Princetonians, 1769-1775: A Biographical Dictionary

by Richard A. Harrison

Overview

This volume, the second in a series of biographical sketches of students who attended the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), brings the story of the College and its alumni to the beginning of the American Revolution. It records not only the contributions of the early sons of Nassau Hall to the formation of the Republic but also the role of the College itself as a major component in the evolution of the first national elite.

Originally published in 1981.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691615387
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #558
Pages:	624
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.10(d)

Read an Excerpt

Princetonians, 1769â"1775

A Biographical Dictionary

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By Richard A. Harrison

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04675-4

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CHAPTER 1

CLASS OF 1769

John Beatty, A.B.
William Lawrence Blair, A.B.
Joel Brevard, A.B.
Matthias Burnet, Jr., A.B.
William Channing, A.B.
Caleb Cooper
John Davenport, A.B.
John Rogers Davies, A.B.
Peter (Petrus) DeWitt, A.B.
John Henry III, A.B.
James Linn, A.B.
John Alexander McDougall, A.B.
Thomas Melvill (Melville), A.B.
Samuel Niles III, A.B.
Jesse Reed, A.B.
Samuel Stanhope Smith, A.B.
Philip Stockton
Elihu Thayer, A.B.
William Willcocks, Jr., A.B.
David Zubly, A.B.

John Beatty

John Beatty, A.B., A.M. 1772, physician, soldier, public official, and entrepreneur, was born on December 10, 1749, in Warwick, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He was the oldest son of Charles Clinton Beatty, an Irish immigrant who had been trained by William Tennent at the Log College and who then succeeded Tennent as pastor of the Presbyterian church in Neshaminy. The Reverend Mr. Beatty was an active missionary, a chaplain in the French and Indian War, and a trustee of the College from 1763 until his death in 1772. His wife, Anne, was the daughter of John Reading who had been president of New Jersey's Royal Council.

At the College John Beatty was one of the original members of the American Whig Society. His part in the commencement exercises of 1769 was to oppose an argument that "ridicule was not the test of truth."

From Nassau Hall, Beatty went to Philadelphia to study medicine under Benjamin Rush (A.B. 1760), who found him "idle but worthy." By 1772 he had opened his own practice, first in Princeton and then in Hartsville, Pennsylvania, near Neshaminy. Half in jest, he complained that both places were too healthy to offer him much of a living.

Beatty returned to Nassau Hall frequently. In November 1773 he enrolled his brother Charles Clinton Beatty (A.B. 1775) in the College, and on March 22, 1774, he married Mary Longstreet, the daughter of Richard Longstreet of Princeton. The ceremony was performed in Longstreet's home by President Witherspoon. After the birth of a daughter in April 1775, Beatty moved back to Princeton permanently, although he was in Neshaminy for several months thereafter. His daughter died in his absence.

All passionate Whigs, the four oldest Beatty brothers joined the Continental Army. In January 1776 John Beatty commanded a company in the Fifth Pennsylvania Battalion, and in June he was in New York to help build Fort Washington. After months of trying to stall the British occupation of the area, Beatty concluded that only a miracle could save the Americans. On November 16, 1776, as a major in command of the Sixth Pennsylvania Battalion, Beatty was captured along with the rest of the garrison at Fort Washington. He spent six months on a prison ship and a year on parole in Flatbush before being exchanged on May 8, 1778.

Three weeks later Beatty was named to replace Elias Boudinot as commissary general of prisoners for the Continental Army, with the rank of colonel. While he managed to spend most of his tenure at or near his home in Princeton, he found his responsibility for the care of enemy captives greatly complicated by congressional inaction and frugality. At one point he formally petitioned for a broader grant of authority, but Congress and the commander in chief pointedly refused. Washington was disturbed by the constant traffic between New Jersey and occupied New York, most of it under the commissary general's flag, and all of it vulnerable to pilferage and graft. To restrict that traffic he insisted that Beatty adhere strictly to a rigid chain of command; but in that chaotic situation a certain amount of informality was both useful and unavoidable. The sub rosa bartering between Beatty and his British counterpart, while exploitable for personal gain, also made the problem of supplying prisoners less onerous. Washington issued a specific ban on such trade in December 1779.

One week later, Beatty ordered some cloth from New York and was arrested. He faced a general court-martial in February 1780. Severely reprimanded by the court and by Washington, Beatty resigned his post, as he had said he wanted to do before his trial. His frustration with Congress grew further as he tried to find someone in Philadelphia with authority to accept his resignation and help settle his accounts.

Beatty rejoined his wife and son in Princeton, where he hoped to devote his first months as a civilian to his farm because he feared that his medical skills were rusty (though he had occasionally treated patients while on active duty). When he did resume his practice, public affairs again interrupted him. On November 16, 1783, he was elected by the state legislature to sit in the Continental Congress.

