Bartlett, Josiah

Josiah Bartlett (December 2, 1729 NS (November 21, 1729 OS) – May 19, 1795) was an American physician and statesman, delegate to theContinental Congress for New Hampshire, and signatory of the Declaration of Independence. He was later Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Superior Court of Judicature and Governor of the state.

Wikipedia

American Connections: If you enjoyed Martin Sheen as the president on television's The West Wing, then you're connected to founder Josiah Bartlett. The connection from signer Bartlett to Sheen includes John Paul Jones; Judge William Cooper, father of James Fenimore; Sir Thomas Brisbane, governor of New South Wales; an incestuous astronomer; an itinerant math teacher; early inventors of television; and pioneering TV personality Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the inspiration for Ramon Estevez's screen name, Martin Sheen.

JOSIAH BARTLETT was forty-six. A redhead, doctor, judge, and a fine figure of a man who dressed posh (ruffles, silver buckles), Bartlett threw himself into revolutionary matters by stealing Brit gunpowder, after which his militia rank was removed by the royal governor. A year later the governor was out and Bartlett was in. And on every major congressional committee.

Between doctoring (great bedside manner), soldiering (field surgeon),

fathering (twelve), administrating (president, New Hampshire), having

his house burned down, and losing his wife (most of which he dealt with

on horseback or by guttering candle), small wonder he died worn out. But not before his Marine Committee had commissioned the American navy's first vessel.

Captain of the good ship USS Ranger was John Paul Jones, a sexually

hyperactive Scots pirate on the run from a Caribbean murder charge and

calling himself Jones. In 1778 Jones took Ranger across the

Atlantic to attack Scotland. There followed much hit-and-run stuff up

and down the British coastline that included the famous encounter when

in response to, "Give up?" Jones did not say, "I have not yet

begun to fight," but something (in French) more like, "Not me. How about you?"

By this time Jones's exploits (ably puffed by Jones) had made him the

darling of French pro-American aristos, and their wives, most notably

that of Jacques Donatien le Ray de Chaumont, who held open house for

Americans in Paris. Le Ray gave Jones a bigger ship and persuaded the

French king to support the American rebels (by doing so Louis XVI

bankrupted France and lost his throne). Après la révolution

with writing on the wall for the nobility, Le Ray's son James hightailed

it to American citizenship and ditto wife.

In his adopted land he bought large bits of New York state around Otsego

(not to be confused with Oswego), became pals with the great and the

good (not difficult with a family friend named Ben Franklin), and

introduced the locals to French essentials such as merino wool, vines,

and silkworms. Key facilitator in all this agribusiness was Judge

William Cooper, Le Ray's land agent and wrestler extraordinaire. For

whom Le Ray's business affairs were a mere bagatelle. Over the years

Cooper bought more than 750,000 acres and then sold them to more than forty thousand settlers. Cooper died one of the richest men in America, leaving behind a son (Fenimore) who would become one of the country's first major novelists by writing about his father's lifestyle.

Judge Cooper's sidekick had been fur trader George Croghan (obscure

beginnings in Ireland), who used his Native American languages to

relieve the natives of their land at knockdown prices even when he was

superintendent of Indians under the colonial Brits. Croghan's technique

was remarkably modern: borrow scads of money so as to buy millions of

acres, then do the absolute minimum to develop them and sell off the

land in highly profitable small bits. So long as the game went your way

this was a license to print money.

Alas for Croghan, the game in question was the short-lived Brit plan to establish the new colony of Vandalia (see elsewhere) on the banks of the Ohio. When the plug was pulled on the scheme just before the War of Independence, in a flush of foreclosures Croghan went out with the water.

Early on, Croghan's boss had been commander of U.K. forces in North

America General Jeffrey Amherst, who had taken Canada from the French in 1760 and then hired Croghan to deal with the Native Americans. After germ-warfare attempts (giving the tribes smallpox-infected blankets) had failed, the French and Indian War followed and Amherst went home to glory he expected but didn't get ("a man of incapacity," it was said).

After being made governor of this and that he bumbled his way up to

field marshal and sir, stopping only to put down ("bungle," it was said)

the 1780 Gordon Riots in London.

Riot cheerleader Lord George Gordon (defamed Marie Antoinette, later converted to Judaism) was a rabid anti-Catholic who led

sixty thousand Protestant rioters on an orgy of burning, looting, and

prison-breaking in opposition to a new act outlawing discrimination

against Catholics. Five days of turmoil saw the mob breaking into

distilleries and torching Catholic chapels. Then they headed for the

Bank of England. It was time for Amherst to bring in ten thousand

troops, who shot and bayoneted the crowd into rapid submission.

Just before the fun and games, the sight of troops bivouacking in Hyde

Park was so mind-boggling as to warrant recording by watercolor whiz

Paul Sandby. Who had turned the genre into a must-have with his early pix of bucolic Scotland. Returning to London in the 1760s his career went: Royal Academy, views of Windsor Castle, meteoric rise to fame and fortune with "Select Views" of places as unfashionable as Wales. And some (like Ireland) he hadn't even visited. No matter. Nor had the buyers.

Chief of whom was John Stuart, third earl of Bute, who also got Sandby

to immortalize his new stately home, Luton Hoo House (designed by

latest-rave architect Robert Adam). Bute retired to books and botany at Luton after a brief and acrimonious career in politics. With more titles

and money than you could shake a coronet at, Bute's job as tutor to the

future King George III (and possible affair with George's mother, and

then George's wife) brought him the prime ministership. Totally out of

his political depth, after two turbulent years of backstabbing and tax

raises he returned to the backwoods and oblivion. Where he supported

intellectuals and writers, organized Kew Botanic Gardens, wrote nine

volumes on plants, and visited his brother James in Italy.

