Person Page - 482

     Susanna Smith was born on 24 December 1729.^2,3 She was the daughter of Judge William Smith and Mary Hett.¹ Susanna Smith married Robert James Livingston, son of James Livingston and Maria Kierstede, on 14 September 1747.⁴ Susanna Smith died on 20 March 1791 at the age of 61.⁴

     Susanna Smith was born on 18 November 1750 in White Plains, Westchester County, New York.¹ She was the daughter of Dr. William Hooker Smith and Sarah Brown. Susanna Smith married Dr. Lemuel Guistine. Susanna Smith died on 12 June 1778 in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, at the age of 27.¹

     Susanna Smith was the daughter of Rev. John Smith and Mehitable Hooker.¹

     Susanna Smith was born on 22 March 1782.¹ She was the daughter of Dr. William Hooker Smith and Margery Kellog.¹

     Susanna Wendell Smith was born on 31 March 1780 on Friday morning.¹ She was the daughter of Rev. Peter Thacher Smith and Elizabeth Wendell.¹

     Thomas Smith was born on 19 September 1675 in Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire.^1,2 He was the son of William Smith and Elizabeth Hartley.¹ Thomas Smith married Susanna Odell, daughter of Thomas Odell and Christiana Goodman, on 13 May 1696 in Buckinghamshire ?² On 31 October 1696 he is named in a lease and called yeoman.³ Thomas Smith and Susanna Odell emigrated in 1715 from Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire to New York. Three of their older sons had preceded them (however Carver states that Susanna died in England before her husband left for New York).⁴ He was the founder of the First Presbyterian Church in that city. By the advice of the trustees of Yale College, he secured the services of Jonathan Edwards, then a youth of nineteen years, who became the first pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New York City, which proved to be the first stepping-stone to his wonderful career as a minister.² Thomas Smith died on 17 November 1745 in New York City at the age of 70.

     Thomas Smith was the son of Thomas Smith and Susanna Odell.¹ He owned much property in New York, and also a large tract in Orange County, at Smith's Clove (now Turner's station on the Erie Railroad), where he resided.²

     Thomas Smith married Mary Corwin on 9 May 1701.¹ Thomas Smith died on 19 February 1742 in Saco.

     Thomas Smith was born on 2 October 1770 on Tuesday noon.¹ He was the son of Rev. Peter Thacher Smith and Elizabeth Wendell.¹

     Thomas Smith was born on 11 March 1733/34.² He was the son of Judge William Smith and Mary Hett.¹ Thomas Smith married Elizabeth Lynsen, daughter of Abraham Lynsen, on 22 November 1758.^1,2 Thomas Smith died on 7 November 1795 in Haverstraw, New York, at the age of 61 leaving a large family.²

      The address of Dr. Thomas Smith was Seymour Street West, Connought Square, London.²

     Rev. Thomas Smith was born on 10 March 1702 in Boston, Massachusetts.² He was the son of Thomas Smith and Mary Corwin.² Rev. Thomas Smith was ordained on 8 March 1726/27 at Portland, Maine.² He married Sarah Tyng on 12 September 1728. Rev. Thomas Smith married Elizabeth Hunt on 12 August 1766 in Windham, Maine.¹ Rev. Thomas Smith died on 23 May 1795 in Portland, Maine, at the age of 93.²

     Thomas Charles Smith was the son of Thomas Smith Jr. and Mary Taylor.¹

     Thomas Hollis Smith was born in 1790.¹ He was the son of William Stephens Smith and Abigail Adams.¹ Thomas Hollis Smith died in 1791.¹

     Thomas Smith Jr. was the son of Thomas Smith and Elizabeth Lynsen.¹ Thomas Smith Jr. married Mary Taylor, daughter of John Taylor, on 4 December 1786.² Thomas Smith Jr. died in 1815 in Haverstraw.¹

     Thomas M. Smith was born in 1881 in England.¹ He married Mabelle L. Gardner, daughter of Everett M. Gardner and Minnie W. Lovett, on 3 August 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts.¹

     Velma Morse Smith was born on 19 December 1872 in New Orleans, Louisiana.¹ He was the son of Alexander Smith and Elizabeth Phoebe Sewall.² Velma Morse Smith is recorded as Morse Smith.³

