JAMES RENWICK, LL.D.

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CHAPTER I.

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Introduction. – Memoir of the Family of Clinton.

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In undertaking a biography of Dewitt Clinton, a task of no little difficulty is to be performed. Few men have been more the object of virulent animosity or of more exalted praise. It is, therefore, hardly possible to obtain any reasonable estimate of his character and public services from the testimony of his contemporaries; a part of whom sought to sink him below the level in popular esteem of which he was certainly worthy, while others, perhaps, endeavoured to raise him to a standing to which he was hardly entitled. In such conflicting testimony, the truth can with difficulty be reached.

It will be necessary, too, in describing his career, to open anew the wounds of political discord. In the violent contests between two great and powerful parties, which preceded the war of 1812, and in the continual fluctuations of opinion which have since occurred, there was hardly any distinguished individual of our state who has not at one time been opposed to Clinton, and at another united with him in the pursuit of the same political object; and of these many still survive. There were also others, who, opposed to him personally in the early period of his life, continued that opposition to the hour of his death, and seem to have been guided finally by no other principle but that of being found in the party where he was not; and there have been some who sunk all other considerations in devoted attachment to his fortunes.

Those who were so long his open enemies, however, prey not upon the character of the dead; and those who, with fair and manly feelings, supported him when his course was consistent with their views of state and national policy, and acted against him without personal motives when their opinions did not coincide with his, cannot be offended by a narrative, intended to be impartial, of his eventful career. There are those, however, who meanly flattered him when possessed of power, and as basely deserted him when the tide of politics set against him, to whom a candid account of the vicissitudes of his political life must recall disagreeable reflections; and there must be some of those who almost deified him while alive, who may feel disappointed at the coldness of the praises which this history awards him.

The name and family of Clinton are inseparably connected with the history of the Province and State of New-York. Under the royal government, George Clinton, a naval officer of high rank, was for a time chief-magistrate of the colony. A second of the same name, the uncle of the subject of our memoir, was the first governor of the state after its independence was declared. This office he held for eighteen years, and was distinguished, not only for a faithful discharge of the civil duties of his office, but for a brave though unsuccessful defence of the passes of the Highlands, at the head of the militia suddenly gathered to oppose the royal forces.

James Clinton, the father of Dewitt, was a brave and useful military officer in the war of 1756 and in that of the revolution; while a third of the name of George, the son of James and brother of Dewitt, represented the City of New-York in the Congress of the United States.

However unimportant we may justly view such pretensions as are founded on ancestral worth alone, and however politic it may be in a republican government to reject all claims to distinction growing out of such a cause, we may still feel, and with propriety gratify, a curiosity as to the race whence our eminent public servants have drawn their descent. In countries where an aristocracy prevails, the sons often derive all their distinction from the exploits and virtues of their sires; while in those where no such adventitious source of dignity exists, the merits of the descendant reflect back honour upon the memory of his progenitors.

The family which bears the name of Clinton is of Norman origin. Individuals belonging to it appear in the history of the Crusades, and figure in the chivalrous chronicles of Froissart and Monstrelet. For our own purposes, we need only go back to the immediate ancestor of the branch which settled in New-York, who was a gentleman of fortune and influence in the reign of Charles I. A cadet of the family of the Earls of Lincoln, he espoused, along with many other scions of noble houses, the royal side in the civil war. On the failure of that cause, he had attained a sufficient degree of eminence as its adherent to be too obnoxious to the victors to hope for safety. He therefore took refuge on the Continent. We next find him in Scotland, under circumstances which lead to the impression that he had accompanied Charles II. in the brave but unfortunate effort which that prince made to reconquer England at the head of the Scottish army. Here he married a lady of the noble house of Kennedy. After the disastrous battle of Worcester, he, with his wife, sought refuge in Ireland, in which country he died, leaving a son of the tender age of two years.

