Description:

Constitution Architect and Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth Signs Pay Order for Connecticut Officer Held on British Prison Ship

OLIVER ELLSWORTH, Document Signed, Pay Order for Nathaniel Gove, June 5, 1778, Hartford, Connecticut. 2 pp., 7.25? x 4.5?. Expected folds; very good.

Complete Transcript:


Sir
Pay Leit Nathl Gove Twenty Pounds thirteen shillings – for Effects lost when taken prisoner – as ? Acct & charge the State.
Hartford June 5 1778
£20.13                                                              }
                                                    O Ellsworth  } Comtee
                                                                        }
Jno Lawrence, Esqr Treas

[Verso:]
[Endorsement:]
Recd of Treasurer Lawrence the Contents Novr 14 1778
                                                ? Nathl Gove
[Docketing:]
No 11049 / Order / Let Nathl Gove / £20.13 / Datd 5th June 1778 / Auditd / Dec 21. 1778 / J Treadwell

Historical Background:
The Pay-Table handled the military finances for the colony of Connecticut during the American Revolution. Also known as the Committee of Four, its members at different times included Oliver Ellsworth, Jedidiah Huntington, William Moseley, Hezekiah Rogers, Jesse Root, Thomas Seymour III, Fenn Wadsworth, Eleazer Wales, Ezekiel Williams, Oliver Wolcott Jr., and Samuel Wyllys.

In this pay order, Oliver Ellsworth orders the colony’s treasurer to pay Nathaniel Gove 20 pounds and 13 shillings for items Gove lost when he was taken prisoner by the British. Gove (1738-1813) served as a sergeant at the Lexington Alarm and was a first lieutenant with the 17th Continental Infantry at the Battle of Long Island. British forces captured Gove during the latter battle on August 27, 1776, and held him on a prison ship off Brooklyn for two years. He was poisoned on the prison ship and suffered the effects for the rest of his life. Governor Jonathan Trumbull agreed to a prisoner exchange on January 1, 1778, that freed Gove. He served as a captain of the Connecticut Line, and in 1781, he moved to Vermont. He died in an epidemic that struck Vermont in 1813, killing more than six thousand people.


Oliver Ellsworth (1745-1807) was born in Windsor, Connecticut, and entered Yale College in 1762. At the end of his second year, he transferred to the College of New Jersey (Princeton), from which he graduated in 1766. He studied the law for four years, gained admission to the bar in 1771, and married Abigail Wolcott in 1772. In 1777, he became state’s attorney for Hartford County and also served on the Pay-Table Committee and helped manage Connecticut’s war expenditures during the Revolutionary War. That same year, he was also named a delegate to the Continental Congress from Connecticut, a position he held until the end of the war. He served on the Supreme Court of Errors in Connecticut from 1785 and later the Connecticut Superior Court. In 1787, voters selected Ellsworth as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, where he helped draft the Constitution and created with Roger Sherman the Connecticut Compromise between large and small states. He left the convention before signing the final document but worked for its ratification. He served as one of the first two U.S. Senators from Connecticut from March 1789 to March 1796, when President George Washington nominated Ellsworth as the third Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, a position he held from 1796 to 1800. After traveling to France as a special envoy to end the Quasi-War, he resigned from the Court in December 1800 because of illness.

John Lawrence (1719-1802) served as treasurer of the colony and then state of Connecticut for twenty years from 1769 to 1789. During the Revolutionary War, he was also commissioner of loans for the United States.

From the famous Supreme Court collection of Scott Petersen.


This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

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