     Walter Smith was born circa 1692.² He married Susanna Brooke, daughter of Clement Brooke and Jane Sewall, circa 1714.¹ Walter Smith died in 1734.²

     William Smith married Elizabeth Hartley, daughter of James Hartley and (unknown) (Unknown), on 4 September 1661.^1,2 Served in the army of the Commonwealth. They moved from the Isle of Ely to Newport Pagnell.³ William Smith made a will dated 28 February 1681/82 (34 Chas II).⁴ He died in 1682.^3,5 He was buried in the aisle on the south side of the font in the Parish Church at Newport Pagnell.⁵

     William Smith was born on 7 October 1762 in White Plains, Westchester County, New York.¹ He was the son of Dr. William Hooker Smith and Sarah Brown.

     William Smith was also known as "Port Royal" Smith.¹ He was born circa 1662.² He was the son of William Smith and Elizabeth Hartley.¹ William Smith married Frances Peartree, daughter of Col. William Peartree and Anna [Unknown], on 12 December 1693 in Port Royal, Jamaica.^1,3 On 31 October 1696 he is named in a lease as William Smith of the Hand of Jamaica, merchant.⁴ William Smith died on 15 October 1736 in New York.²

     William Smith was the son of William Smith and Frances Peartree.¹

     William Smith was the son of Rev. William Smith and Elizabeth Quincy.¹

     William Smith married secondly Anne Vining Heron, daughter of Patrick Heron and Martha Bide, on 24 November 1783 in St. Mary's, Marylebone.¹

     Captain William Smith was born on 24 March 1666/67 in Charleston. He married Abigail Fowle circa 1699/0 in Charlestown.² Captain William Smith died on 3 June 1730 in Charleston at the age of 63.

      William Smith’s grandfather had been a merchant in England before immigrating to New York City in 1715. His father graduated from Yale College in 1722, became a successful lawyer, and in 1753 was appointed a member of the Council of the province of New York; his mother was from the French speaking Huguenot settlement of New Rochelle, New York. Smith graduated from Yale College in 1745 and articled in his father’s law office. Licensed attorney at law in October 1750, he quickly established a lucrative practice. He became particularly skilled in the defence of what were often ill-defined landed estates, and he was prominent in efforts to raise the standards of the legal profession by adherence to British forms. In 1763 Governor Robert Monckton offered Smith, then only 35 years old, the position of chief justice of the Supreme Court. Smith hesitated, because his father had just been appointed third judge of the same court, and the opportunity was lost. In 1767, when his father retired from the colonial council, Smith was appointed to succeed him.

From an early age Smith was a prolific writer. After several literary ventures, in 1753–54 he co-authored the Independent Reflector, New York’s first magazine. With one of his friends, William Livingston, he compiled the first collection of the Laws of New-York from the year 1691 to 1751, inclusive, published in 1752, and so acquired the basic material for The history of the province of New-York, which he published in London in 1757. This work served him well over the years, giving him a wide reputation as an authority on the colony, and he was often referred to as “the historian of New York”; 20 years later he began a second volume, published posthumously. In 1757 he was also the co-author, again with Livingston, of a pamphlet entitled A review of the military operations in North-America, condemning the direction of the Seven Years’ War. In this polemic he took his first look at his future home: “Canada must be demolished – Delenda est Carthago – or we are undone.” By now a compulsive writer, from 1763 to 1787 Smith kept a journal, intended partly as a confidant but chiefly as a historical source book, and from its publication in the mid 20th century it has served as such to historians of the British empire in North America.