James Clinton, the son, made an attempt, on reaching the age of manhood, to regain the estate of his father, sequestered by the commonwealth for his adherence to the royal cause. Here he experienced the ingratitude which disgraced the restoration of the Stuarts. The estate was withheld on plea of an act of limitation, and no indemnity was granted to him. During his stay in England in presenting his claims, he wooed and wedded Elizabeth Smith, the daughter of an officer in the army of the Parliament. The fortune of this lady was sufficient to establish him respectably in Ireland, whither he returned on the failure of his claim upon royal gratitude.

It is not to be questioned, that the denial of what was not more than strict justice must have lessened, to a great degree, the feelings of loyalty to kings which James Clinton may have derived from his parents. His children, in addition, drew their maternal descent from the stern republicans who had doomed a monarch to the block. We therefore find Charles Clinton, his son, a dissenter from the established religion, and in opposition to the ruling party in Ireland.

While the revolution of 1689, and the accession of the House of Hanover, established the privileges of Englishmen on a surer foundation, Ireland was treated as a conquered country, and ruled by a small minority of her population upon principles of bigotry and intolerance. In order to escape the annoyance and oppression arising from this policy in the government, Charles Clinton, in the 40^th year of his age, resolved to emigrate to North America. In this determination he was joined by a number of his friends and neighbours, subject to the same disqualifications, who clustered around him as the leader of their enterprise. Pennsylvania was the proposed object of the voyage on which they embarked from Dublin in May, 1729. From want of skill or fidelity in the master of the vessel, the passage was prolonged to the month of October, when the members of the proposed colony were happy to be landed on the bleak and inhospitable peninsula of Cape Cod. In this disastrous voyage many of the passengers perished, and Charles Clinton lost an only son and one of his two daughters.

Their original intentions being thus frustrated, Charles Clinton and his associates remained for a time at Cape Cod, until a place of settlement could be chosen. This was at last found in the valley of the Walkill, in the present county of Orange. To this they removed in the spring of 1731.

The choice of the land for this settlement reflects credit on the sagacity of Charles Clinton. Up to this time the selection of lands had been principally directed by their capacity for the growth of grain. He, as the leader of a colony accustomed to pastoral occupations rather than tillage, sought for soil which should yield a rich and abundant pasturage, and thus formed the nucleus of that industrious body of Irish Presbyterians, whose luxuriant fields of grass, and the valued products of their milk, justify the scriptural appellation of the land of Goshen, which has been given to this pastoral region. Under the influence of that strong attachment to the land of their ancestors, which was not destroyed, this colony gave to their settlement the name of Little Britain.

In the early settlement of the Province of New-York, it had been customary for bands of emigrants to unite together under a leader for the purpose of mutual defence and support. Such leaders were, in many cases, persons of capital and enterprise, who sought, in the establishment of a colony, a profitable investment for themselves, in a property entailed upon their descendants. The policy of the early government, under both Batavian and English rule, favoured this mode of settlement; and grants were made of large tracts to their leaders, in order to be apportioned among their followers upon tenures almost feudal in their character. In this there was no real injustice, because much of the cost of the transportation of the emigrants from Europe was defrayed by the leader of the expedition, who also paid the fees, small though they might be, attendant upon issuing the patent, and extinguished the Indian claim. Such tenures still exist among us; and the occupiers of the land, forgetful of the circumstances under which their predecessors acquired their possessions, are apt to grumble at the moderate rents in kind, and personal services, which serve, in fact, to pay the cost of emigration and settlement. The companions of Charles Clinton, although they looked up to him as a leader, were not dependent in their circumstances. The settlement at Little Britain was therefore made on principles of strict equality, each head of a family acquiring in fee that portion of land which his capital or command of labour enabled him to occupy to advantage. In spite of this principle of equality, the superior intelligence and education of Charles Clinton gave him a consideration among his neighbours as elevated as if he had become possessed of manorial rights.