In Congress Beatty plunged into the midst of the controversy over the cession of western lands to the Confederation by those states that claimed title to them. Nonlanded states, many citizens of which had speculated heavily in western lands on the supposition that the old titles would be voided after the Revolution, refused to acknowledge the claims of the landed states. Beatty was a leader in the fight for the rights of the speculators. But the prospective cessions gave the landed states immense leverage, and Beatty failed both to secure his constituents' claims and to challenge the landed states' titles.

Of his congressional duties, Beatty was most interested in finances. A member of the committee to enforce requisitions from the states, he was disgusted by the inability of the Confederation to collect its money. The weaknesses of the system confirmed his growing attachment to the concept of a strong central government. Although he was reelected in November 1784, Beatty only reluctantly attended the session of Congress that opened in New York in May 1785. He left the city in June, more depressed than ever about the future of "a union already too feebly united." Retiring from public affairs to resume his practice in Princeton, he joined the Board of Trustees of the College in 1785 and was very active in the state medical society, of which he had been president in 1782.

Beatty was a member of New Jersey's ratifying convention for the Constitution in 1787. He owned £265 in loan office certificates at the time and so had a modest interest in the question of national debt assumption. He served for two years as treasurer of the College and was chosen a member and then speaker of the state assembly in 1789. In that capacity he presented the state's compliments to Washington in New York. Their old problems apparently forgotten, he and the president dined together.

Beatty was a charter member of the New Jersey Society of the Cincinnati and was an executive in the state's Masonic order. He remained a member of the Hunterdon County Militia, attaining the rank of brigadier general. His time for medicine was thus somewhat limited, although when yellow fever struck Philadelphia in September 1793, his old mentor Benjamin Rush made a point of describing the epidemic to Beatty and recommending — as Rush was wont to do — that the disease be treated with mercury.

When a fifth congressional district was created in New Jersey in that year, Beatty was the first man to represent it. The Third Congress was one of the most active in the early national period. Like all Federalists, Beatty was distressed by the growing opposition to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and outraged by the recent conduct of the French minister "Citizen" Edmond Charles Genêt. But the most pressing issue in the early session was the creation of a navy, a problem about which Beatty corresponded with his classmate Samuel Stanhope Smith and with President Witherspoon. American commerce and neutral rights were imperiled by the wars of the French Revolution. The nation was embroiled in a dispute with England over fulfillment of the Treaty of 1783. American vessels were subject to the depredations of the Barbary pirates. And as insurance rates tripled and American seamen were impressed by the Royal Navy or enslaved by the "Algerines," the debate over national defense was embittered by differences over the country's relations with England and revolutionary France.

Opposition to a navy came largely from western and southern members, who feared a threat to liberty, a drain on the treasury, and entanglement in world affairs. It proved to be a divisive sectional and partisan issue, and only after several close votes did Congress authorize six frigates. Beatty consistently supported the measure but he was not eager to incur London's permanent enmity. Accordingly, he worked to limit the concurrent resolution on nonintercourse with England, insisting only that previous wrongs be righted.

For most of his term in the House, Beatty again concentrated on finances. He was one of the minority of Federalists who softened an investigation of the Treasury Department and the national bank. Another of his committee assignments dealt with complaints about the whiskey excises. The committee accurately reported that opposition to the taxes continued in western areas, but it gave no hint of the rebellion that would erupt later in 1794.

After leaving Congress in 1795, Beatty was promptly chosen secretary of state of New Jersey by the legislature. He moved from Princeton to a new mansion on the Delaware in Trenton. Charged with the maintenance of the State House and its grounds, he financed the task by leasing the grounds for pastorage. He was on the committee that bought New Jersey's first governor's mansion in Trenton in 1798. He was also authorized to act as a stock commissioner for a company to build Trenton's first bridge across the Delaware, a project that was bound to compete with the packet service between Beatty's landing at Bloomsbury in south Trenton and Philadelphia from which he had derived a large part of his own fortune. But Beatty assured his income by becoming president of the Delaware Bridge Company and helping to select Bloomsbury as the site of the span.

After retiring from state office in 1805, Beatty was, with Isaac Smith (A.B. 1755), a founder of the Trenton Banking Company. He was chosen president of the firm in 1815, the year in which his wife died. He then married Mrs. Katherine De Klyn Lalor. A ruling elder of the Presbyterian church and a proprietor of the library company, Beatty was also a trustee of the Princeton Theological Seminary between 1822 and 1826. He had resigned from the College's board of trustees in 1802.

On April 30, 1826, Beatty suffered an apoplectic fit and died suddenly. Trenton newspapers of all political persuasions mourned him. His funeral, at the First Presbyterian Church in Trenton, was attended by leaders of New Jersey's educational, religious, political, and business communities. At his death, his estate was worth $15,656. His only surviving child was his son Richard Longstreet Beatty (A.B. 1797).