Smith’s talents as a writer were frequently enlisted in partisan causes. New York politics were dominated by family groupings struggling for control of patronage, and Smith espoused his father’s long-standing antipathy to the De Lancey party. A Presbyterian, he opposed such Anglican enterprises as the foundation in 1754 of King’s College (the future Columbia University) and the establishment of a bishop in America. William Livingston, John Morin Scott, and Smith became known as the “New York Triumvirate,” whose object, one critic observed, was “to pull down Church and State.” John Adams reported that Smith had “acted an intrepid, an honest and a prudent part” in the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, for which he earned the cognomen “Patriotic Billy.” After his appointment to the council, however, Smith became more cautious and as his land speculations increased he turned away from some of his youthful enthusiasms. He preferred to oppose the De Lancey party and the Anglican church covertly and represented himself to successive governors as the man “above party” on whom they could rely for disinterested advice. Nevertheless, when New York began to drift into rebellion, there were those among both radical and conservative opponents of Britain who looked to him for support. In 1776 he moved to his country house in a vain attempt to sit out the crisis in rural retirement, and he refused to pledge allegiance to the new state. After two years on parole in Albany, he was finally forced to take a stand and joined the British in New York City. Although he recognized that both sides were at fault in the conflict, he believed that nothing could pardon the revolutionaries’ desire to shatter the unity of the empire, and he declared his allegiance to the crown in 1778. To the British he was a prize equivalent to a repentant Samuel Adams, a sign for gentlemen “who had been lying on their oars,” though there were reservations: “few Men so able, if he could be trusted.” Two years later he was rewarded by appointment as chief justice of New York.

Sir Guy Carleton*’s arrival as commander-in-chief of the British forces in 1782 shaped the future course of Smith’s life. The two men quickly established a rapport, conversing frequently about ideas of empire and imperial management. Smith had long been an advocate of a union of the American colonies: between 1765 and 1775 he had written several papers urging a united legislature consisting of a lord lieutenant with wide discretionary powers, a council, and an assembly chosen by indirect election. Individual colonial governments would remain as they were beneath this superstructure; the continental assembly would handle all royal requisitions for taxation. Since Carleton had initially hoped to exercise viceregal powers in New York, and was disgusted by the way his command had been shackled by the British government’s determination to accept defeat, he saw great merit in the imperial structure Smith proposed, especially when Smith insinuated that the commander-in-chief was the obvious man to head it.

The British evacuated New York in 1783, and Carleton and Smith sailed for England on the same ship in December, Carleton to face a government unappreciative of his true merits, Smith to learn the numbing routine of office-seeker and claimant for compensation, although London was also a broadening experience in that he met and found himself at ease with many of the dissenting reformers of the day. Smith’s fortunes were inextricably tied to those of Carleton, who had recommended his appointment as chief justice of Quebec while they were both still in New York. Put simply, if Carleton became governor of Quebec, Smith would become chief justice; if not, Smith’s future was blank. It gradually became clear that even compensation for his losses as a loyalist might depend upon Carleton’s success. He heard that William Pitt himself had some “Doubt of my Principles” in the recent war.

Smith viewed Quebec in the context of what he hoped was a British determination to reunite the empire in North America, and he had to encourage an often surly Carleton, determined upon a peerage before accepting any post there, with visions of what might be achieved. If the surviving colonies were put under central direction and made a shining example of the superior wisdom of British forms, then the disorganized Americans would repent of their independence and perhaps “place themselves under the same protecting Power.” Carleton should be governor general of all the provinces and captain-general of the militia, with control of the navy and full authority to negotiate and conclude treaties within North America. He alone would be in contact with the imperial government, and all North American officials would correspond with him. He should approve all executive decisions, control Indian affairs and frontier defence, regulate commerce, grant crown lands and charters for towns, universities, and other public institutions, and choose all officers usually appointed by the British government. He should also have the power to confer for the levying of general taxes with a two-chamber house drawing members from all the colonies. The British government’s conception of what was needed in North America, however, differed from Smith’s. When Carleton was finally commissioned on 15 April 1786, it was not as governor general of a federation of colonies but as multiple governor of Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, with none of the overriding powers Smith had envisaged. Ennobled as Baron Dorchester, he was sent to Quebec on a fact-finding mission, to advise ministers on the constitutional problems of the province.

Dorchester and Smith arrived at Quebec on 23 Oct. 1786, and Smith took the oaths of office as councillor and chief justice on 2 November. Once again denied a full measure of power, Carleton retired from the political scene and did not attend the council. Since the next in line, Lieutenant Governor Henry Hope, was frequently absent, Smith was left to preside over meetings, and his position was strengthened through his chairmanship of numerous council committees. The council was sharply divided along party lines drawn in the names of national groups. The majority French party saw in Smith a powerful threat of anglicization, and the hostility of its leader, Adam Mabane, was doubly assured by the fact that he himself had hoped to become chief justice. Other judges, Thomas Dunn* and Pierre-Méru Panet*, regarded him askance as a newcomer and an American, who retained large land holdings in Vermont and New York and whose reputation for equivocal conduct had preceded him. But since the English party had no leader of Mabane’s calibre, men such as Hugh Finlay* and Samuel Jan Holland* at first looked to Smith to fill that role.