James was U.K. minister to the Turin Court. His chargé

d'affaires was an enigma named Louis Dutens. For somebody with

humble (and worse, French) beginnings, Dutens lived such a charmed life, he must have known where bodies were buried. Apart from servicing the Bute family, Dutens was also hanger-on to other nobs and spent years either as traveling companion or house guest to anybody who'd have him.

He was almost certainly a government spy and rumor mill. His 1805

memoirs exposed the secret American offer of the U.S. throne to Bonnie Prince Charlie. Dutens also wrote now totally forgotten stuff on

history, geography, poetry, and philosophy, produced a study on fire

prevention, and was a big fan of Thomas Jones, instrument maker.

In an era of nonstop exploration the secret of navigational success was

"gradation," the little marks on your theodolites that swiveled the

gizmos by a specifically teeny amount and made the difference between

accuracy and being lost. Such marks were Thomas Jones's forte, so he was flavor of the month. Especially with his invariable (i.e., bet-the-farm) pendulum, accurate to within splits of second and vital for astronomers.

One such Jones client was Sir Thomas Brisbane, soldier friend of the

Duke of Wellington and therefore successful. On his return from a job in the Caribbean a near-shipwreck got him interested in better navigation, i.e. more accurate astronomy about the stars you aimed instruments at to work out where you were at sea. In 1820 Brisbane became governor of New South Wales, a place where (because Australia faces toward the center of the galaxy) there were more stars than you could count. So he counted them. By 1825 when he was encouraged to go home ("too pro-convicts" or "too prosettlers," take your pick), Brisbane had logged no fewer than 7,385 southern-sky stars at the observatory he built in Paramatta outside Sydney.

His return to the United Kingdom was followed by the usual gold medals, baronetcies, honorary degrees, and a quiet harrumph

retirement. Meanwhile his Paramatta Catalogue was published by Greenwich Observatory Assistant and major criminal William Richardson. In 1846 the Greenwich astronomical calm was rocked by Richardson's indictment for having had sex with his daughter Anna Maria and then poisoning the resulting infant, whose tiny body was discovered by workmen clearing Richardson's cesspit. The newspapers loved it.

Richardson's boss, Britain's astronomer royal George Airy, who was

having a really bad day for other reasons, fired him. Airy needed a

scandal like a hole in the head, being up to his ears in how wide

railroad tracks should be, what to do about smoke abatement and gas

sales, the design of Big Ben, gravity in coal mines, and all the other

things Victorian intellectuals did. Plus a ton of paperwork, the entire

reorganization of British astronomy, and the imminent arrival of his

ninth child. All this, and on October 21, 1845, a shy young Cambridge

astronomer arrived uninvited at Airy's door with some nonsense about the existence of "something new in the night sky." A servant accepted the scribble and sent him packing. Airy eventually wrote asking for more

details. Too little, too late.

Shy John Couch Adams had done the sums that showed that the orbit of Uranus was being affected by a force that could only be the

gravitational field of Another Planet Nobody Had Yet Discovered. Alas

for Adams, the same idea had struck a Frenchman, Urbain LeVerrier (https://app.thebrain.com/brain/f3e16344-7cd9-4fa3-ae1d-59876e128474/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000), who wasn't so shy and persuaded the people at Berlin Observatory (fancy equipment) to go looking. They found Neptune just where Adams had predicted. Egg remains on Airy's face to this day.

Adams went far, ending up director of the Cambridge Observatory. In 1864 one of his college pals, Charles Bromby, went farther, i.e., to

Tasmania. As bishop there he built Hobart Cathedral. Charles's older

brother John took much the same route. In his case, to Melbourne,

Australia, where in 1858 he was the first headmaster of the Church of

England Grammar School and hired a passing Yale graduate to teach math.

A little earlier back in the States, Erastus De Forest had disappeared

just before he was due to leave on a trip with his aunt. The New York

Times suspected foul play. Two years later his family tracked

him down, down under. In 1861 De Forest headed home via India and (wild oats sown) settled down to a quiet and incomprehensible life of

statistics.

Twenty-five years later he established a Yale prize in mathematics and

seven years after that (in 1893) math-physics undergraduate Lee De Forest didn't win it, in spite of being a distant family connection. No

matter. Lee made his mark with a connection of a different kind. In 1905

he invented the Audion, which boosted feeble electrical signals. So AT&T inserted one of these gizmos every so many miles along the phone line, and in 1915 started its long-distance cross-country service. Now you could hear coast to coast.

In 1928 Lee De Forest hired young electronics whiz Allen Dumont. Who at age ten had contracted polio, then read a lot, then became an engineer. By 1939 Dumont was manufacturing the first TV set. In 1945 he set up America's fourth TV channel, the Dumont Network. Dumont was yet another inventor lacking in business acumen and was eventually bought out by Hollywood. But not before he had garnered an astonishing number of stations across the country (215 in all) that tuned in to his (and the nation's) number one TV show: Bishop Fulton Sheen's Life Is Worth Living.

When the series started in 1952 philosopher and theologian Sheen was

auxiliary bishop of New York. On the show all he did was give sermons

(with the aid of a blackboard, chalk, patriotism, and piety) attacking

Godless Communism. The public couldn't get enough of it. Sheen made the cover of Time Magazine and won an Emmy. And he changed the life of a young actor named Ramon Gerard Antonio Estevez.

Who in honor of the bishop took the stage name of Sheen. Beginning in

1999 Martin Sheen starred in the acclaimed TV drama series The West

Wing, playing the role of President JOSIAH BARTLET.

For American content, see the Sandbox

Bartlett, Josiah

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