William Lawrence Blair

William Lawrence Blair, A.B., lawyer, was born about 1747, probably in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, where his father, Reverend John Blair, was pastor of the Rocky Spring, Middle Spring, and Big Spring Presbyterian congregations from 1742 to an uncertain date near the beginning of the French and Indian War. In 1757 John Blair succeeded his older brother Samuel Blair — with whom he had migrated to America from Ireland and received schooling at William Tennent's famous Log College — as pastor of the congregation and master of a famous school founded by Samuel at Fagg's Manor, Chester County, Pennsylvania. It was undoubtedly there that young William began his preparation for college. He probably entered Nassau Hall by the fall of 1767, for it was then that his father became Professor of Divinity and Moral Philosophy and vice-president of the College. This appointment was one of the moves made by the trustees following the death of President Finley, before they succeeded in persuading John Witherspoon to accept the presidency of the College. John Blair served as vice-president until Witherspoon took over in August 1768 and resigned his professorship as of the commencement at which William graduated.

The Blair family had been closely identified with the College since its founding. Reverend Samuel Blair was one of the founding trustees under the charter of 1746 and continued under the second charter of 1748 until his death in 1751. His son, Samuel Blair (A.B. 1760), had been elected president of the College for a brief time in the interim between the administrations of Finley and Witherspoon. William's father, John, had been awarded an honorary A.M. in 1760 and was elected a trustee in 1766, a position he resigned upon taking the professorship. William's younger brother was John Durbarrow Blair (A.B. 1775), whose middle name was taken from their mother's maiden name, Elizabeth Durbarrow (the daughter of John Durbarrow of Philadelphia). Samuel Stanhope Smith (A.B. 1769), William's classmate and later president of the College, was a cousin through his mother, Elizabeth Blair Smith, a daughter of Samuel Blair. In 1774 William's sister Rebecca would marry Reverend William Linn (A.B. 1772). Nothing more is known of William Blair's career in the College than that at his commencement he shared in a Latin syllogistic debate with his classmates Joel Brevard and Peter DeWitt.

A long-established tradition at Princeton maintains that William L. Blair went to Kentucky after graduation. This tradition may have grown out of some confusion of William's career with that of his younger brother James, who did settle in Kentucky and was the father of Francis Preston Blair, publisher of the Washington Globe from 1830 and active in national politics for a generation thereafter. Actually, William studied law, presumably in Philadelphia, where he was admitted to the bar in May 1773. In that same year he was practicing law in nearby Chester County, where he seems to have resided and practiced for a number of years. In the 1780 tax rates for Chester County, and in the same year, in the fourth class of the Chester County Militia, William L. Blair, Esq. appears as an "inmate." In April 1786 William L. Blair is listed as judge advocate for the Chester County Militia. If perchance the William Blair that we discuss here was the same man as the William Blair of East Nantmill Township, Chester County, at the time of the census of 1790, he headed a family including, in addition to himself, one free white male under 16 and four free white females; so presumably he was married and the father of one son and three daughters. But no other evidence regarding his marriage and his children has been found.

Within the following decade he had moved to Philadelphia, where he is listed in two directories for 1799 as William L. Blair, attorney at law, with an address at 67 South Fifth Street. In a directory for 1802, he is listed in the same way, except that his address was then 62 North Fifth Street. By 1805 the address was 5 Plum, by 1810 it had become 318 South Second Street, and in 1811 it was 125 South Eleventh. It was probably there that he died on August 17, 1812, at the age of 65.

Joel Brevard

Joel Brevard, A.B., officer in the Revolution, was probably the younger brother of Ephraim Brevard (A.B. 1768), and if so, the son of John Brevard and Jane MacWhorter, sister of Alexander MacWhorter (A.B. 1757). But he could also have been a first cousin to Ephraim. The family traced its origins to the John Brevard who settled in Maryland early in the century and whose three sons, Robert, John, and Zebulon, migrated to North Carolina at some time after 1744. John and Robert had settled on the headwaters of the Rocky River by 1747 or 1748 in that part of Anson County that became Rowan County in 1753- Of the two brothers, John became the more prominent, serving as justice of the peace as early as 1749 and in the assembly in 1754, on the Rowan Committee of Safety in 1775, and as a member of the Provincial Congress in the fall of 1776. His oldest daughter, Mary, was married to General William L. Davidson, and according to tradition, all eight of John's sons served in the Revolutionary War.

The surviving records of the College provide no clue as to where Joel Brevard may have been prepared for college or when he first came to Princeton. It can only be reported that on commencement day of 1769 he participated with William Blair and Peter DeWitt in a Latin syllogistic dispute of the proposition: "Magnitudinem, Distantiam 8c figuram esse proprie, non Objecta Visus, sed tantum Tactus." And to this it can be added that the College catalogue of 1786 lists him as dead.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Illustrations, pg. ix
• Preface, pg. xi
• Introduction, pg. xvii
• Abbreviations and Short Titles Frequently Used, pg. xxxiii
• Class of 1769, pg. 1
• Class of 1770, pg. 63
• Class of 1771, pg. 129
• Class of 1772, pg. 175
• Class of 1773, pg. 261
• Class of 1774, pg. 357
• Class of 1775, pg. 447
• Appendix, pg. 541
• Index, pg. 551