Smith made no secret of his wish to see massive anglophone immigration to strengthen Quebec through increased population, and one of the ways he hoped to encourage it was by anglicizing the legal system of the colony. He and Mabane soon came into conflict in a council committee called to report on the courts of justice. Among the reforms Smith proposed were new judicial districts for the loyalist settlements and the extension of optional jury trials, which since 1785 had been permitted in some civil cases, to all personal actions. Mabane, however, opposed further encroachment of English legal practice on French civil law procedures. Meanwhile, only two months after his arrival, Smith had caused a major controversy by upsetting the customary interpretation of the Quebec Act. He reversed the decision found by Mabane in the Court of Common Pleas in a case involving William Grant*, of Saint-Roch, and Alexander Gray by demonstrating that French civil law did not apply to natural-born British subjects. He argued that the Quebec Act, which had expressly granted Canadian laws to Canadians, had not expressly denied English law to British-born subjects, who were therefore entitled to their natural rights. Although he had good legal precedent for his opinion, Smith chose not to mention it, and it seemed that he was destroying singlehanded a system of laws widely regarded as holding back a flood of British immigration. His legal decision was a political challenge to the French party in the council. When he tried to embody his views in a law, Paul Roch* de Saint-Ours counterattacked by introducing a bill to abolish optional jury trials, as well as the English law of evidence in force in commercial cases since 1777. On 22 March 1787 the council voted not to commit Smith’s bill for consideration. Manœuvring to avoid defeat, Smith seized on a protest against Saint-Ours’ bill, in the form of a petition from the English merchants, as a reason to shelve it. The merchants’ protest was argued before the council on 14 April by the attorney general, James Monk*, who condemned the past administration of justice in such strong terms that a formal inquiry was unavoidable. Smith, the only judge not castigated by Monk, was mainly responsible for conducting the investigation and was uncomfortably prominent as one disappointed litigant after another denounced his colleagues. The accumulated evidence was sent to London with no suggestion as to what should be done; the judicial system had been discredited but continued as before; and Smith, blamed for the impasse, lost support among the English party. In April 1789 Monk was relieved of his office and replaced by Alexander Gray; feeling that he had been made the scapegoat, Monk became a bitter opponent of the chief justice.

Smith continued his efforts to clear the way for immigration when he supported, or possibly inspired, Charles-Louis Tarieu* de Lanaudière’s petition in January 1788 to convert his seigneury to freehold tenure. This effort failed, but in 1790 Smith chaired a council committee that recommended voluntary conversion. Feudal tenures, he argued, had held back the expansion of the old French colony and left it weak enough to be conquered; their retention would retard the progress of Quebec now that it was an English colony. A storm of public protest greeted the committee’s report, and when the legislative session opened in March 1791, the council voted unanimously to abandon a bill for voluntary conversion. Many members of the English party were themselves seigneurs.

Smith, feeling isolated, frequently demonstrated his scorn for provincial politicians, whom he found slovenly, unsophisticated, and unfit for an elective assembly. As he wrote to the London merchant Brook Watson*, “neither Protestant nor Popish Catholic, British nor Canadian, merchant nor landholder” agreed with his views. The only initiative that won nearly unanimous support was his proposal, advanced in 1789, for a provincial educational system crowned by a university with a council consisting of an equal number of French and English members. But since he opposed any denominational connection for the college, the plan was buried in London [see also Charles-François Bailly de Messein; Jean-François Hubert].

