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Smith, James

James Smith (September 17, 1719[1][2] – July 11, 1806), a Founding Father of the United States, was an Irish/American lawyer and a signer to the United States Declaration of Independence as a representative of Pennsylvania.

He was born in Ireland; his family immigrated to Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1729.[1] Smith attended the Philadelphia Academy.[3] He studied law at the office of his brother George and was admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania, initially practicing near Shippensburg and later near York.[4] He became captain of the militia there. He was appointed to the provincial convention in Philadelphia in 1775, to the state constitutional convention in 1776, and was elected to the Continental Congress, where he signed the Declaration of Independence. He was reelected to Congress in 1785 but declined to attend because of his advanced age.

Smith died on July 11, 1806, and is buried in York, Pennsylvania, First Presbyterian Churchyard. The University of Delaware has a dormitory on its North Campus bearing his name.

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James Smith (Pennsylvania politician) - Wikipedia

AMERICAN CONNECTIONS

JAMES SMITH (PA) was about sixty-three. And

thinking ahead. When he wrote his name on the Declaration, Smith was

already on the committee set up to plan the structure of postwar

government. Although colleagues called Smith eccentric he was

essentially a quiet, no-fireworks, behind-the-scenes guy. Smith had

started in law, then given that up for iron-making, then given that up

for law again.

In 1784 he acted as counselor for Pennsylvania in one of those

half-forgotten affairs that occurred so often immediately after

Independence while things were still settling down. Or in this case,

not. Smith's legal brief regarded a disagreement that hadn't been

resolved in more than a hundred years. Back in 1684 King Charles II had

relied on guesstimate maps to grant Pennsylvania a charter for settling

a piece of land. Unfortunately the grant-to-settle rights for the same

land had previously also been given (by the same king, using a different

map) to Connecticut. Seems crazy but back in those days, who knew?

The location in question was the Wyoming Valley in western Pennsylvania

(or Connecticut, if you saw things that way). In 1783 Connecticut

settlers were driven out of the valley by Pennsylvanians at a cost of

150 lives and thousands of refugees. But all was not over. In 1786 Ethan

Allen arrived with some of his Green Mountain Boys, offering the

Connecticut Wyoming settlers help in setting up a new state (to be

called Westmoreland).

Allen had done the same state-forming thing once

before when he'd declared independence from New York state of an area of

green mountain country on the Canadian border.

Before the place (Vermont) was finally admitted as a state of the Union,

Allen had even flirted for two years with the idea of secession to

Canada (see elsewhere).

Engraving depicting Allen before his captors in Montreal

At one point during all this he was involved in

naming a town (St. Johnsbury) after a French friend, Hector St. John de

Crèvecoeur, who wrote a book of fictional letters from a "Farmer James"

describing life in rural America and asking for the first time: "What is

an American?" (Crèvecoeur's answer: a new man, with new principles, free

of European prejudice.)

Neutral during the war, Crèvecoeur made several U.S.-France trips.

In 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, Crèvecœur tried to leave the country to return to France because of the faltering health of his father. Accompanied by his son, he entered British-occupied New York City, where he was imprisoned as a suspected American spy for three months. Eventually, he was released and sailed for England, but was shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland.[1]^ From England, he sailed to France, where he was briefly reunited with his father.

Back in Paris he was hailed as his own best example of "American new man" and

became the darling of salon chatterers. After a first publication

(successful) in London, in 1793 his Letters from an American

Farmer appeared in Philadelphia published by Matthew Carey,

aka "Scriblerius O'Pindar."

The pseudonym was for Carey's protection,

since he tended to make powerful enemies for whose jugular he'd

journalistically gone. On the run from British-ruled Ireland (for

penning revolutionary stuff about giving Catholics the vote), Carey met

and impressed the Marquis de Lafayette, who loaned him four hundred

dollars to start his first American newspaper, the Pennsylvania

Herald (it failed). Carey also produced the first American

atlas, (under his son, the Encyclopedia Americana ; Joseph Bonaparte, former king of Naples and Spain and older brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, contributed to the Americana; his contributions on French topics include a 25,000-word biography on the former emperor of France, which was the encyclopedia's longest biographical article.[2]^

In 1848, John Sutter read the encyclopedia's article on "Gold" as part of his efforts to verify the authenticity of the gold found in his mill, a discovery that would start the California Gold Rush.[6]).