Although distant no more than sixty miles from New-York, and only eight from the bank of the Hudson, the settlement of Little Britain was a frontier post. The house of Charles Clinton was therefore fortified, as a security, not for himself and family alone, but as a refuge for his neighbours in threatened attacks from Indian enemies.

In becoming an integral part of a well-governed community, the supremacy of the laws was to be maintained, and he was forthwith named a justice of the peace. Before many years elapsed, his usefulness in this capacity was extended by his receiving the appointment of a judge of the Common Pleas for the county of Ulster, within the limits of which Little Britain at that time fell.

These offices, which were then exercised without emolument, and were, therefore, no object to those who might otherwise have sought them as a means of livelihood, furnish evidence of the high estimation in which Charles Clinton was held by his neighbours and by the government of the province. In an age of little litigation, his judicial duties did not interfere with the cultivation of his farm, nor prevent his attention to the education of his family. It has been seen that his first-born son died on the passage from Europe. Four others were born to him after his settlement at Little Britain. The two eldest of these chose the profession of medicine, and the second of them served as surgeon in the combined English and Continental army which took the Havannah in 1762.

James, the third son, was born in 1736, and was educated under the paternal roof. When the war of 1756 broke out, his father received the appointment of lieutenant-colonel in the militia of the province, and the son was, at the same time, named an ensign in his father’s regiment. In these capacities both were called into active service, and were present at the capture of Fort Frontenac in Upper Canada, on the site of the present town of Kingston.

The fourth son was called George, after the colonial governor of that name, who claimed and admitted the ties of consanguinity with the settler of the valley of the Walkill. George Clinton, who held for so many years the office of governor of the State of New-York, and died Vice-president of the United States, is too well known in American history to require to be commemorated by us. He was also an officer at the capture of Fort Frontenac.

James Clinton had attained, at the close of the French war in 1761, the rank of captain, and was successively promoted through the intermediate stations to the command of the second regiment of the Ulster county Militia, which he held at the commencement of the struggle for independence. His father did not live to see that contest, but died in the year 1773. James Clinton, in the interval between the close of the French war and the beginning of that of the revolution, married Miss Mary Dewitt, a descendant of a family from Holland. Four sons were the fruit of this union, of whom Dewitt, the subject of this Memoir, was the second.

On the commencement of the hostilities in 1775, James Clinton was among the first officers who were named by Congress to take commands in the army raised under its authority. His first appointment was as colonel in the New-York line; he was subsequently promoted to the rank of brigadier, and held the commission of major-general at the close of the war. He distinguished himself in the defence of the passes of the Highlands, when stormed by the British army in 1777. In this action he served under the command of his brother, then commanding, as governor of the state, the militia which had been called into active service, while the British forces were led by Sir Henry Clinton, the son of the colonial governor, in honour of whom George had been named.

He afterward commanded the forces collected in the Valley of the Mohawk to oppose the Indians and Tories who threatened the settlements of that region, and subsequently led his army to join that of General Sullivan, in the expedition which drove the Indians from their fastnesses. Of this united army he commanded the right wing, and contributed much to the success of that undertaking. In order to join Sullivan, it was necessary to make a military road from the Mohawk at Fort Plain to Lake Otsego. Here boats were to be built to convey the troops with their stores, and, in order to float them over the bars and shallows of the upper Susquehanna, a temporary flush of water was obtained by damming up the outlet of the lake.

He last appeared in arms at the siege of Yorktown, where he aided in the capture of Cornwallis and his army.

At the close of the Revolutionary war General James Clinton retired to his estate in Orange county. Here, however, he was not suffered to remain unemployed in the service of his native state, but was frequently called upon to exercise offices of high trust, and to perform legislative duties.

Such was the race from which the subject of our memoir derived his birth; and his own talents and distinguished public services, so far from requiring the aid of ancestral dignity to illustrate him, would have ennobled the family from which he sprung.

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Transcribed from the original text and html prepared by Bill Carr, last updated 12/10/99.