Smith had created acrimonious political controversy with himself as the focal point, a situation far different from his experience in New York, where he had been able to influence governors and yet remain in the background. And, as with the judicial investigations, to what end? Decisions were made in London, not Quebec. Dorchester’s advice to the home government on the constitutional problems of the colony was mostly negative, and the chief justice fully concurred. In 1789 the initiative for reform passed to William Wyndham Grenville, the new Home secretary, who drew up a plan for dividing Quebec into two separate provinces. He sent a copy of this document, the basis of the Constitutional Act of 1791, to Dorchester for his comments; Dorchester turned it over to Smith.

Grenville’s plan beat a retreat from the glorious prospect Smith cherished: a British America from Atlantic to Pacific and from the Arctic Ocean, through Louisiana, to the Gulf of Mexico. The expansion of British North America required a government that was more centralized, not further fragmented. There should, Smith argued, be a federal government uniting the existing colonies under a governor general, with a legislative council and a, general assembly. The council would consist of members from each province appointed for life by the governor general; the general assembly would have members chosen by the assemblies of the various provinces. To pass in the general assembly, a bill would have to receive not only a majority vote, but also a vote representing a majority of the provinces. This double majority would not, however, be necessary in the council. The legislature would meet at the behest of the governor general at least once in two years and continue no longer than seven years between elections. There was to be no hindrance to royal appointment of the executive council or crown officers. Thus a federal system was to be superimposed on the political constitutions of the provinces. Smith’s plan was included in Dorchester’s reply to Grenville, but a few words from London were sufficient to dispel the dream: the plan, sniffed Grenville, was “liable to considerable objection.”

The constitution of 1791 fell far short of Smith’s ideas, but as chief justice, now of Lower Canada, he resolved to do his best to set the new province on a correct course. He was determined that its politics should be conducted in proper parliamentary form, and his appointment as speaker of the Legislative Council gave him the necessary authority. He drew up commissions for Black Rod and the Serjeant-at-Arms with an exact copy of the uniforms worn at Westminster. Under his direction a council committee decided that all intercourse between council and assembly should be “in strict adherence to parliamentary practice,” and he saw to it that the writs issued to councillors were exact duplicates of the royal summonses to the House of Lords. He even determined the physical layout of the new legislature.

Reform of the judicial system continued to be one of Smith’s main concerns. In October 1792 Grenville’s successor, Henry Dundas, in an effort to make uniform the administration of justice in British North America, forwarded a plan to replace the existing Lower Canadian establishment of one chief justice and six judges of the Court of Common Pleas with two stationary courts of king’s bench in Quebec and Montreal, each presided over by a chief justice. Smith opposed the change, which threatened his personal position, and set out in a draft bill a whole judicial system that, to advance the provincial autonomy of Lower Canada under the crown, would have created almost a complete duplicate of the English judicial system. (Dundas’ plan went into effect, but after Smith’s death.) Smith also played an important role in determining land policy in the colony as chairman of the committee charged with reporting on the land-granting clauses of the royal instructions of 1791. Although the proclamation based on his report followed ministerial intentions, much depended on interpretation, and Smith’s zeal for immigration led him to interpret it in such a way that Lower Canada was opened to the worst kind of speculation. Millions of acres were petitioned for, mostly by Americans who had no intention of bringing in settlers Warrants of survey for large tracts of land were readily issued, and were then sold and resold in the United States, where they were accepted as proof of title. Smith’s policy, in effect, defeated his aims, and the land-granting problem was not resolved during his lifetime.

Smith died on 6 Dec. 1793 after a prolonged illness. The funeral procession was led by His Royal Highness Edward Augustus*, followed by the members of the Legislative Council and the assembly, officers both civil and military, “and the most respectable and numerous concourse of Citizens ever witnessed on a similar occasion.” Smith was buried – strange victory for a lifelong foe – in an Anglican cemetery. He was survived by his wife Janet and four children, including Harriet, who became the wife of Jonathan Sewell*, and William*, a future historian and member of the Executive Council.

William Smith received one of the greatest gifts any man can have, a second chance. He was one of the few loyalists able to resume a career broken by the American revolution. Consequently his life spanned not just two colonies, but two empires as well. From the perspective of the old empire he foresaw the new: a British America federated, virtually autonomous, bulwarked by British political concepts and traditions. He was able to adapt ideas formulated in the first empire while an official of the second. Yet Smith’s career was one of potential rather than actual achievement. His political durability was bought at a high price. Too many men had too many reservations about him; there were too many accusations of duplicity and greed and hypocrisy. His portrait shows a man of middling stature with a high forehead and a weak chin. He was an ascetic individual, prim, self-possessed; an intellectual with a gift for crushing repartee. It was his misfortune to live in times that required clear-cut decisions or at least the appearance of straightforwardness. Smith’s motto had always been in medio tutissimus ibis.