Carey also started the first American Sunday school society, and had a very

boring brother.

John Carey taught classics, French, and shorthand in London. He wrote

essays (now long forgotten), edited a series of fifty classical texts

(now long unread), and produced the best insomnia cure of all time:

Latin Prosody Made Easy. In 1803 he had an idea: save souls

from shipwreck by shooting (at them, from the shore) a wooden ball on a

line. Said endangered souls would then haul in the line attached to rope

with which they would then be then pulled to shore. Carey did nothing

more about it. In 1808 George Manby came up with the same idea, inspired

by the loss of the Snipe, which foundered (and all aboard

were drowned) within sight and sound of the beach.

Manby (at one point he had been shot in the head and tended to behave oddly) went on to invent ways of catching people jumping from burning buildings or saving

those who had fallen through ice, as well as the first pressurized

portable fire extinguisher and a harpoon. This last he tried out when in 1821, he sailed to Greenland with William Scoresby, for the purpose of testing the new type of harpoon for whaling, based on the same principles as his mortar (see explosive harpoon). However, his device was sabotaged by the whalers.[11]

Around 1810 Manby took another of his bright ideas (how to assassinate

Napoleon) to an old political pal, the Honorable Charles Yorke. Who

turned down more government jobs than most: ambassador to Russia,

governor of Madras, governor of Jamaica, surveyor of forests, and member

of the board administering India. He accepted secretary of war, wrote a

book on Egyptian monuments in the British Museum, and generally made no

mark on parliamentary history. He did, however, support the launch of

the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

Whose architect was James Wyatt. You loved or hated him. He had an

infuriating tendency to enthuse about a project till it started and then

lose interest. Nonetheless, at twenty-six he was architect of choice if

you had a falling-down country mansion to renovate. Wyatt traveled an

amazing four thousand miles a year in his coach complete with office and

drawing board (when it was rumoured that he was about to leave the country to become architect to Catherine II of Russia, a group of English noblemen is said to have offered him a retaining fee of £1,200 to remain in their service).

After sprucing up the abodes of royalty (Windsor Castle)

and various dukes, Wyatt turned to the restoration of Gothic cathedrals.

Wyatt's "restoration" meant ripping out anything later than medieval

(such as carved screens, chapels, and porches) as well as moving tombs

and other memorabilia into neat, orderly rows between the aisles. This

good work earned Wyatt his nickname: "the destroyer."

Not everybody hated Wyatt's stuff. One fan was a philandering German

dissolute, Prince Puckler-Muskau, a dashing ex-cavalry officer who dyed

his hair and was also an accomplished landscape gardener.

In 1827, having spent all his wife's money and then divorced her, he was in

England taking in the sights, meeting royalty and Sir Walter Scott, and

sleeping with every woman he could persuade. His predilection seems to

have been for vicars' daughters, sisters, and actresses.

After his England visit he published a selection of the letters he'd

written home. The book caught the attention of Sarah Austin. Just the

kind of woman Puckler-Muskau fancied. Sarah was beautiful, sensuous, and

married to a cold-fish professor of jurisprudence who had bad health and

hangups. Sarah spent a year in Bonn learning German and in 1832

translated Puckler-Muskau's work as: Travels of a German Prince in

England. She also began a correspondence with him that verged

on the pornographic. There was much talk of dreams. By 1835 after

Puckler-Muskau had offered to come and "visit" and she'd said no, the

prince headed for Africa.

Sarah turned to another translation job which she referred to as "dry."

Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia had been

compiled in 1832 by France's leading thinker and molder of public

opinion, Victor Cousin. It outlined the kind of educational system

Cousin wanted France to have: compulsory primary school attendence for

both boys and girls (and punishment of parents who failed to send them),

standardized curriculum, textbooks produced by the state, state control

over teacher training, and of course, state funding.

When Sarah's translation of Cousin arrived in America, the book was just

what Horace Mann was looking for.

Mann was secretary to the Massachusetts Board of Education and he had already opened a couple of teacher-training schools. Mann also visited Germany during his honeymoon in 1844 and came home fired up for reform. Above all Mann wanted to take

religion out of schools. Over the next few years Mann increased

teachers' salaries by 50 percent, opened fifty new public high schools

that used standard textbooks published in Boston, and finagled more than

$2 million out of the state to pay for it all. The rest of America soon

followed Mann's inspiring example.

