Page images
PDF
EPUB

authorized and empowered to draw orders on the treasurer therein after appointed for the several purposes above mentioned. Of this committee, which became for some time, as it were, the executive organ of the government, Mr. Ross was a leading member, as he was also of another important committee, that of grievances. Besides these duties relative to the war, he was appointed, with two other gentlemen, to prepare rules and regulations for the government of the forces of the province which might be raised.

When the proprietary government was dissolved, and the general convention substituted for the previous legislature, Mr. Ross took his seat in it also, as a representative of Lancaster county. He was, within a few days after its organization, appointed on a committee to prepare a declaration of rights on behalf of the state, and chairman of two others of much importance, that for forming regulations for the government of the convention, and that for preparing an ordinance declaratory of what should be high treason and misprision of treason against the state, and what punishment should be inflicted for those offences.

Indeed, in all legal matters, Mr. Ross at this period stood deservedly high. Before the revolution he was among the first of his profession, and in the change which that event had produced in its component parties, as well as its forensic character, he still maintained the same rank. These changes were indeed very considerable; subjects of higher importance than those which commonly fall to the lot of provincial judi catures were brought forward; motives sufficient to rouse all the latent energies of the mind were constantly presenting themselves. The bar was chiefly composed of gentlemen of aspiring minds and industrious habits; and Mr. Ross found himself engaged among men, with whom it was honourable to contend and pleasant to associate. Mr. Wilson, who had practised with great reputation at Carlisle; Mr. Biddle, from

Reading; Gouverneur Morris occasionally, and occasionally Mr. Reed, till he was chosen a member of the chief executive council; Mr. Sergeant, who, in 1777, was appointed attorney general; and Mr. Lewis, of Philadelphia, in conjunction with Mr. Ross, formed an assemblage of powerful and splendid talents, which might have coped with an equal number of any forum in America. The whole faculties of this bar were soon put in requisition, by the prosecutions which were commenced against some of those accused of being adherents to the British cause. The popular excitement against them was high, and their defence appeared to many a service of danger; but the intrepidity of the bar did not allow them to shrink from the conflict, and Mr. Ross and Mr. Wilson especially embarked all their talents, zeal, and professional reputation in the cause of those who were thus accused.

The last public employment in which Mr. Ross was engaged, was that of a judge of the court of admiralty for the state of Pennsylvania, to which he was appointed on the fourteenth of April, 1779; and while on the bench he was esteemed a learned and impartial judge, displaying sound legal knowledge and abilities, and great promptness in his decisions. He did not, however, long occupy the station he was so well calculated to fill, as he died suddenly in the month of July following, from a violent attack of the gout.

Of his character little remains to be said, beyond that which may be collected from the preceding pages; in his domestic habits he was kind, generous, and much beloved; in his professional career zealous and honourable; as a politician always active and patriotic; and he seems to have well deserved the praise which was bestowed on him by one who knew him, as "an honest man and upright judge."

CESAR RODNEY.

THE state of Delaware, though one of the smallest in the confederation, has been, for the most part, in the political history of this country, remarkable for the intelligence and ability with which it has been represented in the public councils. This praise was particularly due at the period of the revolution, when her delegates were CESAR RODNEY, GEORGE READ, and THOMAS M'KEAN.

Of these the first is the subject of this notice; and it may be properly remarked that the name of his family is honourably recorded in the history of earlier and of later times. It has been borne by gallant and successful warriors, and by firm and patriotic statesmen; and it is illustrious alike in the annals of the old world and the new. This circumstance, it is true, can add nothing to the dignity of him whose life we are about to record, and from whose acts posterity will perhaps consider that his descendants may claim a truer glory, than any he could derive from his remote progenitors; but the facts preserved among the records of the family, seem properly entitled to insertion, and although it may be absurd to claim any glory to ourselves from the accidental celebrity of our ancestors, that celebrity, when honourably acquired, may be fairly held up as an inducement, to associate the VOL. III.-R r

same name only with honourable and virtuous actions. The earliest authentic memorial introduces to us the name of Rodney at a period when military prowess was the only mark of reputation, and when that prowess was indiscriminately exerted for the promotion of good or bad ends. The spirit of party or the spirit of chivalry, enlisted sir Walter De Rodency in the cause of an oppressed woman, a queen who was driven by an usurper from her throne. "It hath been a constant tradition," says an old family manuscript, written about two hundred years since, "that we came into England with Maud the empress, from foreign parts; and that for service done by Rodency, in her wars against king Stephen, the usurper, she gave them land within this kingdom. I confess I have no evidence by me to prove this tradition, besides the pedigree; yet the want thereof will not make it false in itself, though it gain the less credit with others. There was an evidence which would have much strengthened this tradition, but it miscarried at the time of sir George De Rodeney's death; it was a piece of brass of the length and breadth of two feet, or thereabout, whereon was insculpt in ancient characters, the names of those manors and lands given by the empress to sir Henry De Rodeney, the second man in the pedigree, and steward to the young king Henry, who was crowned in his father's life time."

The lands which were thus referred to, were situated in the county of Somerset, on the shores of Bristol channel. The little village of Rodney Stoke still preserves the name which it received at that early period; and probably at this day, certainly not a great many years since, the descendants of the first proprietors were still seated on the domains of their ancestors. The successors of sir Henry De Rodeney seem to have borne their full share in the exploits of those stormy times. Two of them were slain in a battle with Leo

lin, prince of Wales, at Hereford, in the year 1234; sir Richard De Rodeney accompanying the gallant Richard Cœur de Lion, in his crusade to the Holy Land, fell at the siege of Acre; and his son died at Viterbo, while on his way to Rome, as an ambassador from king John to the Holy See.

In the reign of Edward the second, the wealth and power of the family was much increased by grants made to sir Richard De Rodeney, a gentleman whose knighthood is recorded by the celebrated antiquary Mr. Selden, as one of the most ancient precedents for conferring that rank, he had been able to discover; he was knighted, it seems, in the great hall of the Obie Kainsham in the county of Somerset, by "being girded with a sword by Almarquis earl of Pembrook, and having one spur put on by the lord Maurice of Berkley, and the other by the lord Bartholomew of Badismere." He died in the early part of the reign of Edward the third, leaving a very large estate. "The names of his manors," says the old family chronicle, "were as followeth, viz. Stoke Rodeney, Backwell, Winford, Hallonko, Salford, Tiverton, Lamgate, Lovington, Dinder, Overbagworth, Congressbury Rodeney, and Tithes Court, besides rents of houses in Bristol; which manors continue to this day, at the same rent as they were let in sir Richard De Rodeney's time; but are worth now, upon the improved values, twenty times the rent, which comes to about six thousand pounds per annum; an estate which when my great-grandfather died, (in the 20th of Henry 8,) did equal any gentleman's estate in Somersetshire, being some years before the dissolution of the abbeys, which hoisted up other families into very great fortunes, but not mine."

The next member of the family of whom particular mention has been made, is sir John Rodeney. There was a

« PreviousContinue »