L. F. S. Upton

[William Smith is the author of The history of the province of New-York, from the first discovery to the year M.DCC.XXXII; to which is annexed, a description of the country with a short account of the inhabitants, their religious and political state, and the constitution of the courts of justice in that colony (London, 1757), translated by M.-A. Eidous as Histoire de la Nouvelle-York . . . (London, 1767); Continuation of the history of the province of New-York, to the appointment of Governor Colden, in 1762, ed. William Smith Jr (New York, 1826); and A review of the military operations in North-America; from the commencement of the French hostilities on the frontier of Virginia in 1753, to the surrender of Oswego, on the 14th of August, 1756 . . . (London, 1757). With William Livingston, he compiled Laws of New-York from the year 1691 to 1751, inclusive (New York, 1752) and Laws of New-York from the 11th Nov. 1752, to 22d May 1762 (New York, 1762). W. H. W. Sabine published in New York in 1956 Historical memoirs from 16 March 1763 to 9 July 1776 of William Smith . . . and in 1958 Historical memoirs from 29 July 1776 to 28 July 1778 . . . ; L. F. S. Upton has edited The diary and selected papers of Chief Justice William Smith, 1784–1793 (2v., Toronto, 1963–65). For a more complete listing of Smith’s writings, as well as a comprehensive biography, see L. F. S. Upton, The loyal whig: William Smith of New York & Quebec (Toronto, 1969). l.f.s.u.].² Chief Justice Hon. William Smith. Historian, diarist, jurist, and politician.² He was born on 18 June 1728 in New York, New York.^3,4 He was the son of Judge William Smith and Mary Hett.¹ Chief Justice Hon. William Smith married Jennet Livingston, daughter of James Livingston and Maria Kierstede, on 3 November 1752.⁴ Chief Justice Hon. William Smith died on 3 December 1793 in Quebec City at the age of 65 (other sources give a date of 6 December).⁵ He was buried on 4 December 1793 in the Episcopal Church, Quebec.⁶

     Judge William Smith was born on 8 October 1697 in Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, some published sources give the date as 5 October 1697.^2,3 He was the son of Thomas Smith and Susanna Odell.¹ Judge William Smith emigrated on 24 May 1715 with his parents and two brothers, they arrived in New York on 17th August.³ He graduated in 1719 from Yale. He adopted the profession of law, and was admitted to practice 20 May 1724, in New York, and rose rapidly to eminence. He was foremost among the founders of King's College. In 1751 he was appointed Attorney General, and Advocate General, and was for many years a member of the Council. In 1763 he was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court, and held that position till the time of his death.⁴ He married firstly Mary Hett, daughter of René Hett and Blanche Dubois, on 11 May 1727.⁵ Judge William Smith married Elizabeth widow Williams after 1754 there were no children of this marriage.⁴ Judge William Smith died on 22 November 1769 in New York at the age of 72.⁵

     Rev. William Smith was born on 29 January 1706/7 in Charlestown, Massachusetts.² He was the son of Captain William Smith and Abigail Fowle. Rev. William Smith graduated in 1725 from Harvard. He was ordained on 4 December 1734 at Weymouth.² He married Elizabeth Quincy, daughter of Hon. John Quincy and Elizabeth Norton, on 16 October 1740 in Braintree, Massachusetts.¹ Rev. William Smith was living in Weymouth.¹ He died on 17 September 1783 in Weymouth at the age of 76.

     William Charles Smith was born in 1842 in Winchester, Hampshire.¹ He was the son of William Robert Brudenell Smith and Caroline Grierson.¹ William Charles Smith. He was an ensign in the 78th Foot, Lieutenant by purchase March 1863, Captain by purchase August 1865 in 1861.^1,2,3

     William Eugene Smith was the son of Thomas Smith Jr. and Mary Taylor.¹