In the early 1850s Mann's sister-in-law and her short-of-cash husband

came to stay on their way to Liverpool, England, where the husband

(Nathaniel Hawthorne, by this time famous as the author of The Scarlet

Letter and The House of Seven Gables) was to be

U.S. consul. After Liverpool in 1857 the couple headed for Italy where

they met the expat community toughing it out in Florence. These

lotus-eaters included poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Browning and Walter

Savage Landor.

Leader of the esthete Florentine layabouts was Seymour Kirkup, a Brit

painter with (it was said) too much money and not enough talent. And who

by this time had been in Florence for more than thirty-three years

complete with three mistresses and offspring. Kirkup had been a disciple

of the London-based Dante scholar Giuseppe Rossetti (Italian nobleman, poet, constitutionalist, scholar, and founder of the secret society Carbonari) and knew about the Lost Giotto Portrait of Dante Hidden Somewhere in Florence. On July 21,

1840, he found the fresco, covered over with whitewash, on a wall in the

Bargello. So he sent a tracing to Rossetti. Who showed it to his son

Dante Gabriele.

Who painted Giotto Painting Dante's Portrait.

D. G. Rossetti was part of the group of artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

whose aim was to return to the medieval simplicites of art before

Raphael. Great if you liked spun sugar. Or woodsy wallpaper such as that

produced by fellow PRB member William Morris, designer to a middle class

now yearning to forget the industrial world outside their windows.

In 1870 Morris spent a year in Iceland (where the communitarian lifestyle

fired his socialist imagination) and then translated a medieval

Icelandic saga. He went on to do the same for the Anglo-Saxon epic

Beowulf.

This medievalist aspect of Morris's work (and indeed the entire

Pre-Raphaelite range of product) was, between 1936 and 1945, to inspire

Anglo-Saxon scholar J. R. R. Tolkien to write the great Lord of the

Rings trilogy (Tolkien considered much of his literary work to have been inspired by an early reading of Morris, even suggesting that he was unable to better Morris's work; the names of characters such as "Gandolf" and the horse Silverfax appear in The Well at the World's End ). At the time Tolkien was philology (James Burke studied this at Oxford) professor at Pembroke College, Oxford, where one of his colleagues was modern historian Ronald McCallum. Whose forte was political analysis (he coined the word

"psephology": the study of polls). While in Oxford, McCallum was an irregular attender of the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group associated with the University of Oxford and attended by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, which met for nearly two decades between the early 1930s and late 1949.[7]^

Of all the students who attended McCallum's tutorials, perhaps the most

famous was William J. Fulbright, who spent from 1924 to 1928 in Oxford

as a Rhodes Scholar studying modern history.

After which, a year in Europe with journalist Mikhail Fodor meeting major political figures. In 1942, back in the United States, Fulbright began a thirty-two-year

congressional career.

In September 1943 the House adopted the Fulbright Resolution, which supported international peacekeeping initiatives and encouraged the United States to participate in what became the United Nations in 1945.

Fulbright opposed the anti-Communist crusades of Joseph McCarthy and the similar investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Fulbright was prosegregation, anti-isolationist,

pro-peaceful coexistence with the U.S.S.R., and anti-Vietnam War. He

also believed in internationalism as a means of keeping the peace, so he

supported America's involvement in the U.N. To the same end in 1946 he

set up an international exchange program in graduate studies, which

became known as the Fulbright Scholarship.

Fulbright alumni have occupied key roles in government, academia, and industry. Of the more than 325,000 alumni:

63 have received a Nobel Prize.[5][7] Linus Pauling, twice

In 1968 Thomas Heck was a Fulbright Scholar in Vienna studying the

history of the classical guitar and in particular adding to his

collection of first-edition manuscripts of music by Giuliani (guitar

composer, 1781-1829). In 1973 Heck set up the Guitar Foundation of

America to act as a storehouse for his (and then others') guitar-music

collections. Since then the organization has acted to provide guitarists

with materials, a library, a society, a publisher, and educational

resources.

In 1985 the Guitar Foundation president was JAMES SMITH.