplomacy and policy to offer, at this critical period in the nation's existence, a govern- ment armed with controlling power over States antagonistic in interests and jealous of each other; therefore the defects in the Articles of Confederation were due to the exigencies of the times. At the conclusion of peace, the fear of a com- mon enemy being eradicated, the people became jealous of the powers of Congress. The freemen dreaded lest they had deposed one set of despotic rulers, only to have their places filled with demagogues of their own production.
The Continental Congress in 1778, at the solicitation of Washington, granted to officers of the army half-pay for life, subject to certain reservations by Congress. This caused uneasiness amongst the people, who looked upon it as a fore- runner of a pension list, to create a subsidized army as the henchmen of a despotism. Congress in 1783 attempted to mitigate these impressions by commuting the half-pay for life to a full five-years' pay; putting it on the ground of recompensing the officers for the depreciation of the Con- tinental currency in which they were paid. There was much popular indignation against this, for the reason that while an officer was allowed five years' pay, the rank and file were to
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receive only one year. The feeling against the officers was augmented by the formation of a society among them, at the time of disbandment of the army, to which they gave the name of The Cincinnati; that is, those who had left their farms to save their country, and the war being over, returned to them. The society was in fact harmless enough; but the people imagined it a sort of Masonic order for the purpose of dividing up public offices among themselves. Malcontents throughout the country, aided by inflammatory publications in the newspapers, strove to arouse prejudices against both Congress and the officers. The feeling in Connecticut was more bitter and general than in her sister States, owing to her extreme democracy. The distrust of Congress was inflamed among the populace by the receipt of one Burke's pamphlet, in which he claimed that the organization of the Cincinnati was an attempt to form two classes among the people: the first a hereditary nobility, consisting of the military officers and the influential families of prominent men; the second of the people or plebeians.
Connecticut's case in regard to the Articles of Confedera- tion was peculiar. For over one hundred and fifty years she had preserved autonomy to her people and had defied every vestige of authority not legitimately obtained from them. She was an exponent of State sovereignty; but the desolation inflicted by the war, which destroyed her foreign commerce, impoverished her coast towns, and bankrupted her merchants, forced her reluctantly to make even State rights subordinate to a national power, but to just the extent impera- tive and no further.
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